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  • Thomas Aquinas and the Philosophy of Punishment by Peter Karl Koritansky
  • Steven Baldner (bio)
Peter Karl Koritansky. Thomas Aquinas and the Philosophy of Punishment. Catholic University of America Press. x, 210. US$24.95

The contemporary mind will be offended by at least two things in the title of this book: “Thomas Aquinas” and “the Philosophy of Punishment.” “Thomas Aquinas,” of course, represents much that we don’t like, and surely scholastic theology must be at its worst in justifying punishment. Think of the rack, the Spanish Inquisition, the punishment of heretics, and eternal damnation. We would do well, however, to set aside our prejudices and open this book; it is very good.

Peter Karl Koritansky argues that there are grave flaws in most contemporary philosophical attempts to account for punishment, based as they are on either utilitarian or deontological (retributive) principles. The problem with utilitarianism is that, in its unvarnished form (Jeremy Bentham), it is subject to the grossest reductiones ad absurda. If the only justification for punishment is the mitigation of pain or the increase of pleasure, it is possible to justify miscarriages of justice in which the innocent are punished if this results in the utilitarian benefits of promoting peace and quieting social unrest. The attempt to improve on utility by distinguishing, as H.L.A. Hart does, between the ground of punishment (utility alone) and the distribution of punishment (based on deserts or justice) fares no better, principally because there is no reason in a utilitarian theory to introduce any notion of deserts or justice.

Kantian ethics, which advances a retributive notion of punishment, is similarly subject to a reductio ad absurdum. Kant held a strict ius talionis, according to which civil authorities have the obligation to inflict on criminals what the criminals have done to their victims: thieves should lose their property, murderers their lives, and so forth. What, however, about criminals who commit grotesque acts of violence against their victims? Should criminals be dismembered or tortured? A contemporary version of retributivism, called the Unfair Advantage Theory, supposes that criminals are to be punished because they have, in unduly exercising the freedom of their wills, secured an unfair advantage over others. On this theory, retribution is owed to criminals to redress the unfair advantage [End Page 478] they have gained in committing their crimes. This version of retributivism, Koritansky argues, is flawed as it supposes an advantage where there really is none. In fact, if we can recognize some wisdom that goes back to Socrates, the criminal has injured himself while also harming his victim. The self-injury of crime is the maiming of one’s moral self – the soul, in an older vocabulary – thereby making a person with a natural political home into an outcast and an enemy of the social order.

This last observation brings us to the heart of Koritansky’s position. Thomas Aquinas, unlike modern philosophers, thought (1) that the natural human desires and tendencies are indicative of good things that ought to be fostered and (2) that the civitas is the natural and essential environment in which human beings flourish and which cannot be reduced to a collective of merely individual relationships. This first point is the basis of the rich Thomistic doctrine of natural law, which provides a justification for punishment on the basis of the natural human inclination to repel attackers and to protect our own. The second point should allow us to see that criminal actions demand both restitution and retribution: the first to restore, so far as can be done, what has been lost to the victim; the second to restore what is owed to the polity, for criminal actions are a disruption of this natural entity and hence an attack on the common good that belongs to us all. Just punishment of a criminal is at once retributive and also medicinal. Criminals receive what they deserve for their evil acts, but the focus of punishment is on their disordered wills, which need to be corrected. In this, the criminal is a beneficiary of punishment. There is thus a way in which the value of both deontology and utility can be realized in Thomism...

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