WTF Moment - messed up father

[GotchayeX]

It's not something I lean towards myself, but I've never understood why we so quickly dismiss the idea that the subjective experience of those harmed should matter in punishing someone.

Who has this man wronged? His wife and child, and society as a whole to a lesser extent. Anyone who's at all retributivist when it comes to these things thinks that more harm should be inflicted upon him than he inflicted upon others. We need a way of measuring equivalence. Now, we could go with our general intuitions of how grave the act is, which is what is being assumed in this thread. I don't see how this is particularly rational, though. It's not like we have a reliable way of calculating how much evil he's done in any objective sense.

On the other hand, we could look at hypothetical choices that we could have presented to those actually harmed. Would the wife have rather this happened or would she have rather spent five to ten years in jail? Will the daughter be better off than she would have been had this not happened and she had been otherwise wronged instead?

This strikes me as a borderline case, and I think they go too far, but there's nothing about the way the "castrate him and string him up" crowd is thinking that makes them less rational than the rest of you.

The thing to realize is that the admonition to let justice always be rational can be taken two ways in this context. It could mean that actions outside of the law are illegitimate, but it could also mean that the law must be structured so as to satisfy those wronged. The point that the hardliners are making here is that the law itself isn't just in this case, and I doubt that anyone here really thinks that the law is necessarily just, and most of us are in favor of civil disobedience in some cases, so the disagreement is more about where to draw the line than about whether a line exists.

I mean, the position Ghaude is taking is really nothing more than a natural extension of Rawlsian thinking to punishment. We should set the proper punishment for acts to what we would want to see happen to someone who wronged us in that way.