Couldn't disagree more, and I think the bad lessons that punishment teaches are self-serving(self-serving for the meme of punishment: It creates abusers who think abuse is good)
Just a few reasons for why punishment is bad: The evidence for punishment being terrible and accumulating human misery is vast, it is based on the religious fantasy of free will(which is an abusive idea that justifies the unjust punishment and unjust reward of people who deserved neither), it causes psychological and social issues, is destroys trust, it teaches the lesson of violence as a solution to things, it is ultimately pro-authority in a world dominated by tyrannical authority, and any situation where punishment has positive outcomes would be made better with positive reinforcement or skillful engagement that taught someone how to resolve something without brutality. A good book on specifically criminal punishment is Deirdre Golash's 'The Case Against Punishment', but the arguments can be extended to all punishment. I don't think one really needs to be sold on not punishing children because of how vast the psychological literature is here-- it's simply an evolutionary strategy for beings to instill psychopathy, callousness, sadism, and other adaptive dominance strategies in their species, which is then spun as wisdom.
Couldn't disagree more, and I think the bad lessons that punishment teaches are self-serving(self-serving for the meme of punishment: It creates abusers who think abuse is good)
Just a few reasons for why punishment is bad: The evidence for punishment being terrible and accumulating human misery is vast, it is based on the religious fantasy of free will(which is an abusive idea that justifies the unjust punishment and unjust reward of people who deserved neither), it causes psychological and social issues, is destroys trust, it teaches the lesson of violence as a solution to things, it is ultimately pro-authority in a world dominated by tyrannical authority, and any situation where punishment has positive outcomes would be made better with positive reinforcement or skillful engagement that taught someone how to resolve something without brutality. A good book on specifically criminal punishment is Deirdre Golash's 'The Case Against Punishment', but the arguments can be extended to all punishment. I don't think one really needs to be sold on not punishing children because of how vast the psychological literature is here-- it's simply an evolutionary strategy for beings to instill psychopathy, callousness, sadism, and other adaptive dominance strategies in their species, which is then spun as wisdom.