Dressler,
p. 33-37
Bentham
Jeremy
thinks that everything people do is the result of seeking pleasure and avoiding
pain. The goal of government, according
to Bentham, is to promote the maximum amount of pleasure and the minimum amount
of pain.
Both
individuals and governments can make decisions that will either augment or
diminish their own happiness.
Seeking
pleasure and avoiding pain are the goals of government, while at the same time
the use of pleasure and pain are tools towards these ends.
The
goal of laws should be to increase the total happiness of society. Yet, punishment is painful, and it should
only be allowed if by implementing punishment a greater overall level of
pleasure can be achieved.
Bentham
gives four cases where punishment is not warranted:
1. When there is
no bad act to prevent
2. When it won’t
work – won’t have a preventative effect
3. When the cost
exceeds the benefit
4. When the bad
act can be prevented in another, cheaper way
Greenwalt
again
Utilitarianism
is a theory where the ends justify the means.
Greenwalt
lists the potential benefits of punishment according to utilitarians:
1. General
deterrence – meaning that people will be less likely to commit crimes in
general because they know there’s a chance they’ll be punished
2. Individual
deterrence – the experience of being punished once for an act will influence an
individual to not commit that act again
3. Incapacitation
– imprisonment keeps criminals off the streets
4. Reform –
through treatment and education individuals can be made happier and less likely
to commit crimes in the future
Notes
and Questions
1. There should
be ways to test if punishment deters through empirical research. Assuming someone is risk-neutral, which is perhaps
not true of many criminals, a 5% chance of a 5 year sentence is a lower
expected cost than a 95% chance of a 1 year sentence, because 5% of 5 years is
a fourth of a year, while 95% of one year is 0.95 years. Individual deterrence seems problematic in
that it is nearly impossible to know what a particular person is going to
do. It seems you can only go for general
deterrence based on broad statistical data.
On the other hand, utilitarians wouldn’t necessarily go for a small
reduction in homicides based on a large increase in punishment. They may find that the pain accrued by the
prisoners may exceed the pain reduced from the murders that are prevented.
2. Reform seems
incompatible with a strict utilitarian, or more particularly, an economic view
of crime. An economist would say that
reform could only succeed if you could permanently change either a person’s
preferences or their level of risk aversion.
It’s more likely that punishment will succeed at preventing crime by
changing someone’s incentives at the time they would commit the crime.
3. Kant always
says a person should be an end in itself and not a means to an end. How does this apply to utilitarians? If the stated purpose of punishment is to
deter future crime, then in a sense you’re using the current prisoner to
prevent future crime, rather than to help that prisoner. I seem to recall Kant’s general objective is
that it’s offensive to use a person as a means to an end because it denies that
person’s status as a rational agent capable of free will. Utilitarians might posit some occasions when
an innocent person ought to be punished, although never knowingly. The problem with the example of the sheriff
arresting the homeless man is that in real life, the chance that such an action
would be discovered is never zero, but the cost of that action being discovered
is so great in terms of the credibility of the justice system that a rational,
well-meaning actor would never do such a thing.
4. The moral
objection to rehabilitation is that the criminal does not deserve to be
rehabilitated.