You Would Probably Punish Hitler Even If Nobody Would Find Out If You Didn't
Consequentialist theories of punishment are often especially attractive when people first encounter them, particularly to young liberal people. On this view, the point of punishment is to deter people from committing similar crimes—both by discouraging the person who is considering committing the crime and by deterring others who see that the person who committed the crime was caught and punished. The alternative is a retributivist theory of punishment, which says, roughly, that those who have committed crimes being appropriately punished is valuable in and of itself.
On my particular metaethical views, this comes down to a question about your terminal values, your preference ordering over world-states. Hopefully, we can put that aside. What I intend to convince you of is that, regardless of what is really right, you yourself prefer worlds where people are appropriately punished for sufficiently serious crimes they commit, even if their being punished has no counterfactual impact on how much crime is committed or how severe that crime is.
It may seem odd to try to convince someone that they prefer different things than they think they prefer, but people make this sort of introspective mistake all the time. My suspicion is that what is going on here is that punishment has a generally bad vibe. It is indeed quite bad when innocent people are punished, and it is generally nice to be seen as the sort of altruistic person who thinks of punishment as an unfortunate thing we must do. Basically, consequentialism about punishment is a nicer view to assert in front of other people than retributivism. There’s something kind of sick-seeming about actively preferring for people to be punished even if no further good is attained as a result.
The problem I have with this is that, for most people, this is a failure to be honest with themselves about what they prefer. I, for one, certainly sometimes prefer for people to be punished even if no further good is advanced as a result.
Let us see, then, if I can help you come to know yourself better.
Imagine that history went very similarly to the way we are familiar with, except that in 1945, instead of Hitler dying, he was captured. He committed all of the same crimes with the exact same severity, but he failed to commit suicide.
About a year later, Hitler is about to face trial, and you, as an expert in ethics and morality, are given a choice. You are informed that it would be possible to send Hitler to a remote, deserted island, with zero chance of escape.1 He could, if you so decided, spend the rest of his days there in relative leisure. Food has been provided for him, as well as various recreational activities. It is also explained to you that, if you were to decide to send him to this island instead of having him stand trial, the whole world would believe that he stood trial and was appropriately punished in whatever way the trial deemed appropriate. They would hire a Hitler impersonator to play the part of Hitler at the trial, and after this whole ordeal, everyone involved, including you, would have their memories of the whole incident erased. As far as everyone besides Hitler is concerned, it would be exactly as if he had stood trial and been appropriately punished.
In order to help you make this decision, they allow you to interview Hitler. You ask him if he feels any remorse. He says that the only remorse he feels is over not finishing the job. He feels a great sadness that not all of the members of the “inferior races” have been exterminated, but he is proud of what he managed to accomplish. He insists that if he had to do it all again, he would make the same decisions every time.
So, would you decide to force the real Hitler to stand trial, or would you have pity on him and let him live out the rest of his days on a deserted resort island? If you would send him to the deserted island, I am curious to hear: why do you care about Hitler’s well-being so much?
I believe basically this thought experiment was first proposed by Kant somewhere, although obviously he didn’t use Hitler as his example. I’m not sure where I first heard it.
I admit however that it is easy to speak of compassion and mercy in the abstract. I am reminded of this piece by John Green where he talks about being unable to forgive someone when he served as a hospital chaplain. I suspect I might not be so high-minded if I were similarly affected.
https://www.npr.org/2004/01/20/1608135/commentary-being-a-chaplain
[transcript] https://web.archive.org/web/20160515102512/http://johngreenbooks.com/nick-from-all-things-considered/
Seems like the resort island option is obviously better from a moral viewpoint. I’m kind of confused about the argument “sometimes people say X is moral and Y is immoral and then do Y instead of X?”
That doesn’t really seem like an argument about what is actually moral. For example, many christians believe premarital sex is immoral, and then have premarital sex anyway. Perhaps on reflection they wouldn’t endorse that, but no one is perfect — that doesn’t seem to be decisive one way on whether premarital sex is actually _moral_ according to them. Just an argument that people are imperfect.