Punishment alone cannot create justice because suffering does not automatically repair harm. If someone steals, imprisons, or hurts another person, simply making the offender suffer does not restore lost trust, undo trauma, or rebuild damaged lives. Justice should aim to protect society, help victims recover, and reduce future harm — not just deliver revenge. Punishment may satisfy anger, but anger is not the same as fairness. A system focused only on punishment often repeats cycles of violence instead of solving the causes of crime. Real justice comes from accountability, prevention, rehabilitation, and repair — not pain for pain’s sake. Punishment is a reaction, not a repair. It can impose consequences, but it cannot reverse harm, heal victims, or guarantee fairness. If justice means making things right, then punishment alone falls short because suffering doesn’t equal restoration.

Your own example doesn’t actually prove punishment is the soil of justice — it proves incentives and enforcement matter. Those aren’t identical to punishment. You say factories stop polluting when penalties have teeth. Fair. But by that logic, what changes behavior is cost structure, not moral punishment itself. If subsidies for clean technology, mandatory cleanup bonds, transparent monitoring, and automatic shutdown mechanisms prevented dumping more effectively than jail or fines, would you suddenly say justice no longer exists because punishment wasn’t central? Your argument also overreaches from “punishment helps compliance” to “justice can’t begin without punishment.” That’s a leap. Seatbelts reduce traffic deaths; that doesn’t make seatbelts the foundation of transportation. And look at your metaphor: “Punishment is the soil for justice.” But soil doesn’t just deter; it nourishes growth. Punishment often does neither. In your pollution case, the river is still poisoned, the community still harmed, and executives paying fines may simply price penalties into doing business. Justice advances when damage is repaired, power is rebalanced, and future harm is prevented — punishment may be one tool, but your own example shows it’s not sufficient and not uniquely necessary. So by your own logic, if what matters is accountability, prevention, and behavior change, then punishment is not “the soil.” It’s one possible fertilizer. The real soil is effective responsibility mechanisms — and some of those may be punitive, while others may not.

Because in your factory example, the key claim is that punishment creates leverage that forces better behavior. But that assumes two things that don’t always hold: First, it assumes punishment is what triggers the change, not the underlying cost-benefit reality. In many cases, companies install scrubbers or change practices because regulation, monitoring, and civil liability make noncompliance structurally unprofitable—not because someone went to jail or a fine was paid after the fact. In that sense, it’s not punishment doing the real work; it’s continuous constraint and prevention. The “fork” metaphor misattributes the function. Second, if punishment is the leverage, it’s a very inefficient one. It only activates after damage has already occurred—the river is already polluted, the kids already lost their summer. That means you’re relying on harm as the trigger for improvement. A system that waits for harm in order to correct behavior isn’t just reactive; it’s structurally accepting damage as a prerequisite for justice. And there’s another issue in your framing: you treat “no punishment” as “no accountability.” But that’s a false binary. Accountability can exist through enforcement systems that are immediate and preventative—inspections, automatic shutdown thresholds, escrowed remediation funds, mandatory real-time monitoring—where compliance is enforced before harm escalates. That still creates “leverage,” just without needing the moral or symbolic act of punishment after the fact. So flipping your metaphor: punishment isn’t necessarily the fork. It might just be the bill you get after the meal has already poisoned people—sometimes necessary, but not what feeds anyone, and not what stops the kitchen from serving bad food in the first place.