Punishment In Plato’s The Republic, Socrates has many conversations with people in order to further understand concepts such as justice and the way things are ideally supposed to be done. When I think about justice the definition that comes to mind is: the administration of a just action because of an unjust or immoral act being done by a human or group of humans. The issue of proper punishment has also been discussed in those conversations with Socrates and his peers. There must be a punishment for immoral or unjust actions committed by any human otherwise everything in our world would turn into complete chaos. In Socrates’s time people believed heavily in the afterlife and that his or her actions on Earth determined the quality of that life. The gods played a huge role in deciding the fates of everyone depending on how one lived while one was alive. If one lived an unjust and reckless life then it will show because the gods in one’s afterlife will punish him or her. Socrates states, “…bad people are wretched because they are in need of punishment, and that in paying the penalty they are benefited by that god.” There is a problem with waiting until the afterlife for people to be punished because then there would be no order in society. Bad people who are actually bad can get away with living well in the afterlife because during their Earthly life they gained enough wealth to pay the gods to give them a good afterlife. Meanwhile the good people of the world who did a bad thing maybe once or twice will be wrongly punished in the afterlife. In order for everyone to get what he or she deserves, they need to be punished while they are still alive. The way the societies keep everything in line is by appointing government personnel and juries. The appointed officials are given the task of creating fair and reasonable laws that are possible for all to follow. If those laws are broken, it is at that point when the perpetrator is given a punishment that correlates with the crime. If an unjust action goes unpunished then the person that acted will not learn from it and therefore will not grow. Crimes that go unpunished show the unjust people that they can continue to do whatever they please and nothing bad will come of it. Being able to do what you please-- just or not, ruins the order that our society tries to preserve. Nobody can only do what he or she wants because if everyone does only what they want our lifestyles will fall apart. Not everything that one wants to do is completely just and eventually everyone would commit an unjust act that warrants a punishment to learn that we cannot run around doing only want one pleases because it ruins our human virtue. If one does not learn from the unjust action then he or she will continue to commit that action and other bad actions, which will lead to social distress. Punishment, however, does not mean revenge. I agree with Gandhi when he said that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. An example would be if my roommate took a shirt of mine without asking and I went into her closet and stole one of her shirts. Even though she committed an immoral action against me does not mean that I have the freedom to do the same to her. The death penalty is still a highly debated subject in our country even though it is legal in almost all states and is used all over the world. I don’t think that the death penalty is a good punishment for an unjust action because I feel that it is closer to revenge than an actual punishment. If a murderer is given the death penalty then it is not teaching anyone anything, it ultimately just makes the grieving family and friends of the murderer’s victim feel better. The nature of a punishment is to teach a lesson to the person that did the unjust action in order to prevent it from happening again. If the murderer is just murdered in the end then they have learned nothing and might not regret their actions. The death penalty then raises another question. Is the person killing the people that were given the death penalty a murderer too? They are murdering the people that murdered other people, and that is no more just than what murderers do. The death penalty is an immoral punishment because in actually preforming the death penalty you must kill the killers and the death penalty does not teach any lessons, which is why we punish unjust acts. Cheating is another example of an immoral act that must be punished. When someone cheats they are passing other’s work off as their own. Not only does that not give credit to the person that actually did the work that was needed, but it also does not benefit his or her life. Everything every person does in their life will teach them something whether that is its intent or not and by deciding not to take part in what ever it is that he or she cheats on takes away the value of the task and he or she loses the meaning that activity intended to give. Stealing is another unjust act that needs to be punished. When someone steals something it diminishes the hard work that the person did to be able to possess that item. Even the small act of choosing the bigger cookie is stealing. The goal of a punishment is to teach one that what they did is wrong and should not be done again. In Book I of The Republic Socrates and Polemarchus argue about punishments. Socrates poses a question to Polemarchus wanting to know if a just man should punish anyone. Polemarchus says that bad people and enemies should be punished. However, right as Polemarchus states his opinion, Socrates asks about animals and if harming them brings good or bad and Polemarchus says that it brings bad. Socrates states that harming animals hurts their virtue just as “people who have been harmed are bound to become more unjust” because justice is part of human virtue. Socrates also states that: “It isn’t the function of a just person to harm a friend or anyone else, Polemarchus, but that of his opposite, an unjust person.” In this section Socrates and Polemarchus agree that harming others is not just because you harm human virtue and you harm yourself by doing so. Punishments are what the world uses to regulate itself. Without them our culture would shut down completely. If nobody got punished for the unjust or immoral actions they committed while alive everyone would do terrible things and keep doing terrible things because they would not have learned any lessons from doing the bad things and would not know the difference between right and wrong. If we do not possess the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong our growth as individuals and humans would cease because our society would stop operating correctly and our world would ultimately fall apart.

Works Cited
Plato. Republic. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett 2004.

--------------------------------------------
[ 1 ]. Plato, Republic, trans. C.D.C. Reeves (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004) 61.
[ 2 ]. Plato, Republic, 11.
[ 3 ]. Plato, Republic, 12.