Punishment

Key terms

Why punish

Who is punished

By the state

By God

Retribution

Is punishment owed for what was done, whatever good it may bring? Retribution is the view that a penalty answers the offence itself. These readings ask whether like should be returned for like, and what, if anything, may lawfully be sought through punishing.

4 readings

In the Douay-Rheims text of Leviticus, chapter 24 closes with a series of judgments in the Law given through Moses, among them the sentence of “dying let him die” for the killing of a man and the rule of “eye for eye, tooth for tooth”. This is the lex talionis in its scriptural form, and the formula is the one later writers cite when they speak of equal return. It stands under retribution as the Law’s own statement of the measure.

In the Sermon on the Mount, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 5, Christ sets the old saying “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” against his own teaching, “I say to you not to resist evil”. The Fathers and the doctors read the passage together with the Law of Leviticus. It stands under retribution as the word that qualifies the old measure.

In the Summa Theologica, Second Part of the Second Part, question 108, Aquinas treats “vengeance” as a matter of the virtue of justice and asks, in the first article, whether it is lawful. He defines it as “the infliction of a penal evil on one who has sinned” and considers the “mind of the avenger”, with “hatred” and “charity” the terms of his reply. The article is the scholastic standard on the subject and sits under retribution for its definition.

In the Rechtslehre, translated as The Philosophy of Law (1797), Kant treats “Juridical Punishment” within Public Right, in the section on the right of punishing. He calls the penal law a “Categorical Imperative” and speaks of the criminal as one who must never be dealt with “merely as a means”. The passage is the usual starting point for the modern retributive theory, and it stands under this term for that reason.