Retributivism and the Similarity Requirement

Is there anything in Feinberg's definition of retributivism that requires, or even recommends any kind of similarity between the crime and the punishment? No.

Retributivism

Discipline: Philosophy

Theory of punishment whereby all or part of the purpose of punishment is the infliction of pain or disadvantage on an offender which is in some sense commensurate with his offence and which is inflicted independently of reform or deterrence.

For a weak theory the commensurate amount need not be inflicted but may be, and a limit is placed up to which reformative or deterrent punishment may go but beyond which it may not.
A strong theory insists that the punishment must be inflicted, but again places a limit beyond which it may not go.

Retributivism opposes excessive harshness as much as excessive leniency, and opposes the violation of the offender's rights in the interests of social expediency or personal spite and so on.
Mitigating circumstances, diminished responsibility, and so on are taken into account before determining the commensurate amount, but there are still problems in determining this, and the strong retributivist, especially, must justify violating the presumed moral ban on inflicting unnecessary pain.

Source:
J Feinberg, 'The Expressive Function of Punishment', Doing and Deserving (1970)

Must a Punishment be Like the Crime in order to Fit the Crime?

I think this is a popular confusion. Retribution theory, as I understand it, requires that we deprive the criminal of happiness, as commensurably as we can reasonably make it, to the degree that the crime was wrong. It doesn't mean that the suffering the perpetrator is supposed to receive is to be similar in nature to that which he inflicted on his victim.

This is often implied in "eye for an eye" arguments. I realize in the eye for an eye case, there is a similarity of crime and punishment. But I do not see this elevated to the level of principle, even in the Old Testament.

A defense of Hell

A redated post, and maybe something Steve Hays can use against me in a discussion I'm having with him concerning retribution over at Triablogue. What a difference a t makes.

By Mark Talbot. One t.

Hell, Hays, and the criminal analogy

I think we have to go back to the context of your using Grayling's employment of the Polanski case in the defense of hell. There are some important differences between this kind of criminal case and the problem of sin. Grayling would not have been making his case if Polanski had served his full sentence and was about to be released. The point is that our judicial system allows people to be released from their punishment once proportionality is reached (with a lot of other considerations thrown in as well). The passage of time without punishment doesn't release one from guilt, that was Grayling's point. In our judicial system, the doing of time in prison "pays one's debt to society."


You are the one using the criminal reasoning to justify hell. But the analogy to the criminal justice system is precisely what propels the proporitionality objection. To get a defense of hell of the ground you have to argue either that the case is different with sin because it is against God, or argue that the damned sinner is unrepentant and therefore reoffends continuously. Those are precisely points at which the criminal justice analogy breaks down.
In my view the retribution analogyis too closely connected to the concepts of criminal justice to justify hell, and that is why I think of hell primarily as a natural consequence of the fact that one is rebelling against the source of goodness itself. If you're doing that, you can't be happy, and here case of Aslan and the dwarfs and the Great Divorce helps us see that. No fire and brimstone is necessary to make us miserable if we are trying forever to find happiness apart from the Source of happiness.

How the Bible defines retributive justice

VR: The concept of retribution is that the evildoer should be deprived of happiness to in proportion to the wrongfulness or harmfulness of the act.




DBT: Is it? Is that how the Bible defines retributive justice?



VR: Let me change my answer to yes.



Here's Gen 4:23-24: And Lamech said unto his wives: Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech; for I have slain a man for wounding me, and a young man for bruising me;

If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold.



By Exodus we get to an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and that puts an upper limit on what can be avenged upon another person. You can't do what Lamech did.

Retribution, Hell, and Roman Polanski: A Response to Hays

This has nothing to do with Calvinism, just so you know.

The concept of retribution is that the evildoer should be deprived of happiness to in proportion to the wrongfulness or harmfulness of the act. The proportionality objection to hell would not be that a certain amount of time passing is going to take the guilt away, but rather that no action is infinitely bad or infinitely harmful, and so the proporitionality requirement can be met in a finite length of time, and the eternity of hell isn't necessary.




It doesn't imply that guilt diminises with time, it just says that after a certain amount of happiness is deprived from the wrongdoer, the punishment can end, because the crime has been paid for. So the reasoning in the Polanski case doesn't apply here.



There are two standard responses to it. One if that in the case of sin, the offended party is God, and therefore sin, (unlike crime) can and always does deserve an infinite punishment. That seemed more plausible back when people were thought of as standing on different levels of the Great Chain of Being, and a crime against a nobleman was thought more heinous than a crime against a commoner, for that reason only.



The other response is to say that the damned are unrepentant sinners who continuously reoffend. I think that is surely the more plausible response, but this has little to do with the reasoning in the Polanski case.



What is more, there is a statute of limitations for many crimes, but no statute for the most heinous crimes. But hell, presumably, is for sinners of every type, and Protestants at least reject the idea that some sins are "venial" and do not threaten a person's salvation.



So I don't think that this is the right way to meet the proportionality objection to the doctrine of everlasting punishment.