Harsher punishments are not more effective deterrents unless they are extremely severe. As you point out, a conscientious person need only face a reasonable consequence in order to change their behavior. For such a person, facing an unjustly harsh punishment may actually backfire. What actually matters is consistency in which a consequence is faced.
I'm not going to hold my breath and believe that we are going to have mass personal enlightenment in society which transcends the need for a criminal justice system. Maybe my attention to it serves as some impediment to my own personal enlightenment. Do you think so?
I think your point about consistency is very important and to children especially because the motivation for living an empathetic life that is driven by the love of others is what cruelty and fear destroy early on.
But the kind of parents that can apply that and will are the kind of people, I think, who despite all they may have experienced negatively themselves, have held onto something within them that mitigates against brutality and facilitates conscientious parenting.
As to your question….. I am not qualified to judge your state of enlightenment or make any comparisons to my own. I have no idea. I believe my cats are more enlightened than I am.
All I can do is address you as best as I can, that is to say, to express what is only my opinion. You should keep in mind that I am a nobody:
I also do not believe we are going to experience some mass enlightenment. I think it is the hearts greatest desire, but the last thing we would do because it requires the loss of everything that we so profoundly needed as children to survive what would otherwise have been seemingly endless misery.
We live by breathing tube holding on to enough to survive in the world, some more effectively, some less, based on factors having little to do with our true worth and more a matter of circumstance, or so I believe.
So I would say that, yes, our impediment to enlightenment is vast but connects very directly to our attitude toward punishment and the moral implications it raises. I believe that we were made to behave as children by fear of the loss of the love of those who raised us, but who all had limits as to what they could give.
At the point where the demands of children rub up against the capacity of parents to give, their, the parents, own inner sense of worthlessness is triggered. Then we learn what happens if we need what they cannot give. I think it turns out it was decided it was your fault for asking and you best stop.
You are not a child anymore but you carry a lesson with a message, perhaps, you just never need and those who allow their needs to disregard the needs of others can be constrained only by punishment.
There is a Sufi saying that goes something like this:
New organs of perception develop with need so, seeker, increase your need.
I think the desire to punish is a reflection of self hate. The solution to that I would say is balance in attitude toward the requirements of moral restraint and even more importantly feeling what you feel. Are there feelings somewhere regarding punishment that we deserved what we got?
In the film Red Beard you will see two related things, I think. One is a woman who destroys love because she is too happy and feels she does not deserve it, and what can happen to an enlightened man who must survive in a world where the government does not serve justice. A doctor should never act like that and would not if he hadn’t have to.
Maybe justice just happens sometimes, sort of like grace, out of the blue. I see in that film a profound love of live based on the deepest intimacy with suffering.