You have overshot the mark. Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. Aug 11, Sara rated it really liked it Shelves: non-fiction , textbooks , religious , , criminology-and-law , essays. Lewis has a way of packing pages of wisdom into one sentence. This short essay addresses the issue of punishment. In society, there are two types of viewpoints on the issue of punishment: utilitarian and retributive. The utilitarian viewpoint, or humanitarian as it is called is this essay, sees punishment as a deterrent for other people.
Though this viewpoint is seen as being merciful, C. Lewis argues that it deprives criminals of their humanity. He states, "when we cease to consider what C. He states, "when we cease to consider what the criminal deserves and consider only what will cure him or deter others, we have tacitly removed him from the sphere of justice altogether; instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a 'case.
Lewis argues that the retributive viewpoint treats the person as a human; "to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we 'ought to have known better;, is to be treated as a human person made in God's image.
Nov 26, David rated it liked it. An interesting read. This is more of a pamphlet or essay and is a quick read. What is the purpose of punishment? How do we know when it is justly served? Who is qualified to decide? How should punishment be matched to the crime? Can criminal behavior be cured? Who decides? Lewis provides sound arguments against the principals of punishment as a deterrent or a "cure". What was relevant 50 years ago is still relevant today. There are no discussion topics on this book yet.
Be the first to start one ». Readers also enjoyed. About C. Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. Clive Staples Lewis was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
He was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. To date, the Narnia books have sold over million copies and been transformed into three major motion pictures.
We may very properly ask whether it is likely to deter others and to reform the criminal. But neither of these two last questions is a question about justice. We demand of a deterrent not whether it is just but whether it will deter. We demand of a cure not whether it is just but whether it succeeds. On the old view the problem of fixing the right sentence was a moral problem.
Accordingly, the judge who did it was a person trained in jurisprudence; trained, that is, in a science which deals with rights and duties, and which, in origin at least, was consciously accepting guidance from the Law of Nature, and from Scripture. We must admit that in the actual penal code of most countries at most times these high originals were so much modified by local custom, class interests, and utilitarian concessions, as to be very imperfectly recognizable.
But the code was never in principle, and not always in fact, beyond the control of the conscience of the society. And when say, in eighteenth-century England actual punishments conflicted too violently with the moral sense of the community, juries refused to convict and reform was finally brought about. This was possible because, so long as we are thinking in terms of Desert, the propriety of the penal code, being a moral question, is a question n which every man has the right to an opinion, not because he follows this or that profession, but because he is simply a man, a rational animal enjoying the Natural Light.
But all this is changed when we drop the concept of Desert. The only two questions we may now ask about a punishment are whether it deters and whether it cures.
But these are not questions on which anyone is entitled to have an opinion simply because he is a man. He is not entitled to an opinion even if, in addition to being a man, he should happen also to be a jurist, a Christian, and a moral theologian. For they are not question about principle but about matter of fact; and for such cuiquam in sua arte credendum. No one was talking about punishment in your archaic vindictive sense of the word.
Here are the statistics proving that this treatment deters. Here are the statistics proving that this other treatment cures. What is your trouble?
The Humanitarian theory, then, removes sentences from the hands of jurists whom the public conscience is entitled to criticize and places them in the hands of technical experts whose special sciences do not even employ such categories as rights or justice.
It might be argued that since this transference results from an abandonment of the old idea of punishment, and, therefore, of all vindictive motives, it will be safe to leave our criminals in such hands. I will not pause to comment on the simple-minded view of fallen human nature which such a belief implies. The immediate starting point of this article was a letter I read in one of our Leftist weeklies.
The author was pleading that a certain sin, now treated by our laws as a crime, should henceforward be treated as a disease. And he complained that under the present system the offender, after a term in gaol, was simply let out to return to his original environment where he would probably relapse.
What he complained of was not the shutting up but the letting out. On his remedial view of punishment the offender should, of course, be detained until he was cured. And or course the official straighteners are the only people who can say when that is.
Which of us, if he stood in the dock, would not prefer to be tried by the old system? They are not punishing, not inflicting, only healing.
But do not let us be deceived by a name. That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust—is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard. If we turn from the curative to the deterrent justification of punishment we shall find the new theory even more alarming.
This, in itself, would be a very wicked thing to do. On the classical theory of Punishment it was of course justified on the ground that the man deserved it. You then, as the saying is, killed two birds with one stone; in the process of giving him what he deserved you set an example to others. But take away desert and the whole morality of the punishment disappears. But that is not the worst. If the justification of exemplary punishment is not to be based on dessert but solely on its efficacy as a deterrent, it is not absolutely necessary that the man we punish should even have committed the crime.
But every modern State has powers which make it easy to fake a trial. The punishment of an innocent, that is, an undeserving, man is wicked only if we grant the traditional view that righteous punishment means deserved punishment. Once we have abandoned that criterion, all punishments have to be justified, if at all, on other grounds that have nothing to do with desert.
Where the punishment of the innocent can be justified on those grounds and it could in some cases be justified as a deterrent it will be no less moral than any other punishment. Any distaste for it on the part of the Humanitarian will be merely a hang-over from the Retributive theory. It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position.
My contention is that good men not bad men consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants.
They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult.
In reality, however, we must face the possibility of bad rulers armed with a Humanitarian theory of punishment. This is not so in most contemporary States. Even if it were, our rulers would still be fallen men, and, therefore neither very wise nor very good. As it is, they will usually be unbelievers. And since wisdom and virtue are not the only or the commonest qualifications for a place in the government, they will not often be even the best unbelievers.
Our government would employ an army of psychologists and doctors for the sole purpose of treating criminals and determining their sentence. What would prevent government leaders from subjecting political enemies or even unruly citizens to indefinite amounts of treatment on the premise of a minute infraction? If the wrong person, or even a well-intentioned leader, is in power the humanitarian theory could have effects reminiscent of Nazi Germany where people were subjected to extremely unethical and inhumane experiments and treatments.
It could all be easily defended by the phrase we are curing them of their criminal disease. Lewis realized this and argued fervently that although there may be good intentions behind the humanitarian theory it has the potential to lead us into a hellish society with no regard for human rights.
Karl Menninger would argue that the humanitarian theory effectively makes criminals into model citizens that are functional productive members of society. He feels that criminals are helpless victims of a debilitating disease known as crime and that with treatment by trained professionals this disease can be eradicated. This seems like a plausible and effective solution upon first glance. This theory is well intentioned and seeks to help the criminal as well as society.
However, the problem with this view is that committing a crime is a choice made by the criminal not some uncontrollable disease contracted from society. There are countless instances of upstanding citizens who were raised in conditions very similar if not identical to the most violent and destructive criminals.
Somewhere along the line, the choice was made by that criminal to commit a crime. This in turn, lead to a series of events and decisions that put him or her on a fast track to judicial punishment.
Poor decision-making is not a disease. It cannot be cured through therapy or drugs. The only effective cure to this kind of behavior is education and personal resistance to negative influence. Treating criminals as victims is absurd. It undermines the very definition of criminal. The person the criminal robbed or killed is the victim. The criminal is responsible for his disregard of the law as well as the damage caused to any victim. Obviously, he or she should be punished according to this accountability, not on an inflated sense of the word disease.
The humanitarian theory of punishment is a dangerous concept that puts our rights as citizens in jeopardy and has no regard for boundaries of punishment. The idea of doing whatever is necessary to cure a criminal could conceivably lead to terrible atrocities and the destruction of the foundations of this country. Instead I propose the adoption of a retributive form of punishment. I think retribution is the most fair and upfront form of. Not only is it fair to the criminal whos punishment directly fits the crime they committed, it also is fair to the victims who get some form of payment or validation about the crime committed against him or her.
To sum it up, an eye for an eye makes the whole world kind. Criminals learn from their mistakes and pay the price for them but in theory, are much less likely to repeat them. Crime would plummet and our country would become exponentially safer as well as prosperous. For this reason, the retributive theory of punishment merits heavy consideration in the overhaul of this countrys judicial and prison system. Buka menu navigasi.
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