ABSTRACT
Punishment, involves inflicting something unpleasant on the subject. If a person enjoys the punitive measures imposed on him, then the attempt to punish him has failed. As Bentham candidly put it, 'all punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil'. Therefore the practice of punishment, as the intentional causing of suffering to other human beings, stands in need of moral justification. For Bentham and the utilitarian tradition, punishment is a capital expended in the expectation of profit – the profit being the exclusion of some evil greater than itself. On this conception, although punishment is an intrinsically bad thing, it is an instrumental good in so far as it deters further offences, or promotes better behaviour in offenders or sends an effective reminder of the standards and values whose observance serves the public interest. Not all philosophers believe that punishment is to be justified primarily by reference to its capacity to increase social goods or decrease social ills.
