Bentham said that “punishment is harm. Therefore punishment can only be justified if it prevents greater evil than it produces.”

• Do you agree with this? Why or why not?
• What if if doesn’t prevent greater evil?
• Return to the board and read over the posts of your fellow classmates. Choose at least one classmate and create a post responding to his/her initial post on the Discussion Board. Be thoughtful in your response, indicating your agreement/disagreement with their posting and give a careful reasoning of your position.

Julianna McCouch 10:06am I do not agree with this because punishment in my opinion is good and can prevent things from happening in the future whether it be a greater crime or less. For example if someone murders someone and gets punishment for this we can not not just punish them for this and let them go because it is less evil then two murders. It is also going off of someone's own opinion of what the greater evil is. If it does not prevent greater evil then what is the point of punishment? Punishment is used to prevent things from happening again. 5 Reply
 

Julianna McCouch

            I agree with you that punishment is good and can be used to prevent things from happening in the future, whether greater crime or less, should be punished. Punishment seeks to punish crime and discourage offenders from future wrongdoing. It instills fear to offenders and makes them not to repeat the crime committed (Kleck & Sever, 2017). Generally, punishment of an individual frightens the public from committing crime thus preventing more crime of the same type. Criminals are punished judicially to enforce and encourage proper behavior needed by the law.

Discussion

            No, I do not agree with Bentham’s statement that punishment is harm. This is because effective punishment helps to promote law and order in the society. Punishment is not harm if it is equal to the level of the committed offence.  When individuals offend the other people or the public, punishment is one of the ways of promoting justice (Ristroph, 2020).  Without punishment, every other person will be doing whatever they want and this will cause the society to be chaotic. If punishment does not prevent greater evil then it means that the root cause of the actions should be identified and dealt with before introducing the punishment.