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It's helpful to think about pure forms, sometimes, even if you completely understand that the real world is all shades of gray. You don't have to be wielding th
by iguy 7y ago
It's helpful to think about pure forms, sometimes, even if you completely understand that the real world is all shades of gray. You don't have to be wielding them as "the enemy of the good", just trying to understand the different components of what you're doing.
Explicitly mentioning that the purest form of retribution would be torture is (IMO) a way to argue that this ought to be a smaller component of what we do. Being sent to prison by definition involves a loss of some freedoms, it's not going to be pleasant. But exactly how unpleasant, this is at least partly within our control.
- danans 7y ago> Explicitly mentioning that the purest form of retribution would be torture is (IMO) a way to argue that this ought to be a smaller component of what we do. Why should it be any component of what we do? You don't have to be religious to recognize the need to call it unacceptable as a basic societal principle.
- throwaway17_17 7y agoI think you have to qualify “basic societal principle” with regard to any measure of penalization for crime being “torture.” There are posts in this thread who say solitary is torture, saying high monetary fines are torture, the whole spectrum... So you need to define torture, and then find a punishment which you find to not be torture and convince general society that it is both proportional and effective punishment for some specific criminal act.