Monday 15 October 2018

Found a Quote by C. S. Lewis


The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
C.S. Lewis
http://www.angelfire.com/pro/lewiscs/humanitarian.html


It may be said that by the continued use of the word punishment and the use of the verb ‘inflict’ I am misrepresenting Humanitarians. They are not punishing, not inflicting, only healing. But do not let us be deceived by a name. To be taken without consent from my home and friends; to lose my liberty; to undergo all those assaults on my personality which modern psychotherapy knows how to deliver; to be re-made after some pattern of ‘normality’ hatched in a Vienese laboratory to which I never professed allegiance; to know that this process will never end until either my captors hav succeeded or I grown wise enough to cheat them with apparent success—who cares whether this is called Punishment or not? That it includes most of the elements for which any punishment is feared—shame, exile, bondage, and years eaten by the locust—is obvious. Only enormous ill-desert could justify it; but ill-desert is the very conception which the Humanitarian theory has thrown overboard.


Original publication would be chapter 4 of Part III of God in the Dock.

God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Anglais) Broché – 24 mars 1972
de C. S. Lewis (Auteur), Walter Hooper (Sous la direction de)
https://www.amazon.fr/God-Dock-Essays-Theology-Ethics/dp/0802808689


Unless that too was a republication - of what he had written for some newspaper?/HGL

Ah, preface of God in the Dock, by Walter Hooper, specifies: 'The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment' first appeared in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, vol. III, No. 3 (1949), pp. 5-12. This same journal in vol. VI, No 2 (1952), pp. 20-26 published Drs Norval Morris and Donald Buckle's 'Reply to C. S. Lewis'. Both pieces were later reprinted in Res Judicatae, vol. VI (June 1953), pp. 224-30 and pp. 231-37 respectively. The followed Professor J. J. C. Smart's 'Comment: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment' in Res Judicatae, vol. VI (February 1954), pp. 368-71, and Lewis' 'On Punishment: A Reply'—that is, a reply to all three men—in Res Judicatae, vol. VI (August 1954), pp. 519-23.

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