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This is mostly a history of punishment in western society. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s interesting. It answers the question in the title mostly by ask

This is mostly a history of punishment in western society. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s interesting. It answers the question in the title mostly by asking what, from today’s perspective, are the rational uses of punishment? But it doesn’t get much at why we do this in the first place. Why do adults punish children? Why do so many people belong to religions with strict and explicit punishment dogmas (e.g., going to hell for offending a higher power). It doesn’t provide a rhetorical or moral framework for differentiating punishment from abuse or torture. I think these are more interesting questions, although perhaps not fair to expect from a historian. Clearly punishment is satisfying to us. Revenge stories are as old as literature, and widely celebrated. I think that in a large society it’s an obsolete and harmful impulse. The article references Plato’s views: “Plato discussed punishment in terms of learning virtue and deterring future acts rather than just in terms of taking vengeance for the past, which he dismissed as a primitive, animalistic motive.” It’s interesting to me how long it takes for views like this to take hold and create a more just society, and how easy it is for cultures to backslide. Revenge is a powerful impulse.

kodah 4y ago
Moralism is a powerful thing and American moralism is far from dead. I think a lot of folks in America probably fancy themselves as being free from these chains, but subconsciously I think the chains of moralism are fairly deep and strong.
- mantas 4y ago
  Today’s anti-moralist stance is very moralist itself. It’s funny how cultural colonialism is going at full speed today. Yet many people think this brings post-colonial justice.
  - kodah 4y ago
    I don't really see amoralists creating laws to punish moral people. Generally people who don't like morals prefer ethical frameworks. But, I do agree that a lot of speech today has moral overtones, and that itself is wrong.
    - mantas 4y ago
      Hate speech laws do pretty much that. Or cancel culture if we skip the formal law.
DiggyJohnson 4y ago
I don’t mean to oversimplify your point, so I’ll phrase this as a question: Should we punish children for bad behavior? How do we discipline without punishing? How can we discipline our kids but avoid making them feel bad? I worry that the collapse of discipline, among other things, leads to a great number of young people about to enter the world with totally misaligned expectations about surviving and thriving as an adult.
- McBeige 4y ago
  What type of discipline do you mean? The self discipline to behave in a way that enables you to live a good life? Or external discipline that makes you behave in a way (not necessarily a good way) out of fear of punishment? Which of these are desirable? Is it possible and efficient to instill the former using punishment?
  - lapcat 4y ago
    > The self discipline to behave in a way that enables you to live a good life? Also, self-discipline tends to follow age. If punishing little kids helped, then why do kids often become terrors in their teens and twenties, then eventually grow up, mature, and become more responsible? Of course some people never grow up, but many of them were smacked around as kids anyway.
- hn_version_0023 4y ago
  > I worry that the collapse of discipline, among other things, leads to a great number of young people about to enter the world with totally misaligned expectations about surviving and thriving as an adult. Is this not already the case? I’m not entirely sure how one might measure this, but boy does my gut tell me that its already happened.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  Personally I don't want to punish but rather inform: if you do this, this might/will happen. It doesn't imply that they're a bad person for doing what they did, just speaks more to the cause and effect of actions. I think this may actually work better for kids. I think so often we praise/shame them, and they can get caught in a cycle of unpredictable self-worth. I dunno, for me, I like to let people know how I will most likely react to certain actions and tell them that even if I react that way, I will still love them. Punishing (with the intent to hurt them) often hurts me, so I'd rather not try to hurt them. That being said, I do want people to know if they punch me in the face, I may punch them back, leave the bar, or strongly distance myself from them physically. I just want people to be more aware of consequences rather than feel like they're a bad person for choosing their actions.
57457802 4y ago
Punishment/revenge is satisfying to a lot of people, but I'm repulsed by it. I don't feel an instinct to punish people who have wronged me, and I feel just as bad for people who are suffering regardless of what they did before. I wonder what makes me different from people who favour punishment. Is it just because I was never punished as a child, or is there a neurological difference?
- superchroma 4y ago
  it's definitely a base instinct. When I'm stressed and preoccupied, lashing out is certainly easier than when calm. I also wonder how people rationalize seeking punishment. More often than not, no forced act can undo wrought damage, particularly emotional damage, and people don't really feel better seeing others suffer, even if that's what they believe they want. People also are extremely prone to forgetting the core intent of society's justice system and prisons, which is (or should be) reform, which is sad. Many balk at the idea that prison is humane in any dimension. We have a lot of growing to do :(
  - wizofaus 4y ago
    I don't have an issue that the threat of prison is a useful deterrent, therefore it needs to obviously be a less desirable option than whatever lives people live now. But nor should it ever be inhumane. The big problem with prisons is that those put there consequently spend a significant period of their lives interacting with nobody but criminals (and prison guards, who aren't exactly known for their ability to inspire the best in others). I'd wager a significant number of career criminals only end up making those life choices after spending time inside. OTOH reform is genuinely hard and not often successful.
    - dolni 4y ago
      Personally, I think prison ought to be structured a lot more like life outside prison. You teach people what they need to do to be successful outside, which has some obvious benefits. Provide for jobs, pay a reasonable market wage, a fair amount of paid time off and/or sick leave. Then teach them how to pay bills and prioritize. Charge reasonable rates for accommodations, food, and amenities. Let people upgrade their room for an increased monthly fee. Maybe they can pay for cable. If someone wants a steak on their birthday, they can splurge and get one -- but it will cost them more than their usual meal. Now you're probably asking: "but what if they refuse to work?" I say: the same thing that happens outside a prison. You don't work, you don't get paid. You don't get paid, you can't buy food. You can't buy food, you don't eat. The problem will solve itself after a while.
rayiner 4y ago
What makes you assume a society with less punishment is a “more just” one? Have you considered that maybe there is a reason that otherwise different societies have almost universally evolved to impose harsh punishments? I.e. that it’s a positive adaptive behavior?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > Have you considered that maybe there is a reason that otherwise different societies have almost universally evolved to impose harsh punishments? The linked article suggests that this sentiment actually comes and goes historically. How do you know that in the long term, we're not evolving in the opposite direction, to not impose harsh punishments?
  - inglor_cz 4y ago
    One of the reasons why punishments used to be so harsh in the past was that enforcement was very inconsistent. In premodern times, it might take a lot of individual crimes before a repeat offender was caught. Given that most crime tends to be committed - even today - by a small, but prodigiously active subset of the general population, once someone was caught stealing, robbing or murdering, there was a tacit assumption that it was a career criminal. Who, in case of a light punishment, would go on stealing, robbing and murdering his peers for the next ten years or so. Which is why permanent incapacitation - mostly by the sword or the gallows, but sometimes by being sent on the galleys, into the mines etc., which was scarcely more survivable than an actual execution, only that it took much longer to die - was the usual judicial punishment. At the very least, the criminal was branded so that he would be instantly recognizable forever. Nowadays, the police has a lot more tech at its disposal. If it is willing to do so and financed to do so, it can catch basically any criminal it wants to. That is why our laws no longer resemble the Bloody Code of early modern Britain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      That's a good point, but AIUI those harsh provisions weren't even enforced very strictly. Similar to modern plea bargaining, there were many ways to reduce the punishment one would actually end up getting. I believe that David Friedman describes these mechanisms in quite some detail in his work on unusual legal systems.
jimkleiber 4y ago
I often see revenge as "you hurt me, I think you're not hurt, I want you to also hurt." I think we 1) assume the other is not hurting, which is very often false, as the other person may hurt us because they feel hurt and assume we aren't hurting and 2) instead of trying to make them feel hurt, we can tell them that we're hurting. However, I think we mostly don't do that strategy because it often requires us to cry and most cultures shun crying. So we seem to end up feeling hut, hiding that hurt, and assuming the other doesn't feel hurt, probably because they're so good at hiding it.
- danenania 4y ago
  I think revenge probably evolved first and foremost as a deterrent. While it might feel satisfying to cause pain to someone who has hurt you, the damage has already been done and you can’t undo whatever damage you suffered. But you can show that there’s a cost to messing with you, which could prevent future aggression. I’d guess that’s why we feel the desire to punish in the first place.
  - jimkleiber 4y ago
    There was a study I read over the last year, maybe it was posted on here, that said we mostly seek revenge out of spite not deterrence. I hope I can find it again. I don't think it's about undoing the damage, it's about evening the damage. If you punch me and I feel hurt two days later, then I may still want to punch back. If I have healed physically and emotionally, forgiven you completely, do you think I'm as likely to punch you then?
    - davidgay 4y ago
      > There was a study I read over the last year, maybe it was posted on here, that said we mostly seek revenge out of spite not deterrence. It's easy to imagine that it's personally for spite, but evolutionarily for deterrence (i.e., spite is an evolutionarily effective way to encode deterrence).
      - 4y ago
dragontamer 4y ago
> Why do adults punish children? Because it works at changing their behavior. Now we can argue the merits of positive reinforcement vs negative reinforcement all day. But when a technique is effective at changing unwanted behavior, then it will be used. Punishments are absolutely necessary because some kids don't know when their parents disapprove of their behavior otherwise. I'm not talking about beating kids btw, I'm talking about scolding, "go to your room", and timeouts. I don't think corporal punishment is worthwhile. There's some studies that shows that while effective at changing behavior, it also teaches the kid that violence is sometimes necessary, a lesson that I'm not sure if we should be teaching them. But punishments in general? You don't want to reach for them as your first tool in your parenting toolbox. But you really can't just positive-reinforcement "you're doing a good job" all day to your kids. Its disingenuous and the kids pick up on that. ---------- > It answers the question in the title mostly by asking what, from today’s perspective, are the rational uses of punishment? To change a person's behavior. If someone keeps lying, cheating, and stealing in society, we want to make them to stop so that they can reintegrate and become a beneficial member of society. Perhaps we've gone too far with jail times in the USA, but the foundational theory is quite simple and effective here. Anyone who has ever trained a dog or other animal knows how to use animal psychology / punishments / rewards to change the animal's behavior. Human psychology is more complex than animal behavior, but it shares a lot of similarities. Positive reinforcement (aka: rewards) and negative reinforcement (aka: punishments) are both useful within the framework.
- NikolaNovak 4y ago
  As well, we need to clearly distinguish "punishment" and "revenge". Revenge is an emotional response by those who have been wronged in the past. Punishment can mean many things (so perhaps we need more specific words), but I believe in this context it is meant to be a rational, conscious act to influence behaviour - though there are other kinds of punishment, and it can be difficult to distinguish. A parent may raise their voice very intentionally, without actually being angry, to gain attention, distinguish and underline a point, or elicit quick obedience (i.e. a "STOP!!!" when a child is about to dart on the road), but they may also raise their voice out of impulse, emotion, frustration, with no specific goal in mind and thus no clear direction or "win conditions". (I've only recently learned of the phrase "omnidirectional ass-chewing" [1], which is a very intentional demenour and environment for receiving marines to put them into a constantly stressful environment to train focus. It LOOKS like random angry yelling, but is in fact extremely studied, careful, and intentional. ) 1: Section 6, "Yelling" https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/03/why-is-boot-camp-so-intense.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/03/why-is-boot-camp-so...
jhrmnn 4y ago
This excellent book discusses a lot of what you touch on—D. Golash: The Case against Punishment https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Case_Against_Punishment.html?id=czYTCgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Case_Against_Punish...
naniwaduni 4y ago
> It answers the question in the title mostly by asking what, from today’s perspective, are the rational uses of punishment? Not rational, legible (and tenable). Our inability to recognize (and accept as valid) consequences doesn't not make them unsound.

kodah 4y ago

Moralism is a powerful thing and American moralism is far from dead. I think a lot of folks in America probably fancy themselves as being free from these chains, but subconsciously I think the chains of moralism are fairly deep and strong.

mantas 4y ago
Today’s anti-moralist stance is very moralist itself. It’s funny how cultural colonialism is going at full speed today. Yet many people think this brings post-colonial justice.
- kodah 4y ago
  I don't really see amoralists creating laws to punish moral people. Generally people who don't like morals prefer ethical frameworks. But, I do agree that a lot of speech today has moral overtones, and that itself is wrong.
  - mantas 4y ago
    Hate speech laws do pretty much that. Or cancel culture if we skip the formal law.

DiggyJohnson 4y ago

I don’t mean to oversimplify your point, so I’ll phrase this as a question: Should we punish children for bad behavior? How do we discipline without punishing? How can we discipline our kids but avoid making them feel bad? I worry that the collapse of discipline, among other things, leads to a great number of young people about to enter the world with totally misaligned expectations about surviving and thriving as an adult.

McBeige 4y ago
What type of discipline do you mean? The self discipline to behave in a way that enables you to live a good life? Or external discipline that makes you behave in a way (not necessarily a good way) out of fear of punishment? Which of these are desirable? Is it possible and efficient to instill the former using punishment?
- lapcat 4y ago
  > The self discipline to behave in a way that enables you to live a good life? Also, self-discipline tends to follow age. If punishing little kids helped, then why do kids often become terrors in their teens and twenties, then eventually grow up, mature, and become more responsible? Of course some people never grow up, but many of them were smacked around as kids anyway.
hn_version_0023 4y ago
> I worry that the collapse of discipline, among other things, leads to a great number of young people about to enter the world with totally misaligned expectations about surviving and thriving as an adult. Is this not already the case? I’m not entirely sure how one might measure this, but boy does my gut tell me that its already happened.
jimkleiber 4y ago
Personally I don't want to punish but rather inform: if you do this, this might/will happen. It doesn't imply that they're a bad person for doing what they did, just speaks more to the cause and effect of actions. I think this may actually work better for kids. I think so often we praise/shame them, and they can get caught in a cycle of unpredictable self-worth. I dunno, for me, I like to let people know how I will most likely react to certain actions and tell them that even if I react that way, I will still love them. Punishing (with the intent to hurt them) often hurts me, so I'd rather not try to hurt them. That being said, I do want people to know if they punch me in the face, I may punch them back, leave the bar, or strongly distance myself from them physically. I just want people to be more aware of consequences rather than feel like they're a bad person for choosing their actions.

57457802 4y ago

Punishment/revenge is satisfying to a lot of people, but I'm repulsed by it. I don't feel an instinct to punish people who have wronged me, and I feel just as bad for people who are suffering regardless of what they did before. I wonder what makes me different from people who favour punishment. Is it just because I was never punished as a child, or is there a neurological difference?

superchroma 4y ago
it's definitely a base instinct. When I'm stressed and preoccupied, lashing out is certainly easier than when calm. I also wonder how people rationalize seeking punishment. More often than not, no forced act can undo wrought damage, particularly emotional damage, and people don't really feel better seeing others suffer, even if that's what they believe they want. People also are extremely prone to forgetting the core intent of society's justice system and prisons, which is (or should be) reform, which is sad. Many balk at the idea that prison is humane in any dimension. We have a lot of growing to do :(
- wizofaus 4y ago
  I don't have an issue that the threat of prison is a useful deterrent, therefore it needs to obviously be a less desirable option than whatever lives people live now. But nor should it ever be inhumane. The big problem with prisons is that those put there consequently spend a significant period of their lives interacting with nobody but criminals (and prison guards, who aren't exactly known for their ability to inspire the best in others). I'd wager a significant number of career criminals only end up making those life choices after spending time inside. OTOH reform is genuinely hard and not often successful.
  - dolni 4y ago
    Personally, I think prison ought to be structured a lot more like life outside prison. You teach people what they need to do to be successful outside, which has some obvious benefits. Provide for jobs, pay a reasonable market wage, a fair amount of paid time off and/or sick leave. Then teach them how to pay bills and prioritize. Charge reasonable rates for accommodations, food, and amenities. Let people upgrade their room for an increased monthly fee. Maybe they can pay for cable. If someone wants a steak on their birthday, they can splurge and get one -- but it will cost them more than their usual meal. Now you're probably asking: "but what if they refuse to work?" I say: the same thing that happens outside a prison. You don't work, you don't get paid. You don't get paid, you can't buy food. You can't buy food, you don't eat. The problem will solve itself after a while.

rayiner 4y ago

What makes you assume a society with less punishment is a “more just” one? Have you considered that maybe there is a reason that otherwise different societies have almost universally evolved to impose harsh punishments? I.e. that it’s a positive adaptive behavior?

lapcat 4y ago
> Have you considered that maybe there is a reason that otherwise different societies have almost universally evolved to impose harsh punishments? The linked article suggests that this sentiment actually comes and goes historically. How do you know that in the long term, we're not evolving in the opposite direction, to not impose harsh punishments?
- inglor_cz 4y ago
  One of the reasons why punishments used to be so harsh in the past was that enforcement was very inconsistent. In premodern times, it might take a lot of individual crimes before a repeat offender was caught. Given that most crime tends to be committed - even today - by a small, but prodigiously active subset of the general population, once someone was caught stealing, robbing or murdering, there was a tacit assumption that it was a career criminal. Who, in case of a light punishment, would go on stealing, robbing and murdering his peers for the next ten years or so. Which is why permanent incapacitation - mostly by the sword or the gallows, but sometimes by being sent on the galleys, into the mines etc., which was scarcely more survivable than an actual execution, only that it took much longer to die - was the usual judicial punishment. At the very least, the criminal was branded so that he would be instantly recognizable forever. Nowadays, the police has a lot more tech at its disposal. If it is willing to do so and financed to do so, it can catch basically any criminal it wants to. That is why our laws no longer resemble the Bloody Code of early modern Britain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Code
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    That's a good point, but AIUI those harsh provisions weren't even enforced very strictly. Similar to modern plea bargaining, there were many ways to reduce the punishment one would actually end up getting. I believe that David Friedman describes these mechanisms in quite some detail in his work on unusual legal systems.

jimkleiber 4y ago

I often see revenge as "you hurt me, I think you're not hurt, I want you to also hurt." I think we 1) assume the other is not hurting, which is very often false, as the other person may hurt us because they feel hurt and assume we aren't hurting and 2) instead of trying to make them feel hurt, we can tell them that we're hurting. However, I think we mostly don't do that strategy because it often requires us to cry and most cultures shun crying. So we seem to end up feeling hut, hiding that hurt, and assuming the other doesn't feel hurt, probably because they're so good at hiding it.

danenania 4y ago
I think revenge probably evolved first and foremost as a deterrent. While it might feel satisfying to cause pain to someone who has hurt you, the damage has already been done and you can’t undo whatever damage you suffered. But you can show that there’s a cost to messing with you, which could prevent future aggression. I’d guess that’s why we feel the desire to punish in the first place.
- jimkleiber 4y ago
  There was a study I read over the last year, maybe it was posted on here, that said we mostly seek revenge out of spite not deterrence. I hope I can find it again. I don't think it's about undoing the damage, it's about evening the damage. If you punch me and I feel hurt two days later, then I may still want to punch back. If I have healed physically and emotionally, forgiven you completely, do you think I'm as likely to punch you then?
  - davidgay 4y ago
    > There was a study I read over the last year, maybe it was posted on here, that said we mostly seek revenge out of spite not deterrence. It's easy to imagine that it's personally for spite, but evolutionarily for deterrence (i.e., spite is an evolutionarily effective way to encode deterrence).
    - 4y ago

dragontamer 4y ago

> Why do adults punish children? Because it works at changing their behavior. Now we can argue the merits of positive reinforcement vs negative reinforcement all day. But when a technique is effective at changing unwanted behavior, then it will be used. Punishments are absolutely necessary because some kids don't know when their parents disapprove of their behavior otherwise. I'm not talking about beating kids btw, I'm talking about scolding, "go to your room", and timeouts. I don't think corporal punishment is worthwhile. There's some studies that shows that while effective at changing behavior, it also teaches the kid that violence is sometimes necessary, a lesson that I'm not sure if we should be teaching them. But punishments in general? You don't want to reach for them as your first tool in your parenting toolbox. But you really can't just positive-reinforcement "you're doing a good job" all day to your kids. Its disingenuous and the kids pick up on that. ---------- > It answers the question in the title mostly by asking what, from today’s perspective, are the rational uses of punishment? To change a person's behavior. If someone keeps lying, cheating, and stealing in society, we want to make them to stop so that they can reintegrate and become a beneficial member of society. Perhaps we've gone too far with jail times in the USA, but the foundational theory is quite simple and effective here. Anyone who has ever trained a dog or other animal knows how to use animal psychology / punishments / rewards to change the animal's behavior. Human psychology is more complex than animal behavior, but it shares a lot of similarities. Positive reinforcement (aka: rewards) and negative reinforcement (aka: punishments) are both useful within the framework.

NikolaNovak 4y ago
As well, we need to clearly distinguish "punishment" and "revenge". Revenge is an emotional response by those who have been wronged in the past. Punishment can mean many things (so perhaps we need more specific words), but I believe in this context it is meant to be a rational, conscious act to influence behaviour - though there are other kinds of punishment, and it can be difficult to distinguish. A parent may raise their voice very intentionally, without actually being angry, to gain attention, distinguish and underline a point, or elicit quick obedience (i.e. a "STOP!!!" when a child is about to dart on the road), but they may also raise their voice out of impulse, emotion, frustration, with no specific goal in mind and thus no clear direction or "win conditions". (I've only recently learned of the phrase "omnidirectional ass-chewing" [1], which is a very intentional demenour and environment for receiving marines to put them into a constantly stressful environment to train focus. It LOOKS like random angry yelling, but is in fact extremely studied, careful, and intentional. ) 1: Section 6, "Yelling" https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/03/why-is-boot-camp-so-intense.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/03/why-is-boot-camp-so...

jhrmnn 4y ago

This excellent book discusses a lot of what you touch on—D. Golash: The Case against Punishment https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Case_Against_Punishment.html?id=czYTCgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Case_Against_Punish...

naniwaduni 4y ago

> It answers the question in the title mostly by asking what, from today’s perspective, are the rational uses of punishment? Not rational, legible (and tenable). Our inability to recognize (and accept as valid) consequences doesn't not make them unsound.