Aquinas on punishment : its nature, its purpose, and its role in the atonement.

Abstract

Punishment is an important and widespread topic in Aquinas’s thought, yet it is also one for which Aquinas offers little systematic exposition and one to which modern interpreters of Aquinas have given relatively little attention. This dissertation thus seeks to explore Aquinas’s understanding of punishment, identifying his answers to three basic questions: What is punishment? What is punishment’s purpose—i.e., for what end does God punish, and for what end ought the state to punish? And what role, if any, does Aquinas assign to punishment in his account of the atonement? In answering these questions, I show that while Aquinas thinks that punishment of wrongdoing is just in itself, he does not think that the justice of punishment engenders an obligation to punish. Rather, the normativity of punishment derives from the way that punishment contributes to goods beyond justice. This structured account of the normativity of punishment gives punitive agents strong reason to punish but also latitude to forgo punishment for goods higher than justice. This understanding of punishment consistently informs Aquinas’s accounts of God’s work of punishment, the state’s work of punishment, and of how Christ’s death has salvific efficacy