By J. P. Moreland
Scriptorium Daily
Until the 1950’s, there were four aspects of and goals for criminal justice: punishment, deterrence, protection of society, and rehabilitation. Here are three crucial points about the list. (1) Only the first one (punishment) requires taking the crime as intrinsically evil. It looks back in time at the crime, sees the balance of good and evil in the universe as disturbed, and seeks to right those scales and punish evil simply because it is evil and not because punishment would bring about good future benefits to society (or victims). Punishment is unrelated to revenge whose presence or absence is irrelevant to the appropriateness of the punishment.
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(2) Only the first one (punishment) requires that human beings have free will necessary for moral praise, blame, and responsibility. You can engage in deterrence, protection and rehabilitation (i.e., behavior modification) with a rogue dog without assuming that the dog’s actions were freely done. But you cannot consistently punish someone without assuming the actor was free and, therefore, responsible.
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All four of the traditional notions are legitimate, but today, secular progressives no longer believe in punishment, and rehabilitation has morphed into restorative justice. Here’s why. With the loss of a Judeo-Christian worldview in which free will and objective evil make sense, in its place we have the emergence of naturalism, Darwinian evolution and a culture in which we are reduced to our brains. The result: Human beings are now seen as determined by their brain chemistry, their genes and their environment. Free will is gone. And with the rise of tolerance and moral relativism, the difference between objective good and evil is hard to justify. Thus, the two essential requirements for punishment (free will, intrinsic evil) no longer make sense to secular progressives, and punishment has gone the way of the dodo. In its place, the last three notions (deterrence, protection, rehabilitation) are severed from good and evil and are solely utilitarian means to sustain what cultural elites believe the social order should be. Sounds like the former Soviet Union, doesn’t it?
I tend to agree in principle with Dr. Moreland and Dr. Reynolds (Ref. Illegal Immigration: Is Law King?) than with John M. Czarnetzky and Ronald J. Rychlak (Ref. The International Criminal Court: An Obstacle to Peace?) on the issue of balancing justice/the law and compassion.
