Retribution

After last week’s post on the practice of knowing what to overlook as an important component of wisdom and peace of mind, I decided to do a follow-up on the subject of Retribution. It’s been something on my mind for years, beginning when I worked in New Mexico as the director of a reentry program for 700 plus people, many violent, adjudicated as felons who had ‘done time’ in prison and now were back in the community with requirements to attend ‘programs’. Here we are years later and it again plays a central role in my thoughts… about political decisions in this country and and abroad.

I will not beat around the bush about my political biases so let me put it out there in case you have not picked up on past nuances made: I did not vote for the current occupant of the People’s House nor did I vote for his opponent. I am registered as an Independent, as are many in my state. An adjective often directed at Independents is ‘wishy-washy’, sometimes ‘spoiler’. We’re all entitled to our opinions . Knowing that, if this is a post you want to read, continue on. This will not be a rant but it will be long.

Retribution holds that punishment is deserved — morally owed— when a wrong has been committed. It is distinct from other justifications for punishment:

*Retribution asks: What does the offender deserve?

*Deterrence asks: What will prevent future harm?

*Rehabilitation asks: How do we fix the offender?

*Restorative justice asks: How do we heal the community?

The philosophical foundation comes largely from Immanuel Kant, who argued that a person who commits a crime has forfeited their right to be treated as though they haven’t — and that failing to punish them actually dishonors them by not taking their moral agency seriously. I personally don’t much care about the dishonoring aspect. As I have come to know, these are the situations where retribution applies.

Please let me know if and why you perhaps might disagree:

• Criminal Sentencing

  Criminal sentencing is the most obvious arena. When a court imposes a sentence proportionate to the severity of the crime — not just what would deter others — it is operating retributively. The phrase ‘the punishment should fit the crime’ is essentially a retributive principle. However, this is not so black and white…I learned many crimes are ‘pled-down’ aka ‘watered down’.

• War Crimes and International Justice

  War crimes and international justice invoke retribution heavily. Tribunals like Nuremberg or the ICC exist partly on the premise that those who commit atrocities deserve to face justice, regardless of whether prosecution will deter future war crimes.

• Civil and Workplace Contexts

  Civil and workplace contexts use punitive damages and disciplinary action — sanctions designed to go beyond mere compensation and signal that the behavior was wrong, not just costly.

• Excessive Harm to Innocents

  When harm is excessive and diffuse — massacres of civilians, systematic torture, deliberate starvation, ethnic cleansing — the retributive framework strains in three critical ways:

  *Proportionality collapses: There is no punishment that ‘fits’ the annihilation of hundreds of thousands. Perpetrators can only be punished once, making any sanction arithmetically trivial compared to the harm done.

  *Collective guilt is unavoidable: Mass atrocities require infrastructure, bystanders, and enablers. Retribution is instinctively individualist, yet the ‘guilty party’ is often a system or a chain of command — demanding reparations, institutional reform, and cultural accountability beyond criminal prosecution.

  *Victims cannot be restored: The most harmed are gone. Punishment may serve survivors and the moral order of society, but it offers nothing to those most directly wronged.

• Threats to Eradicate an Entire Civilization: (timely)

When the stated goal of an aggressor is the complete annihilation of a people — their culture, language, and inter-generational identity — the nature of the wrong changes qualitatively. It is no longer a sum of individual harms but an attempt to erase the very capacity of a group to exist in the future.

Classical retributivism is reactive: you punish what has been done, not what might be done. But a credible existential threat raises critical questions:

Does the scale of threatened harm justify a response that would ordinarily be considered disproportionate?

Can retribution be applied to states, ideologies, or movements rather than individuals?

Is there a risk that ‘civilizational self-defense’ becomes the mirror-crime — using the threat of annihilation to justify annihilation of an opposing population?

**Most serious ethicists conclude: a severe existential threat can justify a stronger response, but that response must still target those directing the threat, not collective punishment of an innocent opposing population — which most ethical frameworks regard as its own form of atrocity.

I’ve given serious thought to Personal Relationships. It’s a thorny category. I believe most of us have or have had wishes to ‘get even’ when we feel even when we have been wronged…as in ‘cutting off ‘someone who wronged You, or refusing to forgive without acknowledgment of harm. I’ve done both in my life. Yet, in my view, someone who does You dirty is not in the same category as the others. You may disagree and if you do, please go ahead and voice your opinion. *My desire is to have this substack be a place for thought and dialogue. More people than I can count have not been in agreement and in the disagreements, sometimes we have reached the ‘dialectic’ (or a third more reasoned truth in the back and forth of opposing views).

Please pause and give yourself some time to think about what you’ve read. I have more to say in the form of Pros, Cons, Considerations and Conclusions which I almost automatically use in pondering weighty things bumping around in my mind.

The Case for Retribution:

• Affirms Victims’ Dignity

The strongest argument is that retribution takes victims seriously. When society punishes a wrongdoer, it validates the victim’s experience — it says the harm mattered. A world without retributive punishment risks treating victims as mere collateral damage.

• Proportionality as a Limit on Power

A retributive framework insists you cannot punish someone more than they deserve, even if it would be useful. This is a genuine constraint on state power and prevents punishment from becoming a tool of deterrence without ethical bounds.

• Moral Intuition and Closure

Most people, across cultures, feel that the wicked should face consequences. Retribution maps onto a near-universal human sense of fairness that other theories of punishment sometimes struggle to honor.

• Upholds Social Norms

By responding to wrongdoing decisively, retribution signals society’s values. It communicates what a community will and will not tolerate, reinforcing the moral fabric that makes collective life possible.

Here is the Case against Retribution

• Easily Becomes A Revenge Ecalation Risk

The sharpest critique is that retribution and revenge are far closer cousins than proponents admit. Both are backward-looking; both are driven by a desire that the wrongdoer suffer; both can be fueled more by emotion than principle. The line is genuinely thin. Some might even say that retribution is just widow dressing for revenge.

• Ignores Rehabilitation

Retribution does nothing forward-looking — it doesn’t reduce future crime, doesn’t help the victim rebuild, and doesn’t address the conditions that led to the offense. A pure retributive framework can produce a society that punishes richly but heals poorly. In my own country which has the largest number of incarcerated individuals in a democracy… this has always been in play.

• Bias in Application

  Retribution assumes a just and equal system of punishment — but in practice, who gets punished, and how severely, often reflects social inequality more than moral deserve. Retributive logic applied through a biased system produces injustice in the name of justice.

And what about weighing Pain and Suffering (to the Individual versus the Population)?

Retributivism, at its philosophical core, resists aggregation. Kant’s framework insists that each individual victim’s suffering has a moral weight that cannot simply be added up or averaged out. *The 800,001st victim’s death is not ‘worth less’ than the first.

But this creates a profound practical problem at population scale. If each victim deserves individual acknowledgment, and there are a million victims, a purely retributive process would be infinite. This is why international tribunals select representative cases — meaning most victims never see their specific harm acknowledged in court.

There are three major frameworks that handle this differently:

Retributive view: each victim deserves acknowledgment, and sheer numbers don’t change what is owed. This is the framework’s great strength and its great practical limitation.

Utilitarian view: Aggregate matters most — the greatest relief for the greatest number can justify a harsh response. The danger is that individuals disappear into statistics, and innocent parties become acceptable collateral.

Rights-based view: Each person holds rights that cannot be traded away, regardless of population math. Yet mass rights violations create qualitatively different obligations — including an international duty to intervene.

The most defensible position appears to be a hybrid: rights-based constraints (no person may be treated as expendable) combined with an acknowledgment that population-scale suffering creates widened moral obligations — escalating urgency without overriding individual rights.

Whew, that’s a lot to think about, right?

And finally (mercifully, one might say), we’ve come to The/A Conclusion:

Retribution captures something genuinely important — that wrongs demand responses, and that victims deserve acknowledgment. But as a stand-alone theory of justice it is incomplete, and as a personal impulse it is dangerous.

The extreme cases — excessive harm to innocents, civilizational threats, and mass suffering — expose the limits of any single framework. Justice at scale requires drawing on restorative, preventive, and rights-based frameworks alongside retributive ones. The scales of individual pain and population suffering don’t cancel each other out. Both demand to be honored, and doing so simultaneously remains one of the hardest problems in moral and political philosophy.

All of this may seem too theoretical, even scholarly to You. There are no one paragraph answers to the question of retribution. I’ve said several times before that I was recruited to lead a Reentry Program for Adjudicated Felons and I did for awhile. I was unable to continue beyond several years. I had too many questions, internal conflicts and fears for my own safety as well as the safety of young female employees who thought understanding and caring were the answers, not a better-than-nothing framework mandated by Probation and Parole. It was the worst professional choice I ever made. It did clearly teach me my limitations to adapt, keep calm and carry on.

Perhaps you’ve been able to insulate yourself against the ideas I’ve presented. If you have, you likely won’t want to consider them now. I get it and sorry/not sorry especially if you are an American citizen.

The rest of April posts, right into May will be about Spring in the natural world…a relief, eh?

I have peony shoots…weeks until flowers but still, growing nearly an inch a day.