It may seem remarkable that reward plays a small and apparently decreasing part in the self-management of society by the public power. To the naïve Athenian, [1] it seemed a natural instrument for the encouragement of public spirit, probably rather by a want of discrimination between motives than by a real belief in political selfishness. In European countries honours still appear to play a considerable part, but on analysis it would be found less than it seems. Partly they are recognitions of important functions, and thus conditions rather than rewards. To a great extent, again, they recognise existing facts, and are rather consequences of the respect which society feels for certain types of life (with very curious results in regions where the general mind is inexperienced, e.g. in fine art) than means employed to regulate the conduct of citizens. We should think a soldier mean whose aim was a peerage, still more a poet or an artist. I hardly know that rewards adjudged by the State, as distinct from compensations, exist {219} in the United States of America. [2] Rewards then fill no place correlative to that of punishments, and the reason seems plain. Punishment corresponds much better to the negative method which alone is open to the State for the maintenance of rights. For Punishment proclaims its negative character, and no one can suppose it laudable simply to be deterred from wrong-doing by fear of punishment. But though precisely the same principle applies to meritorious actions done with a view to reward, an illusion is almost certain to arise which will hide the principle in this case. For, if reward is largely used as an inducement to actions conducive to the best life, it is almost certain that it will be used as an inducement to actions, the value and certainty of which depend on the state of will to which they are due. And then the distinction between getting them done, motive or no motive, which is the true region of State action, and their being done with a certain motive, which is necessary to give them either practical or moral value, is pretty sure to be obliterated, and the range of the moral will trenched upon in its higher portion and with a constant tendency to self-deception. [3] {220} It is the same truth in other words when we point out that taking reward and punishment, as interferences, only to deal with exceptional cases, reward would deal with the exceptionally good. Therefore, again, reward must either make an impossible attempt to deal with all the normal as good, which involves the danger of de-moralising the whole of normal life, or must take the line of specially promoting what is exceptionally conducive to good life; in which case confusion is certain to arise from interference with the delicate middle class of external actions analysed above. [4] And thus it is only what we should expect when we find that States having no damnosa hereditas of a craving for personal honours are hardly acquainted with the bestowal of rewards by the public power.
[1] “Speech of Pericles,” Thucyd., ii. 46: “Where there are the greatest rewards of merit, there will be the best men to do the work of the State.” Contrast Plato’s principle that there can be no sound government while public service is done with a view to reward.
[2] The precise theory of the grants in money made to soldiers or sailors, for distinguished service, is not easy to state. But it seems clear that they are not intended to act as motives. They are essentially a recognition after the act, not an inducement held out before it.
[3] It is perhaps permissible to observe in general, what is very well known to all who have much experience of what is called philanthropy, that the tendency to distinguish it by public honours is exceedingly dangerous to its quality, which depends entirely on that energy and purity of intelligence which can only accompany the deepest and highest motives. Mere vulgar self-seeking is not the danger (though it does occur) so much as obfuscation of intelligence through a mixture of aims and ideas.
[4] P. 199.
It will be sufficient, then, to complete the account of State action in maintenance of rights by some account of the nature and principles of punishment.
And we may profitably begin by recalling M. Durkheim’s suggestion, which was mentioned in a former chapter. [1] Punishment, he observes, from the simplest and most actual point of view, includes in itself all those sides which theory has tended to regard as incompatible. It is, in essence, simply the reaction of a strong and determinate collective sentiment against an act which offends it. It is idle to include such a reaction entirely under the head either of reformation, or of retaliation, or of prevention. An aggression is ipso facto a sign of character, an injury, and a menace; and the reaction against it is equally ipso facto an attempt {221} to affect character, a retaliation against an injury, and a deterrent or preventive against a menace. When we fire up at aggression it is pretty much a chance whether we say “I am going to teach him better manners,” or “I am going to serve him out,” or “I am going to see that he doesn’t do that again.” A consideration of each of these aspects is necessary to do justice both to the theories and to the facts.
[1] P. 37.
i. An obvious point of view, and the first perhaps to appear in philosophy, though strongly opposed to early law, is that the aim of punishment is to make the offender good. As test of the adequacy of this doctrine by itself, the question may be put, “If pleasures would cure the offender, ought he to be given pleasures?” The doctrine, however, does not, by any means, altogether incline to leniency. For it carries as a corollary the extirpation of the incurable, which Plato proposes in a passage of singularly modern quality, when he suggests the co-operation of judges and physicians in maintaining the moral and physical health of society. [1]
[1] Republic, 409, 410.