In light of the war on terror, which for most people is nothing more then whiling away additional time at the airport, perennial questions emerge that education should take an interest in and desire to confront. What kind of price is a society willing to pay to stop people from committing acts of violence? How does one repay murder?

A thought experiment by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the issue into sharp relief.

Kant asks what would happen if we took a convicted murderer and placed him on a presumably unpleasant island that had long since been abandoned, with no chance of escape?

Would we still feel the need to kill him? Kant understood that such a proposition would test out our motives in contemplating execution. If the purpose is to prevent any future harmful acts, then it would seem that execution would be redundant, as the goal of deterrence would already have been achieved. To execute at this point would imply that we feel a need to redress the past – to punish regardless of any future threat or lack of it.

Kant himself argues that even if everyone was long gone from the island, “the last murderer lying in the prison ought to be executed… This  ought to be done that everyone may realize the desert of his deeds.”

At the other end of the spectrum is George Orwell, who in his 1931 essay A  Hanging leaves behind all thoughts of deterrence or punishment and focuses only on the humanity of all, regardless of anyone’s moral credentials: “I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside… I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide.”

Both Kant and Orwell stand on principle, though radically different ones: either the imperative to punish, or the hideousness of prematurely ending any life with deliberation.

Punishment is popularly associated with Judaism, as opposed to Christianity, but  even Christianity posits some kind of hell.

Indeed, the very suggestion that compassionate forgiveness is not the only possible solution for Hitler’s eternal soul has been a thorn in the side of some of the 20th century’s most renowned thinkers.

For Bertrand Russell, this fact was what convinced him that he was not a Christian, nor did he want to be.

“There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ’s moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not believe myself that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting  punishment,” Russell wrote.

And C.S. Lewis – who was, unlike Russell, a deeply committed Christian – writes with reticence and regret about hell in The Problem of Pain: “There is no doctrine that I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture… and it has the full support of reason.”

Clearly, neither man would have been laudatory about the Jewish perspective, for Judaism views consequences for bad actions not as the antithesis of compassion, but as its very essence.

Or, as the Talmud reminds us, “those that are kind to the cruel will end up being cruel to the kind.”