Recently, I came across C.S. Lewis’ essay “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”. If you’ve not read it, I do recommend it: I think Lewis makes some excellent points about punishment. It makes quite a neat follow-up to my previous post on Atheism Plus and ethics. What I was talking about in that post was personal morality: does atheism have the power to change anyone’s life from bad to good? Does atheism have the power to stop people doing things which are ‘unethical’?
What I’d like to do in this post is look at the idea of punishment itself. What happens when someone DOES do something considered unethical / wrong, at the level of society? Lewis argues that the traditional idea with respect to punishment is that of retribution: someone has done something wrong, therefore they deserve some kind of punishment. There is a connection between punishment and crime.
However, what some were arguing back in the 1940s with respect to capital punishment, was that retributive punishment is actually immoral. Lewis outlines the two reasons given for punishment: correction – i.e. to make someone change their behaviour – and deterrent, i.e. making sure that other people don’t follow the same pattern of behaviour. I think the same arguments would probably be applicable today. Where it gets interesting is how Lewis then takes it.