One of the first things we are taught about justice is the phrase “an eye for an eye.” The phrase, which dates back to Hammurabi’s Code in 1750 BCE, is an example of retributive justice: the intuitive theory that those who have done wrong deserve to be repaid in kind. Instinctively, most of us agree that some form of retribution must be given to wrongdoers: to prevent future harm, to inflict punishment, and to preserve justice. The problem, then, is how that retribution should best be enacted or distributed. In this article, I would like to apply a utilitarian view to the question of retribution—a controversial idea that nearly opposes the current U.S. justice system.

Jeremy Bentham is known as the founder of modern utilitarian thought. Active in the 18th and 19th centuries, he based his political philosophy on two principles: maximizing happiness and minimizing pain, which he then applied systematically to all other areas of life. To Bentham, happiness and pain were the two lords over a man’s life, two antithetical figures arching over everything else. As he said, they “govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.” Obviously, happiness is the goal in this scenario: not necessarily true euphoria, but instinctively, we want to do things that are pleasurable or that we have conditioned ourselves to regard as pleasurable. In the Experience Machine article I wrote a few months ago, I stated that although hedonism is often dismissed without a second thought, all of us are hedonists in some way—if we are willing to accept a broader definition. The ways we derive happiness manifest differently: to some, it could be a cocktail of drugs; to others, athletic achievement; and to others still, a nomadic and simplistic lifestyle free of desire. Likewise, for some, pleasure might lie in sacrifice for one’s children, which causes momentary pain—but only because the alternative, a life where the children are not set up for success, would be far more painful. If we accept that we are all primarily motivated by pleasure in some form, then it should be obvious that we seek to maximize it, or minimize the amount of pain in our lives. This is what Bentham refers to as the “hedonistic calculus,” the quasi-mathematical procedure he used to guide policy. Hedonistic calculus does not merely account for pleasure; it is a quantitative attempt to reduce happiness to mathematics by including factors like intensity, duration, certainty, purity, and generative capacity.

Hedonistic calculus provides us with a way of taking the principles of utilitarianism—that is, maximizing good for the greatest number of people—and implementing them in law and public policy. One of Bentham’s major interests was the prison and rehabilitation system. Punishment is a tricky puzzle in the utilitarian worldview: although the concept of retributive justice is intuitive to most, a utilitarian would only support it if it were guaranteed to produce genuinely beneficial outcomes. In other words, while philosophers like Immanuel Kant insisted on retributive justice “even if society crumbled the next day,” Bentham and other utilitarians rejected punishment “just for the sake of justice.”

To advocate for more humane treatment, Bentham created something called the Panopticon—a prison design that positioned a guard in the middle and prisoners around the outside in a ring. In step with his theory of rehabilitation over punishment, Bentham thought the Panopticon would instill in prisoners self-discipline and regulation, a trait arising from the fact that they could not know whether they were being watched or not. (The reality, of course, is that with one guard and so many prisoners, they likely were not.)

But what about the main puzzle: the American prison system? An institution where tens of billions of dollars are poured in annually—far more if we account for broader social costs—the prison system is everybody’s concern. Given that somewhere between $250 and $1,000 of your money is spent on prisons, it is important that those funds be put to good use. So this raises the question: is prison more about retribution, invoking Kantian ethics and the classic adage “an eye for an eye”? Or, in the utilitarian view, should punishment be oriented toward rehabilitation, where inmates are subject to more humane measures designed to help them re-enter society as productive members in the future?

I think that the chokehold that retributive justice has on our society stems from the emotions we feel toward perpetrators of crimes. This is not to say those emotions are bad, but we all need to recognize that they cloud our judgment. When someone commits a crime, our natural reaction is a desire to see them suffer for what they did to the victim. This is perfectly understandable, and prison is a more fair way of ensuring suffering than any vigilante-esque actions. But I believe we as a society must, as hard as it is, place our emotions aside temporarily and really ask what purely retributive justice accomplishes. I see it in two ways, depending on the sentence: purely retributive justice either creates a hardened repeat offender who emerges from punishment as angry as before, or else it fails to create any positive change in the offender’s disposition. What needs to be done—if people truly have the best interests of society in mind, and not merely a lust for revenge—is rehabilitation, so that criminals not only serve their time but emerge from the system as changed people.

Despite the need for rehabilitation, punishment still needs to be retributive in some way. I disagree with the methods used in places like Norway and Sweden, where prisoners are allowed nearly free roam. Punishment should not exist to make wrongdoers suffer, but to deter future harm and promote rehabilitation. To that end, some degree of hardship may be necessary—but it must always be tied to outcomes, not to revenge.