The Big Big Thread of Religious Discussion

[Tydeus]

Originally Posted by Demetrius

Back to punishment and consquences.

I am right now unable to wrap my head around preventative punishment. Why should I care about committing an act if there are no direct consequences? If I want sex now and there is a chick and I rape her what will I learn from a punishment? Your being punished is a result or consequence of your actions, merited by those actions.

Not quite. See, punishment is not merited by the act itself, but as a deterrent to the act among the many, or as a way to instill a deeper fear of actually experiecing the punishment in the punished. Just as a dog becomes handshy, so would punishment seek to imprint on someone a connection of certain behaviors to pain and misfortune.

Though some individual may not personally learn from punishment for his evil deeds, society is by-and-large deterred from replicating them, and so a justifiable end is produced and upheld -- the very concept of an ordered society. However, torture, for example, serves no purpose (as a punishment, ignoring anything regarding interrogation). If imprisonment is enough to produce in society a general aversion to a certain misdeed, then torture is excessive, is vengeful, is unjustified. Similarly, if locking up marijuana users and sellers does no good to society (and arguably, it actually hurts our society), then the punishment is not justified. Whether or not the act itself is wrong or harmful is irrelevant. It's a cost/benefit analysis. For this reason I believe all drugs should be legalized, regulated, and taxed. Though they may be vices, in some cases quite severe, if punishment only produces further negative effects, it is useless, and merely vengeance, or some callousness to the punished, and either way is unjustified.