punishment involves suffering that many people try to avoid
Since punishment involves suffering that many people try to avoid, its intentional burden by the state needs justification. The legal institution of punishment introduces a moral challenge since it incurs a state’s infliction or harsh treatment of some of its members which may be typically considered as morally impermissible. To consider punishment as ethically impermissible, it is significant to understand what is being examined. Traditionally, justifications of punishment have been recognised as either retributivist or consequentialist.
Consequentialist justification account dominated in American jurisprudence during the 20th century. Through the consequentialist account, punishment is considered as a way of securing crime depletion by improving the offenders. In its view, the results of maintaining an institution of legal punishment are preferable than the consequences of not having the institution. Many consequentialists take the burden of punishment as a negative consequence which is typically the defendant as a compelling manner of valuable end of crime reduction.
Contrary, retributivism account supports that punishment is a naturally appropriate response to criminal wrongdoing. Majority of the actual theories do not fit univocally and exclusively into any of these approaches to justification. Majority of the people have feelings that respond to the retributive argument that wrongdoers should suffer for the harm they have caused. A simple retributivist case caters for a philosophical account that corresponds to such feelings; someone who has gone against the rights of others should be punished to restore moral orders.
The challenges of justification cannot be evaded by considering that punishment is an unavoidable supplement of a system of criminal law. Therefore, if criminal law is supposed to find the sentence, the critical question remains whether society should include a method of obligatory rules enforced by penalties.