[1] Plato’s reformatory theory seems to involve this.
[2] Mr. Bradley, in the _International Journal of Ethics_, April, 1894.
But, applied to responsible human beings, such a theory, if really kept to its distinctive contention, is an insult. It leads to the notion that the State may take hold of any man, whose life or ideas are thought capable of improvement, and set to work to ameliorate them by forcible treatment. There is no true punishment except where one is an offender against a system of rights which he shares, and therefore against himself. And such an offender has a right to the recognition of his hostile will; it is inhuman to treat him as a wild animal or a child, whom we simply mould to our aims. Without such a recognition, to be punished is not, according to the old Scotch phrase, to be “justified.”
ii. The idea of retaliation or retribution, though in history the oldest conception of punishment, [1] may be taken in theory as a protest against the conception that punishment is only a means for making a man better. Its strong point is its definite idea of the offender. The offender is a responsible person, belonging to a certain order which he recognises as entering into him and as entered into by him, and he has made actual an intention hostile to this order. He has, { 224} as Plato’s Socrates insists in the _Crito_, destroyed the order so far as in him lies. In other words, he has violated the system of rights which the State exists to maintain, and by which alone he and others are secured in the exercise of any capacity for good, this security consisting in their reciprocal respect for the system. His hostile will stands up and defies the right, in so far as his personality is asserted, through a tangible deed which embodies the wrong. It is necessary, then, that the power which maintains the system of rights should not merely, if possible, undo the external harm which has been done, but should strike down the hostile will which has defied the right by doing that harm. The end or true self is in the medium of mind and will, and is contradicted and nullified so far as a hostile will is permitted to triumph.
[1] We saw that, even in its earliest forms, it cannot really be taken to exclude the other aspects.