It is difficult to praise punishment. Only a retributivist could make it out to be a good thing. But it can be defended, for the proffered alternative is far worse.
Contrary to their protestations, the enlightened reformers who would replace punishment by a form of treatment chosen scientifically by sociologists are more illiberal and more inhumane than their opponents. The traditionalists at least regard people as people to be addressed in the second person as rational agents, not discussed in the third and manipulated as experimental material. Laws, rules and moral precepts can be understood and can be rationally obeyed: and penalties, although essentially heteronomous, are also external. In order to secure obedience to the law, they do not take it upon themselves to alter a man's personality against his will, but only the factors he takes into account, and by bringing certain adventitious factors into his calculations, hope to tip the balance in favour of the right and against the wrong.
(J. R. Lucas, "Or Else," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s., 69 [1968-1969]: 207-22, at 219)
