Reward and Punishment (AQA A-Level Religious Studies): Revision Notes
Reward and punishment
Introduction
Society responds to acceptable behaviour with rewards and to deviant behaviour with punishment. Whether these responses are justified depends on how society understands moral responsibility. Different philosophical positions on free will lead to fundamentally different approaches to reward and punishment.
Two main approaches to crime and punishment
There are two contrasting views on how society should treat crime and deviant behaviour. These broadly correspond to determinist and libertarian positions on free will.
Approach 1: Crime as a mental condition requiring treatment
This viewpoint recognises that determining factors in a person's life limit their moral responsibility.
Key factors that may determine criminal behaviour:
Understanding these factors is crucial to the therapeutic approach:
- Upbringing in an environment of violence, abuse or neglect
- Lack of education leading to limited understanding of responsible behaviour
- Social and environmental circumstances beyond individual control
Implications for punishment:
This approach advocates therapeutic punishment - treatment aimed at helping and healing the offender rather than being retributive or proportional to the crime.
Therapeutic punishment
Treatment or punishment focused on helping and healing the criminal rather than being retributive or proportional to the crime committed. This represents a fundamental shift from punishment to rehabilitation.
The therapeutic approach has several key implications:
- Corporal punishment and harsh prison conditions are inappropriate as they lead to reoffending
- Capital punishment is unjust because it punishes behaviour the individual was taught by others
- Reform should offer criminals the chance to start a new life with different values
- Reform is effectively a reward rather than punishment, as it provides beneficial opportunities
Approach 2: Crime as deliberately anti-social behaviour requiring punishment
This view holds that criminals freely choose their actions and should be punished accordingly.
Reasons for punishment:
- Retribution - provides justice by compensating victims and allowing criminals to pay for their crimes
- Deterrence - shows society's disapproval and discourages others from committing crimes
- Reinforcing responsibility - failure to punish leads to reoffending, as seen when courts are lenient with petty crimes
- Reform is ineffective - attempts at reform are costly and reward criminal behaviour; resources would be better spent compensating victims
- Protection - criminals harm others and society, so society must be protected from them
Consequences of moral responsibility theories
Hard Determinism and punishment
Hard Determinism has significant implications for how we view reward and punishment.
Main consequences:
1. No genuine moral responsibility
If determinism is true, there can be no freedom of the kind needed for moral responsibility. It would be pointless to punish murderers, thieves or rapists, or to reward those who avoid such behaviour, because all events are determined and unavoidable.
If human behaviour is determined, then our system of rewards and punishments is also determined - they are simply consequences built into the system. This creates a paradox: even our attempts to reform punishment are themselves determined.
2. Religious implications
If determinism is true, the concept of 'sin' against God becomes meaningless. Nobody can be blamed for doing what their nature determines them to do.
Problems for Christianity:
Hard Determinism creates serious theological challenges:
- The doctrine of Jesus' atonement for sin becomes pointless
- The idea of reward (heaven) for moral behaviour makes no sense
- Theological Determinism (Augustine and Calvin's predestination) creates a dilemma: why would a loving God create people destined for damnation?
- Believers predestined to hell cannot change their fate through any moral behaviour
3. B.F. Skinner's conditioning approach
Skinner believed his work would lead to reform of all practices of praise, blame, reward and punishment.
Skinner's key arguments:
- Punishing antisocial behaviour is ineffective because people return to their original behaviour once punishment ends (e.g., a thief returns to stealing)
- Punishment creates resentment and aggression
- Society should be redesigned so that behaviour requiring punishment seldom or never occurs
- Psychological conditioning can shape what people desire, so they can be conditioned to desire only socially beneficial actions
Libertarian critique of Hard Determinism:
Libertarians argue that determinist ideas about conditioning are incoherent:
- If determinism is true, any attempt to apply conditioning is itself determined
- The psychologist's decision to recondition a patient is determined, making the whole process pointless
- Determinism reduces moral responsibility to 'what is' rather than 'what ought to be'
- Skinner's recommendations acknowledge that people have freedom to do otherwise, making him a 'closet libertarian'
Libertarianism and punishment
Libertarians must hold people responsible for their actions, making praise, blame, reward and punishment central to their moral framework.
Key libertarian principles:
1. Responsibility for actions
People must be held accountable for their free choices. Praise, blame, reward and punishment help lead people to be morally responsible.
To view people as products of social and genetic forces (as determinists do) treats them as objects without dignity - as subjects for social engineering experiments. The libertarian position respects human agency and moral autonomy.
2. Diminished responsibility in UK law
The UK legal system acknowledges diminished responsibility for:
- Children
- Those suffering from depression
- The mentally unstable
Defence lawyers consider the defendant's situation, social circumstances and mental state. However, the law generally punishes those judged guilty because they could have done otherwise - their behaviour was free and not wholly determined by circumstances.
3. Kant's 'ought implies can'
This libertarian principle states that our sense of moral obligation ('ought') implies we have the freedom ('can') to fulfill it.
Evidence for freedom:
Our everyday moral experience provides evidence for libertarian free will:
- We feel moral compulsion about what we ought to do
- We can override that compulsion and do otherwise
- We experience guilt and remorse when we fail to do what we ought
- These feelings indicate genuine moral freedom
Most libertarians therefore support the view that crime is deliberately anti-social behaviour deserving punishment.
4. Kant's retribution theory
Kant offers a libertarian account of punishment based on retribution.
Kant distinguishes two types of freedom:
- Internal freedom - freedom in our minds to follow the moral law
- External freedom - political freedom to pursue our own ends
In a State of Nature (without laws), we lack external freedom because others can use violence to enforce their choices. To have external freedom, we must live under the rule of law, where everyone has maximum freedom compatible with others' freedom.
Why retribution is necessary:
When someone breaks the law, they limit others' freedom and damage the law itself, pushing society back toward a State of Nature.
For example, theft is wrong because the thief follows a maxim ('I can steal X's property') which, if universalised, would return us to a State of Nature.
Society must reverse the maxim on the criminal:
- The thief should have property removed
- The murderer should be killed
- The principle: whatever undeserved evil you bring upon another must be brought upon yourself
Why retribution is the proper aim:
Kant rejects other theories of punishment on moral grounds:
- Punishment cannot be for deterrence, as that uses the criminal as a means to an end
- It cannot be for rehabilitation, as that treats the criminal as an animal incapable of reason
- Only retribution allows the criminal to become a rational person responsible for their actions
5. Weakness of libertarian approach
If Determinism is true, then Libertarianism is just another determined response to moral issues.
Some people are conditioned to believe in causal determinism; others are conditioned to believe in freedom. For determinists, their conditioning happens to correspond to truth. Whether libertarians support retribution, deterrence or any other approach makes no difference, because all responses are determined. There is no space in a causal universe for free will to operate.
Compatibilism and punishment
Compatibilism holds that an action is free if the agent could have done otherwise. If someone performs such an act, they are responsible.
The key difference in answering 'Could I have done otherwise?':
- Hard Determinist: 'No'
- Libertarian: 'Yes'
- Compatibilist: 'Yes, if I had desired to do otherwise'
This subtle distinction is crucial to understanding the compatibilist position on moral responsibility.
Why compatibilists see themselves as morally responsible:
- Their moral choices are not results of physical restraints or coercive threats
- They wanted or desired to act as they did despite being aware of alternatives
- Where actions result from ignorance, people may be wrong but are not morally responsible
Hume's compatibilist approach:
Hume argues that people are blameworthy only where choices come from their character. Actions are judged insofar as they indicate 'internal character, passions, and affections'.
Hume's utilitarian view of punishment:
Most behaviour we approve of (sympathy, empathy) increases society's general wellbeing. Punishment's function is to improve society through social engineering:
- Fear of punishment helps repress antisocial behaviour
- Rewards stimulate virtuous character
This approach aligns with the therapeutic/treatment model of punishment.
Hume's critique of heaven and hell:
Hume argues that eternal reward and punishment make little sense because:
- Human beings don't fall into neat categories of good and evil
- Most people 'float between vice and virtue'
- Our moral ideas reflect human nature, so punishment must be proportionate to the offence
- Why would there be eternal punishment for the short-term offences of frail creatures?
- Moral ideas come from thoughts about human society's interests, which are short-term and minor
- The eternal damnation of one person is infinitely worse than the overthrow of billions of kingdoms
Both ultimate reward (heaven) and ultimate punishment (hell) are senseless because they are totally disproportionate to human good or evil.
Problems with compatibilist accounts:
1. The 'just deserts' objection
Just deserts
The view that punishment for crimes should be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime committed. This theory critiques determinist and compatibilist approaches as potentially lenient, ineffective and disproportionate.
Andrew von Hirsch argued in Doing Justice (1976) that the treatment model should be replaced with sentencing according to 'just deserts'. This theory is retributive rather than therapeutic.
Both Compatibilism and Determinism lean toward the therapeutic model, but there is strong public feeling that:
- Punishment should fit the crime
- The criminal justice system fails victims by prioritising criminals' needs and rights over victims'
- This reflects a libertarian 'common sense' view
2. The incoherence problem
Despite most philosophers being compatibilists, many suspect Compatibilism is incoherent. Hume himself admitted that Causal Determinism might be true - that voluntary actions might be subject to the same laws of necessity as matter, creating 'a continued chain of necessary causes'.
Fundamental disagreement:
Hume's account of 'necessity' as 'constant conjunction' is rejected by both determinists and libertarians:
- Determinists reject it because what Hume suggests might be the case actually is the case
- Libertarians reject it because determinism of the will is incoherent - a will that is not free is not a will at all
If either determinists or libertarians are right, then compatibilist ideas about moral responsibility are the 'miserable subterfuge' that Kant described.
Key Points to Remember:
- Society's approach to reward and punishment depends on its understanding of moral responsibility and free will
- The therapeutic approach treats crime as an illness requiring reform and rehabilitation, viewing criminals as products of determining factors
- The retributive approach treats crime as a free choice deserving punishment proportionate to the offence
- Hard Determinism implies that genuine moral responsibility is impossible, making traditional reward and punishment pointless; Skinner proposed using conditioning instead
- Libertarianism holds people fully responsible for their free choices; Kant argued that only retributive punishment respects criminals as rational agents
- Compatibilism (Hume) bases responsibility on whether someone could have desired to act differently; it takes a utilitarian approach where punishment should benefit society
- The 'just deserts' objection argues that compatibilist approaches may be too lenient and fail to ensure punishment fits the crime
- Each position faces serious challenges: Hard Determinism seems to make moral concepts meaningless, Libertarianism may itself be determined, and Compatibilism may be incoherent