Punishment[edit]The State, Schopenhauer claimed, punishes...

Punishment

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The State, Schopenhauer claimed, punishes criminals to prevent future crimes. It places "beside every possible motive for committing a wrong a more powerful motive for leaving it undone, in the inescapable punishment. Accordingly, the criminal code is as complete a register as possible of counter-motives to all criminal actions that can possibly be imagined ..."^[74] He claimed that this doctrine was not original to him but had appeared in the writings of Plato,^[75] Seneca, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Anselm Feuerbach.