system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Emotionally proportional punishment is just punishment

### Proposition

If someone stabs, they deserve to experience the totality of the emotional and physical pain involved with getting stabbed.

If someone kills someone else, they deserve to experience in excruciating, visceral detail the emotion associated with entering the void for the rest of eternity - and then the emotional pain that all the loved ones that the deceased are going through.

If someone robs someone else, they deserve to experience the sense of loss - both in monetary value and emotional/physical security - that their victim experienced. (Read: the *sense* of loss in monetary value, the "oh shit I lost x% of my income" feeling - not *actual* loss. The *sense* of loss of emotional/physical security.)

Ideally, in some far-future society where we could force people to experience emotion, a just form of punishment would be to first have the criminal experience all negative emotion associated with their crime, and then go through a period of rehabilitation from which they are not released until their personality has changed (this far-future society would have the capability to determine if their personality has changed enough).

*Even if* we had (and were willing to use) technology capable of "redeeming" a criminal and changing their personality for the better, it is still just for them to experience the magnitude of the crime they committed.


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### Thoughts

The reason I ask this is that the concept of proportional punishment seems to be reviled and thought of as fundamentally wrong. Let's take torture, for example: if someone tortures someone else, in my mind, it is only fair and just for the criminal to experience the same (again, only the physical/emotional pain without any permanent effects other than emotional). However, most civilized people would say this is barbaric and wrong, and I don't understand why. I can even understand barbaric, but why would it be *wrong*? To me, it seems only fair.


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### Major Edits


* There would be a system in place to reduce or eliminate punishment for mental retardation/insanity/etc. This is more for the 'I stabbed Jimmy for 5 bucks" or "ran over a kid while drunk driving" crimes. The idea is to force people to feel and understand the magnitude of their crime.

* We don't want people to suffer, so we don't enforce reciprocal punishment in the real world. We want to minimize suffering wherever possible, and let people lead happy, fulfilling lives. **My current point of view is that "minimizing suffering" ≠ "equality/fairness/justice".** I need you to convince me that either (a) this is not true, or (b) this is alright, and enforcing complete justice is a bad idea.

* Someone went through my history and downvoted everything. Congrats, I guess? I would still like to CMV however, so please let this be visible so people have a chance to CMV.
gpt
The moral goal of most people is 'decrease the amount of suffering and increase that amount of happiness in the world.'

Torturing people, even criminals, goes 100% against this common-sense morality.  They are still humans, and you are therefore still adding to the total amount of human suffering.  

Human suffering is not 'bad' when it happens to 'good' people and 'good' when it happens to 'bad' people. Human suffering is just bad, full stop.

'Justice' is a funny, slippery word, which means different things to different people in different contexts. But most people would hope that it has at least *some* relationship to morality.  

At the very worst, justice should not be *100% anti-correlated with morality*, which the system you describe actually is (again, assuming morality = reducing human suffering, which most people believe).

This is why most people would be very reluctant to call your system 'justice'.  A better term might be 'balance' or 'karma' or 'symmetry' or 'equal and opposite reactions'.