Utilitarianism and Punishment

I was asked in Quora recently about the utilitarian argument in favor of punishing criminals.  I'm happy with my response and I will reproduce it here.

Joe the Burglar is caught red-handed trying to carry a television out of a stranger’s personal residence at 2 AM. Now: what is to be done about Joe? Should the law concern itself only with getting the television back into the hands of the rightful owner, and, say, getting Joe to pay for whatever damage he did breaking in? That would be all there is to it in a purely compensatory system of justice. But that violates our intuitions. The Joe’s of the world figure out pretty quickly that if that is the only response to their burglary, they might as well try again If they didn’t get away with it the first time they might get away with it the second, or tenth.

A utilitarian will generally believe that burglary is a bad thing. After all, whatever pleasure it wins for Joe is more than made up for by (a) the pain it brings his victim, (b) the ancillary harm that it does as mentioned above, (c) the way it undermines the value of the things likely to be stolen, and so in this case threatens the viability of the television industry, and (d) for a thousand other utilitarian reasons you can probably work out for yourself.

So the utilitarian will often conclude that a system of justice should go beyond compensation, and should have a deterrent function. It should “teach Joe a lesson” so he stops burglarizing places. Further, it should do so in a public way so teaching Joe a lesson will also have the effect of teaching the general public a lesson, “burglary is a bad career choice!” These two views are different. Teaching Joe a lesson is called “specific deterrence” whereas teaching the public a lesson is “general deterrence.”

So it seems there is a direct answer to your question. Or perhaps two. Both specific and general deterrence seem valuable ways if upping the sum of happiness in the television loving world. is our goal.

But here is where things get complicated. What should a utilitarian want when these two justifications tend toward opposite conclusions? For example: suppose the authorities know televisions in a certain neighborhood are disappearing but they don’t know who did it. It is bound to occur to someone, “let’s punish some random person. Jim over there — no one likes Jim, no one much will object if he is singled out for this punishment. Let us put on a show trial, bring forward phony evidence against Jim, and throw HIM in jail for stealing televisions.”

This obviously does nothing for specific deterrence. Jim, by hypothesis, is not a television thief anyway. It might help general deterrence, though. If we fool enough of the public into believing Jim was guilty we will help send the necessary message about the badness of television theft. By jiggering the specifics of our hypothesis we can allow for a compelling case, on a purely hedonistic, consequentialist ground, in favor of framing the innocent in certain situations.

There are many things that utilitarians do say about the morality of punishment that address such issues. I won’t go further into them. But opponents of utilitarianism do often point to such issues as evidence that there is something inherently wrong with the utilitarian take on punishment in particular, and of utilitarianism itself in general.

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