Exemplary punishments are favored by some philosophers as the only moral form of punishment, because they think that retributive punishments do not work. Retribution on the other hand has Biblical warrant, famously 'an eye for an eye,' etc., so especially Christian philosophers have often suggested that it is moral to punish someone only for their own crimes/sins, and not for those of someone else -- especially crimes (or sins) that haven't even been committed yet, and may never be at all!
My favorite philosophical theory on retributive punishment -- not because I advocate for it, but because I love retelling it to see people's faces -- is Kant's theory. Kant especially loved capital punishment, which he advocated for a very great many things. One of those things was rebellion against your sovereign, as he was very much a law-and-order kind of guy. In the Metaphysics of Morals, he talks about two Jacobites who come to trial for their rebellion -- which sufficed, for him; the details didn't matter beyond that they were rebels. (For those of you who want to look it up, this is in Ak. 6:334).
Kant said that the judge ought to offer each of them the choice between death or lifelong slavery. He imagines that one chooses death and the other slavery. The one who chose death should receive his wish and be put to death, because he is "acquainted with something that he values more highly than life, namely honor, while the scoundrel considers it better to live in shame than not at all." The one who prefers slavery should be denied his will, because he has proven he is unworthy of the honor of having his will respected: he should also be put to death.
Hegel was also a retributionist; he thought that treating a man as a man by punishing him only for his own actions was just, whereas punishing a man to deter others was like "raising a stick at a dog," i.e., treating the other men as if they were animals to be intimidated rather than men to be respected. The use of the first man as a mere instrument rather than as an individual worth respect offended both.
Hobbes is mostly a retributionist, but he allows that a valid secondary choice is to correct others liable to the similar offense.
Those are all Modern thinkers, in the philosophical sense of the term -- Hobbes is really Early Modern. Among the Ancients, the exemplary punishment is the usual standard. Plato advocates for it the Protagoras as the only valid reason for imposing punishment.
If you will think, Socrates, of the nature of punishment, you will see at once that in the opinion of mankind virtue may be acquired; no one punishes the evil-doer under the notion, or for the reason, that he has done wrong, only the unreasonable fury of a beast acts in that manner. But he who desires to inflict rational punishment does not retaliate for a past wrong which cannot be undone; he has regard to the future, and is desirous that the man who is punished, and he who sees him punished, may be deterred from doing wrong again. He punishes for the sake of prevention...
Likewise in the Gorgias and the Laws, the latter of which we went through at length together once. The Stoic position is similar, advocated by Seneca in (De Ira 1.19). Aristotle's discussion in the EN, which we also went through together, spells out retributive punishment explicitly, but also allows for deterrence and for restorative punishment as alternative forms.
Not that it has only ancient advocates; deterrence/examples live also in J.S. Mill's utilitarianism, Bentham's as well (Rationale of Punishment).
I'll do a follow-up post later, I think, examining what I said about the issue in my commentaries on the Laws and the EN. For now, I just want to raise the matter for our discussion. What do you think about it?
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