Retribution - does it have a place in a progressive society?

[Bee]

Many people believe that retribution is morally flawed and problematic in concept and practice, however I think that the punitive system recognises levels of retribution – for the victim, the victim’s loved ones, and for society as a whole.

But, to take a life when a life has been lost is not justice, it’s revenge.

The main argument that retribution is immoral is that it is just a sanitised form of vengeance. Scenes of howling mobs attacking prison vans containing those accused of murder on their way to and from court, or chanting aggressively outside prisons when an offender is being executed, suggest that vengeance remains a major ingredient in the public popularity of capital punishment. But just retribution, designed to re-establish justice, can easily be distinguished from vengeance and vindictiveness.

The issue of the execution of innocent persons is also a problem for the retribution argument - if there is a serious risk of executing the innocent then one of the key principles of retribution - that people should get what they deserve (and therefore only what they deserve) - is violated by the current implementation of capital punishment in the USA, and any other country where errors have taken place.

Why do we treat killing so differently to other crimes? Rapists are not themselves raped, people guilty of assault are not beaten up as punishment (or deterrence). Therefore, the death penalty is both cruel and unusual in that regard and seems to serve a human need to exact revenge.
Camus and Dostoevsky argued that the retribution in the case of the death penalty was not fair, because the anticipatory suffering of the criminal before execution would probably outweigh the anticipatory suffering of the victim of their crime.

Others argue that the retribution argument is flawed because the death penalty delivers a 'double punishment'; that of the execution and the preceding wait, and this is a mismatch to the crime.

Some people who believe there is a place for retribution in sentencing oppose capital punishment because they feel the death penalty provides insufficient retribution. They argue that life imprisonment without possibility of parole causes much more suffering to the offender than a painless death after a short period of imprisonment. I’m of that belief

As society develops and we become more aware of our own motivations and limitations, what purpose does retribution have today? Is it an outmoded concept - or does it have a place in a civilised society?

 

[Jon]

Game theory - as first espoused by John von Neumann - suggests that the best strategies involve "tit for tat." So perhaps the age old "An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" is just an enlightened discovery back in ancient times. Is not retribution just a successful strategy that has worked since the beginning of time?

 

[Bee]

Well, an eye for an eye as we reference it these days is from the Old Testament (although its origins are older). When Christ gave us Christianity (and new teachings from God), he told us to 'turn the other cheek' knowing that not to seek retaliation would call on a higher degree of self-control and spiritual awareness and acceptance.

You don't have to believe in God to understand that retaliation in that sense is outmoded and, if we are to strive for excellence (as referenced in another post) we ought to strive not to seek retaliation.

 

[Jon]

Is the New Testament just another form of political correctness?

Where is the evidence that retaliation is outmoded? Does game theory not suggest that in fact it is the superior approach? I nuke you if you nuke me?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

This issue is one that is actually being debated, even if only indirectly, in the USA. The Black Lives Matter movement is frequented by people who want JUSTICE (usually spoken 10 to 20 decibels louder than anything else they say). But the same group turns a blind eye to the black-on-black crimes that permeate their neighborhoods. If you look at drug gangs, tit-for-tat ends up with innocent bystanders getting killed including infants inside their houses being hit by stray bullets passing through windows or thin siding. And too many times, their cries for justice sound more like calls for vengeance than anything else.

Retaliation and escalation lead to really bad situations where neighborhoods are in a near-continual state of war. Many of the illegal immigrants claim that they left behind such an environment. The gangs, because of their drug money, can afford really good weapons and lots of bullets.

These days, police have a hair-trigger mentality because of police ambushes. A really bad one occurred in Baton Rouge Louisiana, just about 90 miles northwest of New Orleans. Several officers were shot, I think two were killed. But other ambushes have occurred as well. Officers KNOW they are targets and that they might have to face a gun at any time. The BLM folks only see blacks getting shot; they fail to see that in a situation where police fear for their own lives, aggressive responses to a police officer are not a good thing to do. Rebelling against armed authority is how the USA was founded, but that rebellion took many thousands of lives. The cost was not trivial. The BLM movement forgets, or perhaps cannot understand, that ALL lives matter and that their anti-police attitude is part of the problem. It fans the flames of distrust on BOTH sides of the issue. They forget that when things turn violent, NO lives matter except the lives of those holding the guns. Their lives matter to them and they will defend their lives at the cost of any around them who offer a threat.

This leads me to ask the counter-question for the purposes of discussion: Given the rampaging retribution by gangs in the streets of our major cities, and given the anti-authority attitudes we see in these movements, ARE we an advanced culture? Or is our advancement more along scientific issues and less along cultural lines?

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Jon - regarding your game-theory comment. There is also the risk/reward concept to consider. Let's reduce it to the minimum example that you yourself brought up. If you nuke me, I will nuke you. And the threat is thus "Mutually Assured Destruction." Appropriate that the acronym is MAD, since it is an idea born of desperate madness. In game theory, the question has to be whether you are playing a zero-sum game or a non-zero-sum game. In a zero-sum game, MAD is a valid strategy to assure that there are no winners.

Retaliation is obviously a zero-sum game.

 

[Jon]

Interesting concept to bring in zero-sum game, although I don't altogether agree. You don't need to have exact balance of threat for the tit for tat approach to work. Just look at American soldiers going to war in Vietnam. As the body count rises, public opinion turns against the politicians and there is a building pressure to pull out. Same in Afghanistan.

So, you can have an imbalanced loss from each side, but tit for tat can still act as a deterrent. This is why North Korea is such a threat. They don't have many nukes but the threat of just sending one and landing on American soil is devastating. That's why no one wants to tackle the thorny issue. The alternative is no defence and well, that doesn't bode well - ask Poland!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

In a zero-sum game, you can't have a win-win situation if I recall correctly. You can have a win/lose or a stalemate. In a non-zero-sum game you can have a win-win situation. In the subject of the thread, the win-win case is that the thugs finally realize that if they don't change their ways, then nothing else will change either - for better OR worse. So they decide to find another way than killing their opponents. Or the better win-win would be that disaffected kids stop joining the thugs and just let attrition take its toll.

 

[Jon]

Yes, you are right. In zero-sum games, you cannot enlarge or shrink the pie. In the case of the nukes, I see the tit for tat approach preserving the status quo. This is from my perspective a win-win - it's mere threat keeps the peace. However, it depends on the viewpoint of the aggressor. If they want to overcome someone else then it isn't win-win, but instead win-loss. So the mere perception of the other party influences the type of game perceived. Or rather, the same game can actually be both zero-sum and non zero-sum at the same time, making the concept sound rather fruitless!

 

[The_Doc_Man]

Had to think about this one for a while. Nuclear deterrence is a stalemate situation, but given that politics is a case of games within games within games, I would see that the stalemate at one level allows time for other solutions to come to fruition.

A case in point from not-too-distant history is the Cold War, in which the US and USSR were glaring at each other, escalating the nature of the nuclear deterrent. But eventually, the USSR flinched when Ronald Reagan announces the "Star Wars" initiative because the USSR couldn't afford the pace. So the Berlin wall came down and the USSR split off its little SSRs to become independent nations. The Cold War is still at least a bit chilly these days but it is nowhere near as intense. It has also changed fronts, from the nuclear nightmare military scenario to the computer's vicious virus attacks.

So maybe the deterrent situation buys time for things to change? After all, we have enough resources to have multiple layers in such conflicts. So why would we NOT have those layers?