Henry Straughan

Leibniz is typically thought to accept a purely retributive form of punishment. In this paper, I argue that, on the contrary, Leibniz takes all punishment to be ultimately justified by its contribution to the happiness of minds. While I marshal a number of texts that contradict the retributivist view, the core of my argument is that retributivism is incompatible with Leibniz's conception of justice as the charity of the wise. Instead, I argue that Leibniz has a ‘two-level’ conception of the justification of punishment, according to which the practice of punishment (that is, the law) is justified by its contribution to the happiness of minds, while within the practice, individual cases of punishment are justified by the laws themselves. I further argue that Leibniz sees the system of laws as forming a harmony that is both valuable in itself and insofar as its contemplation produces pleasure in wise agents. It is the value of this harmony which, for Leibniz, justifies the consistent application of the laws.

The recent literature on Leibniz’s views on salvation and damnation has focused on whether Leibniz was a lifelong believer in the doctrine of eternal damnation, or whether he came to accept universalism, the doctrine that everyone will be saved. Neglected, however, has been Leibniz’s complex and surprising justification of damnation. In this paper, I examine Leibniz’s attempt to answer the ‘complaint of the damned’: the damned’s complaint that God has treated them unjustly by creating them such that damnation was inevitable. I argue that Leibniz’s ‘psychology of damnation’ is the centerpiece of his response to the complaint of the damned. I further show that the psychology of damnation is not only of theological interest, but also provides an account of the moral psychology of evil in general, and helps solve a puzzle that arises from Leibniz’s naturalized theory of punishment – the puzzle of how vice can be naturally ‘self-punishing.’