No one deserves to suffer, not even Harry Sisson

an argument against retributivism

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I’ve argued before that wrongdoers deserve to suffer. Indeed, my sympathy with Hinduism is partially yoked to this claim, since I think the only sensible way to spell out the notion of karma will hang on retributive desert.

Retributivism — in the strong sense — is the notion that wrongdoers (or, alternatively, bad people) deserve to suffer. Specifically, the claim is that it’s good for wrongdoers to be made to suffer, even though it’s bad for them and good for nobody else. On retributivism, the suffering of evil evildoers is good from the point of view of the universe.

When I posted my original article,

Richard Hanania

— eyes wide, teeth bared, blood trickling down his face — gleefully endorsed the argument:

I agree. Bad people should suffer is as natural to me as good people should suffer less. Incomprehensible that others don’t agree.

Now that Mr. Hanania has written an enthusiastic defence of the death penalty, I thought I’d share an intuition pump against retributivism which occurred to me last night in my prison cell.

Here is the basic idea. Imagine a murder who — surprise, surprise — has a bad character. (Retributivists disagree over whether desert is grounded in one’s choices, one’s character, or both — for the sake of ecumenism, suppose this guy is the full package.)

And, if capital-M Murder isn’t galling enough to tickle your retributivist intuitions, imagine additionally the murderer in question is the serial philanderer Harry Sisson.

Now imagine we know that in a billion years (but not before), Mr. Sisson will repent of his crimes and delete Snapchat. Those whom he wronged — not just his murder victim but also his real victims: the women whose hearts he shattered by having a “roster” — will find closure by then and heal.

Importantly, all this will happen whether or not Mr. Sisson is retributively punished. Whether he’s punished or not, in other words, things will work out the same.

Now imagine that — over the course of a billion years — you can cause Mr. Sisson to feel the slight pain of a small pinprick for a single second once a day. Over the course of a billion years, we can suppose, the aggregate pain will sum up to at least the badness of whatever finite punishment we think Mr. Sisson deserved. (If a billion years is too short or too long a timeframe, adjust the number as needed.)

Suppose, additionally, that Mr. Sisson wouldn’t know why the pricks were being imposed — he’d just feel a slight pain, wince, and get back to tweeting things like “HAHA. Perfect! @The Democrats just #destroyed @The Republicans.” Nor would any of his victims find out, so there’d be no schadenfreude on their end.

Question: would it be intrinsically good to impose these pinpricks on Sisson?

I am inclined to say “no”. At the end of the day, it might be that various theoretical commitments force me to say “yes”; but my intuition about the case is that there’s nothing desirable or worthwhile or choiceworthy about imposing the pinpricks.

You might wonder why the case is constructed so weirdly. (Tiny pinpricks? A billion years?) The reason is that I’m trying to get at whether imposing N amount of pain on wrongdoers with bad characters is intrinsically good, while decoupling our judgements — as far as possible — from the assumed instrumental effects of said pain.

After all, according to anti-retributivists, the retributivist intuition is just a case of a good heuristic gone bad. Usually, imposing suffering on wrongdoers with bad characters is instrumentally good, in that it generally has some positive instrumental effects vis-à-vis prompting character change, bringing closure to victims, enforcing norms that deter future wrongdoing, etc. As a result, we’ve formed a heuristic linking pain caused to wrongdoers with bad characters to a positive moral appraisal; unfortunately, the story goes, this heuristic is so ingrained that we have trouble decoupling pain from the instrumental effects of pain, even when it’s abstractly stipulated that none of the positive instrumental effects of pain inflicted on wrongdoers obtain in a given example.

Of course, this is only a just so story, and hearing it — by itself — shouldn’t disabuse anyone of anything. It might be true, but if we accept that things usually are the way they seem, then we’ll need some positive reason to think the retributivist intuition is a case of a misfiring heuristic and not a veridical moral judgement.

The example we’re considering is supposed to supply a positive reason along those lines. When we suppose that the amount of pain N that Mr. Sisson would deserve were retributivism true is administered in miniscule, spread-out doses over the course of a billion years, it’s much easier to decouple the pain itself from any instrumental benefits that might be contingently correlated with pain. And when we do that, seems plausible — to me, at least — that there’s nothing worthwhile in inflicting it.

The argument is eminently resistible. There is a widespread intuition that, for example, no of slight pain caused by dust specks in eyes can aggregate to the same level of badness as one person being tortured. I think this intuition is in error, but people certainly have it; as a result, my argument faces a dilemma: either the intuition that no amount of dust specks in eyes (or slight pinpricks to the skin) sums up the badness of one torture is correct, or it isn’t. If the intuition is correct, then it implies that no number of pinpricks can ever sum up to the badness of whatever more intense pain Mr. Sisson deserves for his crimes. If the intuition is incorrect, then we’re going to want to supply a debunking account — a story about why, in this case, we’d expect our intuitions to misfire and deliver a verdict that isn’t truth-tracking. Whatever that story is (and, presumably, it will be something to do with scope insensitivity: the well-documented failure of human psychology to cope with large numbers, like, e.g., 365,000,000,000 pinpricks), presumably it will apply to the case I’ve raised against retributivism.

On the first horn of the dilemma, I agree that if no amount of pinpricks could equal the badness of one torture, then — whatever N amount of suffering Sisson deserves — it might be that no arbitrarily large number of pinpricks will harm him sufficiently. Still, I’d think that for the case to have bite, the badness of the pinpricks doesn’t have to equal the badness of whatever pain Mr. Sisson would deserve on retributivism; presumably, on retributivism an insufficient punishment will still be good, even if a proportionate punishment would be better. Like, if Ted Bundy deserves the chair, surely it’s not bad for the right person to give him a slap.

On the second horn of the dilemma, the one which tried to debunk the intuition in general: I think this is what retributivists who share my intuition about the case should say. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that the argument has something going for it. Having been brainwashed by moral theory, I’ve lost many of my anti-aggregationist intuitions of yesteryear. Nowadays, it just strikes me as obvious that some arbitrarily large number of dust specks in eyes will sum up to the badness of one torture. Even still, when I reflect on the case of Mr. Sisson, I find it hard to believe that a billion, barely noticeable pinpricks would be good from the point of view of the universe.

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