Eliza: You are obviously a good and well-meaning person, and, despite the somewhat sour tone of my last response to you, I have much respect for you and sympathy with your views. And I agree that the extent to which punishments should be enforced is an intransigent problem.

The trouble is, indeed, the whole concept of "punishment" itself. The idea that, because someone has departed from Society's norms and expectations, they should be forced in return to undergo an experience they would rather not have undergone (whatever form it might take, from loss of money to loss of liberty to the pain of a birch across the bottom or a hot iron on the hand), is clearly illogical, irrational, and altogether absurd, even though it might give some satisfaction to their victims to contemplate their having suffered in their turn.

Unfortunately, no society seems ever to have come up with a better idea...

This might be worth a thread of its own. Think I will start one and see if anyone responds.

~Michael~