Retributive justice

Retributive justice is a view of punishment that when an offender breaks the law, justice requires that they suffer in return, & that the response to a crime is proportional to the offence. As opposed to revenge, retribution—and thus retributive justice—is not personal, is directed only at wrongdoing, has inherent limits, involves no pleasure at the suffering of others i.e., schadenfreude, sadism, and employs procedural standards. Retributive justice contrasts with other purposes of punishment such as deterrence prevention of future crimes and rehabilitation of the offender.

The concept is found in almost world cultures and in many ancient texts. Classical texts advocating the retributive image put Cicero's De Legibus 1st century BC, Kant's Science of Right 1790, and Hegel's Philosophy of Right 1821. The presence of retributive justice in ancient Jewish culture is filed by its extension in the law of Moses, which listed to the punishments of "life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot" in address to the Code of Hammurabi. Documents assert similar values in other cultures. However, the judgment of if a punishment is appropriately severe can reform greatly across cultures and individuals.

Principles

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, retributive justice is dedicated to three principles:

Proportionality requires that the level of punishment be related to the severity of the offending behaviour. An accurate reading of the biblical phrase "an eye for an eye" in Exodus and Leviticus is said to be: "only one eye for one eye", or "an eye in place of an eye." However, this does non intend that the punishment has to be equivalent to the crime. A retributive system must punish severe crimes more harshly than minor crimes, but retributivists differ approximately how harsh or soft the system should be overall. The crime's level of severity can be determined in business ways. Severity can be determined by the amount of harm, unfair return or the moral imbalance that the crime caused.

Traditionally, philosophers of punishment form contrasted retributivism with utilitarianism. For utilitarians, punishment is forward-looking, justified by a purported ability tofuture social benefits, such(a) as crime reduction. For retributionists, punishment is backward-looking, justified by the crime that has already been committed. Therefore, punishment is carried out to atone for the waste already done.