Ancient & modern
PRIME MINISTER Blair was said to have announced that youthful criminals would receive bribes in the shape of trainers and CDs to persuade them to take to the straight and narrow. Next day he denied it. The Greek philosopher Plato (429-347 BO would have been very disappointed at this failure of nerve and logic.
Ancient Greeks argued that society was held together by systems of rewards and penalties; revenge, recompense and deterrence were the main features of their penal thinking. In Homer's epics, for example, the hero will retaliate in four ways against someone who offends him; (a) by exacting recompense in order to restore any loss of status or wealth he felt the offender had caused, (b) by ensuring the recompense affords him the satisfaction of seeing the offender squirm, (c) by advertising his success in making the offender so squirm, and (d) by deterring him from offending in the same way again. Restoring his own public status and ensuring the diminution of the offender's was always a priority for Homeric heroes, and this feeling was never far from the surface in Greek discussions of punishment.
Later thinkers developed the arguments in other directions. The 4th-century BC orator Isocrates argued that prevention was far more effective than punishment, while the thinker Protagoras thought that penalties should be imposed, but more to reform the criminal than reflect the severity of his crimes. Plato thought wrongdoing so horrific that his thinking about it was very radical. For example, he argues that, since justice is the greatest good and goodness leads to happiness, the only way for a criminal to be good and therefore happy is to submit to justice and therefore punishment. Consequently, people should denounce themselves and everyone they hold dear if they have done wrong, because that is the only way they can ever again be good and thus happy. Likewise, the best way to treat an enemy is to encourage him to be wicked.
Wrongdoing, for Plato, was an illness and had to be cured at all costs. In his Laws he says, 'We may take action against a criminal, or simply talk to him; grant him pleasures, or make him suffer; honour or disgrace him, fine him or give him gifts — anything to make him hate injustice and embrace justice.'
If we believe that rewards as well as punishments are effective in changing behaviour — and every parent knows they are — Mr Blair should pick up his
Plato again. Peter Jones
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