Wrongdoers Deserve to Suffer
A cheeky defence of the obvious
In general, wrongdoers deserve to suffer.
To me, that’s as plain as the nose on my face. But for some, this claim smacks of a cold, barbaric retributivism. Derek Parfit—perhaps the greatest moral philosopher of all time—found the view that wrongdoers deserve to suffer morally incomprehensible. After watching Hitler do a happy jig after successfully storming Paris, he said, without a shred of irony, “at least something good came out of the German victory.”
Here’s a snappy argument that wrongdoers deserve to suffer, which I get from a paper by Douglas Portmore. It’s short, and maybe a little cheeky.
Wrongdoers deserve to feel guilty. But guilt—a negative emotion—necessarily involves suffering. When you wallow in guilt, you suffer in it. Thus, in one sense, wrongdoers deserve to suffer.
Imagine a fellow named Trish. Trish kills a toddler in cold blood. (The reason: that toddler was ugly as hell!) Plausibly, Trish deserves to feel guilty. This seems to be the case even if no bad consequences would, or would be expected to, come of things if Trish took a guilt-free, blasé attitude towards his act of infanticide. (Perhaps he’s set to die in five minutes, and so won’t be around to kill again.)
All else equal, a world where Trish feels guiltless about what he did seems worse than a world where he feels the appropriate guilt.
But guilt, of course, involves suffering. As Portmore puts it, when one wallows in guilt for past actions, one wallows in the “unpleasantness of appreciating one’s culpability”. This is a type of suffering, just as envy, heartache, or back pain are types of suffering.
So, wrongdoers deserve to suffer.
It doesn’t follow, of course, that wrongdoers deserve to suffer in other types of ways. Retributive punishment might still be off the menu. Even so, Hitler should’ve felt bad.
Parfit strikes me as extremely overrated. Why do you think he may be the greatest moral philosopher of all time?
Regarding the argument: you say “Plausibly, Trish deserves to feel guilty.” What work is “Plausibly” doing here? It doesn’t strike me as plausible that anyone deserves to feel guilt as an end in itself, nor does it seem to me to be the case that they deserve to suffer even if there’d be no negative consequences to them being guilt-free. Are you reporting what seems plausible to you, or making a more general statement about how things seem to others?
I see a lot of philosophers talk about what seems plausible, or is intuitive, and so on, without qualification. Such remarks strike me as unclear: are they statements about the speaker’s own evaluations, or a more general statement about what most people think, what most reasonable or right-thinking people think, etc.? Personally, I think it’s important to be clear on such matters, since these differences are relevant to the strength of the claims and the arguments those claims figure into.
I think I'm inclined to believe that wrongdoers should feel regret for what the have done. Though I may only believe this because it seems like an appropriate feeling to have in such a situation (and thus shows of a proper character). I'm not sure whether they actually deserve the pang of guilt–even if their actions merit it. However (a bit of an aside) I think there is still something interesting going on with wrongdoers and ethics, such as it seems we should save a saint and an ordinary person over a wicked person, and not just because of possible consequences of saving the wrongdoer. It seems they deserve to be rescued less compared to the others.