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Netherlands and elsewhere by about the middle of the eighteenth century;
after 1800 the shift accelerated and led to what is recognizably our own
sensibility toward violence, suffering, and the fate of others. According to
Spierenburg, this shift was imposed on the masses by social elites, who
had become disgusted by the crudeness of public displays of brutality, and
by the evident enjoyment on the faces of those who watched the torturing.
Only gradually did a studied and cultivated sensibility begin to take root
among the masses.
Little by little, public executions were banned in Europe. Concur-
rently, enjoyment of the punishment of others was driven underground.
140 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
Schopenhauer is one of the first philosophers to discern that this enjoy-
ment continued. His attention to the mental state of punishers predates
Durkheim s slightly more developed account of the same phenomenon.
David Garland s formidable work Punishment and Society, which con-
tains an exemplary account of the emotional aspect of administering pun-
ishment, presents Durkheim s findings as a key for unlocking a larger
cultural text such as the nature of social solidarity or the disciplinary
character of Western reason.8 In The Division of Labor (1895) Durkheim
argues that the punitive passions emerge from collective sentiments and
convey the moral energy of the citizenry against its criminal enemies.
Durkheim explains:
In the first place, punishment constitutes an emotional reaction.
This characteristic is all the more apparent the less cultured soci-
eties are. Indeed primitive people punish for the sake of punishing,
causing the guilty person to suffer solely for the sake of suffering
and without expecting any advantage for themselves from the suf-
fering they inflict upon him The proof of this is that they do not
aim to punish fairly or usefully, but only for the sake of punishing.
Thus they punish animals that have committed the act that is stig-
matised, or even inanimate things which have been its passive in-
strument. When the punishment is applied solely to people, it often
extends well beyond the guilty person and strikes even the inno-
cent  his wife, children or neighbours, etc. This is because the
passionate feeling that lies at the heart of punishment dies down
only when it is spent.9
Durkheim rejects the argument that modern societies now punish as a de-
terrent to future wrongdoing. For Durkheim, we do not punish out of a
conviction that the consequences of punishment are good; instead, we
punish out of a sense that such punishment is intrinsically good and fit-
ting. He insists on a sense of proportionality between crimes and punish-
ments in such a way as to make Burke s challenge seem unreflective:
. . . reaction to punishment is not in every case uniform, since the
emotions that determine it are not always the same. In fact they
Punishment and Its Pleasure 141
vary in intensity according to the strength of the feeling that has
suffered injury, as well as according to the gravity of the offence it
has sustained. . . . Since the gravity of the criminal act varies ac-
cording to the same factors, the proportionality everywhere ob-
served between crime and punishment is therefore established with
a kind of mechanical spontaneity, without any necessity to make
elaborate computations in order to calculate it. What brings about
a gradation in crimes is also what brings about a gradation in pun-
ishments; consequently the two measures cannot fail to corre-
spond, and such correspondence, since it is necessary, is at the
same time constantly useful. (p. 57)
Durkheim characterizes punishment as a social institution that reflects
and enhances social solidarity. Punishments issue forth from strong bonds
of moral solidarity and, when inflicted, reaffirm and strengthen these
same social bonds.
As Garland has pointed out, Durkheim s work can be taken as a reac-
tion against turn-of-the-century criminologists who aimed to remove all
traces of moral censure from penal law in order to give it a purely techni-
cal character. Durkheim insisted that the essence of punishment is not ra-
tionality or instrumental control but rather irrational, unthinking emotion
stirred up by a perceived violation of the sacred. For Durkheim, punish-
ment is not so much a means to an end as a release of psychic energy. The
end or objective of punishment is not reform of the offender, but the com-
mon expression of social outrage, an expression that unites people and
creates solidarity.
Garland s analysis proceeds from Durkheim to Nietzsche, for whom
there is more than dutiful moral sentiment in the fact of punishment 
there is positive pleasure. As usual in Nietzsche s vision, the least noble
sentiments are to be found among the common people, the lower classes,
the herd. It would be pointless to search for evidence to support the truth
of Nietzsche s snide view. But in the case of punishment, there is a specific
explanation for this social distribution of cruel delight  for the act of
punishing brings with it power. In punishing the debtor, the creditor
shares a seignorial right. The creditor feels that finally he or she can bask
in the glorious feeling of treating another human being as inferior  or if
142 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
the actual punitive power has passed on to a legal  authority, of seeing
another person despised and mistreated.
According to Nietzsche, the pleasures of punishment are vicarious
rather than direct, since in modern society it is the state which punishes,
using the punitive machinery for its own purposes. Of course, the penal
institutions of modern society deny their association with cruelty, but
Nietzsche insists that beneath this hypocrisy these passions continue to
exist. Particularly in the Second Essay of On the Geneaology of Morals,
Nietzche advances the claim that  pleasure in cruelty is not really extinct
today; only given our greater delicacy, that pleasure has had to undergo a
certain sublimation. Pleasure gets so well disguised that it can untimately
pass muster before  even the tenderest hypocritical conscience.
An examination of the sentiments typically expressed by reformers, by
penal agents, and by different sectors of the public makes clear that the
punishment of offenders can evoke a whole range of feelings from sympa-
thy and compassion to anger and indignation. It makes little sense to re-
duce this diversity to a single sentiment. Nor does it seem useful to debate
whether the predominant sentiment is high or low in some moral hierar-
chy, since a key aspect of emotional life is ambivalence, that is, the coexis-
tence of contradictory impulses and emotions toward the same object.
Psychological attitudes often meld high moral sentiment and selfish ulte-
rior motives, so we should not expect that punitive emotions will prove
simple or single-minded. David Garland has the last word here.
I want to emphasize that I do not deny the possibility that anyone
might, in fact, take pleasure simply in knowing that a transgressor of
some sort suffers. My skepticism about the likelihood that pleasure can be
restrained in such a way derives from the psychological difficulty of con-
trolling ourselves perfectly. Along with this skepticism goes admiration
for the creativity with which people explain their drives and actions to
themselves and others. Schopenhauer s point lends itself to easy compari-
son with the much maligned principle of double effect in Roman Catholic
theology. This famous principle justifies what amounts to an abortion
procedure on a Catholic woman whose pregnancy is ectopic or whose
uterus has been invaded by cancer according to the following logic: the
death of the fetus at the hands of a physician is a foreseen but unintended
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