John Hare on the Value of Punishment

Consider the bully on the school playground, tormenting his victim. He is giving outward expression here to a low view of the victim, putting him at the bottom of the playground hierarchy. The playground, especially if it is relatively unsupervised, is a good place to observe what I said yesterday. People who know each other well, and know how much what they do hurts, can go ahead despite this knowledge with relish. They establish a pecking order, like chickens in a coop, and the people at the bottom get wounds from which they sometimes never recover. But the victim’s moral value as a human being with dignity is higher than this, and is in fact equal to the bully’s. The function of punishing the bully is then to give an outward expression to the lowering of the bully from his assumed status, ‘putting him’, as we say ‘in his place’, and raising the demeaned value of his victim. The suffering of the bully is not something good in itself; here the utilitarians are right. But it is good because it expresses the right relative value of himself and his victim. On the expressive theory of punishment, punishment is good because it takes the victim seriously.

I do not claim that I have given here more than a suggestion of a theory of punishment. But it enables us to see what might be good about God’s accepting reparation. For we most often wrong God by wronging each other, not by wronging God directly (though we can do that too). The punishment of the offender takes seriously the value of the victim, and this is not given expression if the offender is let off. If it is the victim who lets the offender off, this might express his own value (if the situation is not inherently coercive). But on the expressive theory of punishment, God’s punishing us expresses not so much his own value as the value of the people we have wronged. Or we could put this distinction in a different way. The punishment expresses God’s value in his image-bearers who have been abused, rather than his value in his own person. To go back to the example of the bully. If the victim says to the school that he does not want the bully punished, this might be an expression of his magnanimity and a restoration of his value; though he might also be afraid of the bully’s implied threat in the future, and just be continuing his role as victim in an inherently coercive situation. But if the school on its own account lets the bully off his punishment, it fails to acknowledge the value of the bully’s victim. — John Hare, “Moral Faith and Atonement”