There’s a plausible principle according to which if something is better for everyone then it is a good. This principle is called the Pareto principle. If we take the Pareto seriously, it poses serious challenges for retributivism.
Note, this doesn’t only apply to strong retributivism, according to which it’s sometimes non-instrumentally good to harm bad people. This applies to every version of retributivism, according to which the badness of harm depends on one’s personal virtue.
Suppose we have two individuals John and Lucy. John and Lucy both will be virtuous until they turn 50, and then vicious until they die at the age of 100. Thus, the following choice is presented.
Either give John and Lucy 8 units of well-being while they’re virtuous or 10 units of well-being while they’re vicious. On the retributivist story, assuming that the viciousness dilutes the value of well-being by more than 20%, you should give them both 8 units of well-being while they’re virtuous — despite this being worse for everyone. (If you think it dilutes it by less than 20% then swap out numbers accordingly).
The retributivist could try to get around this by claiming that one’s virtue — which determines how much they deserve to suffer — doesn’t change over the course of their life. This, however, has some rather odd implications. For one, it proposes that it would be intrinsically good to kick a baby if they’d turn out to be a vicious adult. But second, it holds that, if some serial killer repents and turns to a life of justice and virtue, they would desert to suffer just as much after they repent as they did before. This is not plausible. It’s especially odd that one’s virtuousness later in life reaches back in time and affects how much one deserves to suffer.
What do people think? Are there plausible ways of avoiding this implication?
Edit: As I was explaining this, I realized that having both John and Lucy was unnecessary — this applies just as well in the context of one person.
> There’s a plausible principle according to which if something is better for everyone then it is a good.
Nonsense. If something benefits a utilitarian it’s total value is presumptively negative. If we free a murdurer from jail and give everyone else 0.0003$ that’s just bad.