Retribution

Abstract

Abstract Some people think that, if punishment can be justified at all, then it can only be justified because it has some good future effects, such as deterring potential criminals (Bentham 1907: Chs. 13–14). We could call this position a technocratic position on punishment: it sees punishment as a particular technique that might rationally be adopted for bringing about some desirable results – though only if there are no better nonpunitive alternatives. Others suspect that this cannot be all that there is to the importance of punishment. What about the case of holding to account a sex murderer who is now elderly and unlikely to be a danger to the public? It might seem as though something in our sense of justice applauds the fact that this person, having got away with it for so long, will now get his just deserts ( see Punishment; Justice). You might experience the same feeling at the end of a film in which the bad guy finally gets his comeuppance. This sense of justice can be thought of as a desire for retribution . The idea of retribution is the idea that it might be important that a person be punished, or made to suffer, or have something bad happen to them, not simply (as in the technocrat position) because it is an efficient way to bring about some desirable results, but rather because of something bad or wrong that they did in the past. Whereas the technocratic position takes the importance of punishment to derive from future benefits, the idea of retribution is sometimes said to be backward‐looking: it sees the punishment as essential to “do justice to” some previously committed wrong.