It is often objected to retribution that it is only a development of vengeance. The truth is that in almost the most elementary human vengeance there are obscure premonitions of the moral notion of punishment. Hardly any savage but in vengeance persuades himself he has been wronged; he feels differently towards the man who falls against him and the man who hits him. The prejudice against recognizing the retributive element in punishment has arisen, I think, from a too bare identification of punishment with pain and even with the lex talionis. Retribution is not an eye for an eye. It would be no more possible or appropriate for a parent to punish his children's disobedience by disobeying them than for the child to reward its mother's devotion by feeding her or educating her. Nor is retribution the mere occurrence of pain. A murderer is not punished by the pain of having cancer, but only by a pain which is given him, and which he knows is given him, because of his guilt. The essential thing in punishment, then, is not pain but the expression of censure, which is necessarily painful and tries to approximate to the ideal pain of remorse. Hence punishment has its best chance of reforming when it is recognized as being given retributively, that is, because it is deserved. From Plato downwards it has been objected to retribution that pain added to guilt is the addition of evil to evil. But it seems self-evident that guilt with its appropriate pain of remorse is something that ought if possible to be substituted for guilt complacent and insulting. We cannot put remorse ready-made into a criminal's mind, but we can stimulate it by giving him a pain akin to that of remorse, making him feel the indignation of impartial observers. For though neither our intellectual nor our moral growth is merely imitative, both develop by the stimulus of seeing ourselves in the mirror of other minds.
(E. F. Carritt, The Theory of Morals: An Introduction to Ethical Philosophy [London: Oxford University Press, 1928], 111-2 [footnote omitted])
