Reward and punishment

“ reward and punishment, a whip to lash the people into obedience, meekness and contentment. ”

“ To what extent can the doctrine of reward and punishment be admitted, if the will is not free? Chasdaï Crescas' answer to this is that reward and punishment wait on intentions, not on actions. He who, in purity of heart, wishes to accomplish good—which must, of course, necessarily follow—deserves to be rewarded, as the man who willingly promotes evil, deserves punishment. ”

“ To punish one deserving of reward is to cast a slur upon all punishment: to honour one deserving of punishment is to detract from the value of all honours. And if such a case were to be admitted as a precedent for future generations, then those eager to do their duty, and those anxious to avoid evil, would equally find themselves in a strange dilemma. ”

“ I grant that good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided, and therefore they are to be made use of to children too. ”

“ What the people deem worthy of reward and punishment is that which Heaven wishes to punish and reward. There is an intimate communication between Heaven and the people: let those who govern the people, therefore, be watchful and cautious. ”

“ Reward and Punishment.—The view that neither reward nor punishment should be employed as instruments of education is erroneous, for unquestionably both have considerable influence upon human activities and intercourse. ”

“ You must admit that he can punish or reward only either according to the merit of the actions, or not according to the merit of the actions. If you suppose Him to reward and punish according to the acts, why can you not presume the acts themselves to be the cause of the reward and punishment which you see? ”

“ We have already noticed the origin of punishment in revenge, which is the outcome of a fundamental, egoistic instinct of self-defence; and we have traced its development up to the monopolization of its extremer forms by society as a whole through state organization. It is impossible for analysis to give any adequate representation of the workings of Reward and Punishment in society, except as we draw an exact line between legal and other forms. But such a distinction, however convenient for particular purposes, is obviously scientifically injustifiable in a general theory of social morals. ”

“ Spurs and bait, punishment and reward, have been used from time immemorial to set the will in motion, and the results have been variable—no one has appeared to be thoroughly satisfied with either, or even with a combination of the two. Some authorities have stood on an eminence, and said that neither punishment nor reward should be used, that knowledge should be loved for its own sake. ”

“ Even reward and punishment, however they may be intelligible when used merely in the sense of motives employed, have in general acceptation a sense peculiarly derived from the supposed freedom of the human will. ”

“ It may be asked then, why man should be rewarded for his good actions and punished for his misdeeds. Let us consider first the nature of reward and punishment. Experience tells us that things have natural properties and that physical laws operate in a uniform manner. ”

“ The immediate reward and punishment for our conduct we receive in the pleasure and happiness we experience in doing something good, and in the grief and [151] remorse we ought to feel on learning that we have displeased the Almighty by our conduct. As a rule, every good act leads to further good acts, and every sin to further sins; and our Sages say therefore: “The reward of a good act (‏מצוה‎) is another good act, and the punishment for a transgression is another transgression.” ”

“ Is to give worth reward, vice, punishment. ”

“ As for the purpose, where Reward and Punishment are Inverted, and where Men of Faith and Zeal for the Honour and Service of the Common-wealth are only made Sacrifices to the Passions and Interests of the Corrupt and Fearful. ”

“ The awarder of reward or punishment is the above-named influence, which proceeds from the actions performed, and in its turn allots good or evil in exact proportion with the cause that has created it. ”

“ For all reasons then let us pay these tributes first: for great is the facility, and greater the reward; and more abundant the gain, and worse the punishments to us if we are obstinate. For a punishment cometh upon us, which hath no end. ”

“ Punishment and reward satisfy merit and demerit, but do not constitute them. Suppress all reward and all punishment and you do not thereby suppress merit and demerit; on the contrary, suppress merit and demerit, and there are no longer true punishments and true rewards. Unmerited goods and honors are only material advantages; reward is essentially moral, and its value is independent of its form. One of those crowns of oak that the early Romans decreed to heroism is worth more than all the riches in the world, when it is the sign of the recognition and the admiration of a people. ”

“ And so far this account is undoubtedly true, that we frequently have occasion to confirm our natural sense of the propriety and fitness of punishment, by reflecting how necessary it is for preserving the order of society. When the guilty is about to suffer that just retaliation, which the natural indignation of mankind tells them is due to his crimes; when the insolence of his injustice is broken and humbled by the terror of his approaching punishment; when he ceases to be an object of fear, with the generous and humane he begins to be an object of pity. ”

“ Whatever punishment a man deserved by the book he got, promptly and mercilessly; whatever reward was earned was bestowed with equal celerity, accompanied by a crisply accurate statement of the facts in each case, at the daily parade review. ”

“ To us, therefore, that action must appear to deserve reward, which appears to be the proper and approved object of gratitude; as, on the other hand, that action must appear to deserve punishment, which appears to be the proper and approved object of resentment.
To reward, is to recompense, to remunerate, to return good for good received. To punish, too, is to recompense, to remunerate, though in a different manner; it is to return evil for evil that has been done. ”

“ And with regard, at least, to this most dreadful of all crimes, Nature, antecedent to all reflections upon the utility of punishment, has in this manner stamped upon the human heart, in the strongest and most indelible characters, an immediate and instinctive approbation of the sacred and necessary law of retaliation. ”

“ We must believe in punishment as the proper reward of crime—we must even believe in unreformative punishment as the proper reward of crime, if we believe in a Hell to which lost souls are relegated against their will, and there kept with no hope whatever of cure or betterment from the process. ”

“ Whereas, the hope of reward is to the human mind one of the strongest incentives to good conduct; and as, in this enlightened age, such incentives are found to be more humanizing than punishment, which partaking of the character of vengeance begets its like, as a natural result, in the mind of its victim; and as under the present humane mode of treatment of another class of sufferers, kindness and consideration are found more effectual as remedial agents than chains and dungeons, which were formerly resorted to. ”

“ No; your dilatory person is a fatalist. 'What can't be cured must be endured,' he says, but he will endure without any effort to cure. Rewards? No; to him a reward is a punishment presented under another aspect: the possible reward he realises as actual ”

“ Therefore the reward is meant only as an encouragement to him and others, to provide a motive for subsequent actions ; words of praise are flung to the runners on the course, not to the one who has reached the goal. Neither punishment nor reward is anything that comes to one as one's own ; they are given from motives of usefulness, without one having a right to claim them. ”

“ XI. Give clear appreciation to merit and demerit, and deal out to each its sure reward or punishment. In these days, reward does not attend upon merit, nor punishment upon crime. Ye high functionaries who have charge of public affairs, let it be your task to make clear rewards and punishments. ”

“ It is a strong argument against such doctrines that the same word which our Lord employs to describe the permanent blessedness of the redeemed is used by Him to denote the punishment of the wicked. The reward and the punishment are both declared by Him to be everlasting or eternal. ”

“ Thus punishment and reward become equally fixed and inevitable: but retribution may be deferred by the intermediate exhibition of virtue, and an offering or prostration to Buddha, or an aspiration in favour of faith in his name, will suffice to ward off punishment for a time, and even produce happiness in an intermediate birth ”

“ Therefore in your rewards and punishments examine carefully every part of their conduct, and judge calmly, not hastily, and be sure you are just. An unmerited reward will make a child question your judgment as much as an unmerited punishment. ”

“ As to the final rewards and punishments, these shall be distributed according to the deserts of each, in perfect justice: "the wicked shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into life eternal." ”

“ In the army the punishment always suppresses the reward, but the reward never suppresses the punishment; and as the number of those who [98] can punish is at least twenty times greater than that of those who can reward, nearly everything that happens is disagreeable. ”

“ I think, in a case of this kind, a deeper moral effect may be obtained by the application of the beautiful theory that crime, like virtue, has its own inevitable reward, apart from any extraneous punishment that the human intellect can devise. ”

“ When we thus see the punishment of guilt accumulated on the head of him who has not participated in it, and vice triumph in the security that should seem the lot of innocence, we can only adduce new motives to fortify ourselves in this great truth of our religion—that the chastisement of the one, and reward of the other, must be looked for beyond the inflictions or enjoyments of our present existence. ”

“ The desire of pleasure, wealth, and power, the apprehension of poverty, pain, and death, prompt generous reward, speedy severe punishment, are the human means to invigorate duty, stimulate zeal, correct perversity, and restrain guilt. ”

“ That every means possible should be adopted for developing and working on the higher feelings of the prisoners directly by moral, religious, and secular instruction, and indirectly by insuring industry, good conduct, and discipline, through appealing to the hope of advantage or reward, as well as by the fear of punishment. ”

“ The vast mistake, both in the education of children and government of nations, is the heavy stress laid on the negative virtues. Also the fact that punishment follows on the failure not to do certain things—whereas no commensurate reward is offered even for success in not doing, let alone for success in active and honourable well-doing. The reward of negative virtue is negative also, and consists simply in non-punishment. The rewards of active virtue are, in the world of men, money and praise. ”

“ It has been urged that, as virtue is its own reward, and vice its own punishment, the criminal is sufficiently punished while upon earth, and need not, therefore, have hell superadded. If the argument is valid in relation to hell, it is equally valid in relation to heaven. The logic which closes hell annihilates heaven. If vice is its own punishment, why should the thief be imprisoned, or the murderer executed? ”

“ This principle we have pursued in the chapter on Rewards and Punishments; we have not considered punishment as vengeance or retaliation, but as pain inflicted with the reasonable hope of procuring some future advantage to the delinquent, or to society. ”

“ They justify the wicked for reward, and find some pretence or other to clear him from his guilt and shelter him from punishment; and they condemn the innocent, and take away their righteousness from them, that is, overrule their pleas, deprive them of the means of clearing up their innocency, and give judgment against them. In causes between man and man, might and money would at any time prevail against right and justice ”

“ So, too, with the attempt to show that from the analogy of the present life we may not unreasonably infer that virtue and vice will receive their respective rewards and punishments hereafter; it may be admitted that virtuous and vicious acts are naturally looked upon as objects of reward or punishment, and treated accordingly, but we may refuse to allow the argument to go further, and to infer a perfect distribution of justice dependent upon our conduct here. ”

“ It could be, of course, when rewarding virtue, but punishment was usually pleasant only to the punished's victims or their survivors—never to the punished, seldom to observers, and only through God's Mercy was it satisfying to the punishers. ”

“ Careful criticism of the evidence is above all necessary. For instance, we have to deal with several statements recorded among low races, explicitly assigning reward or punishment to men after death, according as they were good or bad in life. Here the first thing to be done is to clear up, if possible, the question whether the doctrine of retribution may have been borrowed from some more cultured neighbouring religion, as the very details often show to have been the case. ”

“ It must, in the next place, be observed, that to the sense of propriety as well as of justice are annexed the sanctions of rewards and punishments; which evidently prove the one to be a law as well as the other. The{23} satisfaction a man hath in doing his duty, joined with the esteem and good-will of others, is the reward that belongs to both equally. The punishments also, though not the same, are nearly allied; and differ in degree more than in quality. ”