Jeff Reiman has a classic paper in Philosophy and Public Affairs from the 1970s arguing that Marx, like Hegel and Kant, is a retributivist. I will have to dig it up and summarize his argument for the list.
The point that thae anti-retributivists on the lists are not geting is that the idea that those who do ill should be made to suffer is not an endorsement of howling mob violence or torture or perpetual inaceration under bright lights. Nor can utilitarians be smug about avoiding these bad results either. Why don'tw e critiocize the serious retributivist view that calls for proportional punishment imposed only on the guilty after due process. What Shane contemptuously called state-sanctioned punishment. (The alternative being mob violence or vendetta, of course.) jks
--- Ted Winslow <egwinslow at rogers.com> wrote:
> Shane Mage wrote:
>
> > The only human emotion
> > I can imagine as sufficient is *revenge*,
> especially when bolstered
> > by religious fanaticism. My revulsion at Justin's
> advocacy
> > of state-administered vengeance is prompted by the
> moral
> > legitimation it gives to
> religiously-or-politically-administered
> > vengeance. IMHO the most valuable moral precept
> to be found
> > in the whole Bible is the phrase "Vengeance is
> mine, saith the Lord."
>
> If we start from Marx's idea of "human being," an
> idea with an ancient
> lineage, "vengeance" is always unreasonable because
> it assumes that bad
> behaviour could be the result of something other
> than ignorance of the
> good. That's why Marx's revolutionaries (in
> contrast, say, to
> Foucault's) are magnanimous.
>
> The Kleinian psychoanalytic understanding of a
> desire for vengeance is
> consistent with this. It roots it in clinical
> narcissism. The evil
> perceived in those who are the target of vengeance
> is "narcissistic" in
> the sense that it's the perceiver's own sadistic
> aggressiveness split
> off and projected into others. Vengeance also
> serves to defend against
> the bad feeling that would otherwise be associated
> with this sadistic
> aggressiveness by providing a rationalized outlet
> for it.
>
> Ted
>
>
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