Harming other people is prima facie wrong. Unless we can be very certain that doing so is justified under the circumstances, we ought not to do it. In this paper, I argue that we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist criminal justice systems for this reason; we cannot be sufficiently certain that the harm is justified. Gregg Caruso, Ben Vilhauer and others have previously argued for the same conclusion; however, my own version sidesteps certain controversial premises of theirs. Harsh retributivist criminal justice can only be morally right if the following three propositions are true: Moral responsibility exists, retributivism is right, and we can find out how much punishment offenders deserve for their crimes. Suppose that we initially assign a high credence to each of the three propositions; I assume for the sake of argument that there are good arguments in support of each. Nevertheless, these arguments ultimately depend on intuitions. Since we have philosophical peers whose intuitions differ from ours, we ought to downgrade our credence in each. However, even slightly less credence in each proposition means far less credence in a conjunction of all three. Since the stakes are high and there are morally safer options for a criminal justice system, we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist ones.

伤害他人从表面上看是错误的。除非我们非常确定这样做在当时情况下是合理的，否则我们不应该这样做。在本文中，我认为出于这个原因，我们应该废除严厉的报复性刑事司法制度；我们不能充分肯定伤害是合理的。Gregg Caruso、Ben Vilhauer 和其他人之前也提出过同样的结论。然而，我自己的版本回避了他们的某些有争议的前提。只有在以下三个命题为真时，严厉的报复主义刑事司法才能在道德上是正确的：道德责任存在，报复主义是正确的，我们可以找出犯罪者应为他们的罪行受到多少惩罚。假设我们最初对三个命题中的每一个都赋予了很高的可信度；为了论证起见，我假设每个人都有很好的论据来支持。然而，这些论点最终取决于直觉。既然我们有哲学同行，他们的直觉与我们的不同，我们应该降低我们对每个人的信任度。然而，即使每个命题的可信度稍低，也意味着在所有三个命题的结合中可信度要低得多。由于风险很高，而且刑事司法系统在道德上有更安全的选择，我们应该废除严厉的报复性选择。