My goal is to reduce suffering, not identify and punish the guilty.
Think of any action that seems abominable to you.
Punishment can have an instrumental, preventive value. But intrinsic?
The falsehood of free will is sufficient argument to discard the intrinsic value of punishment.
But even supposing that free will existed, we can argue against the intrinsic value of punishment.
Moral agents (they could be: many humans, certainly some nonhuman animals, maybe some machines) are strongly determined not only by genetics and environment, but by the precise context of the conflict that we are going to judge.
The knowledge of human emotions, perfectly illustrated by literature, particularly in operas, comedies and soap operas, clearly explains how and why the same person, under certain circumstances, would kill us, while under other circumstances, give their life for us.
We can punish the action to prevent it. The action is susceptible to judgment, but never the individual. We do not punish the person: we punish the act.
The moral priority is, for all individuals, to experience the least possible suffering. It’s not to punish the “guilty”. Punishing the “guilty” is absurd and cruel. We punish acts.
See also
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