Is it fair to punish people so harshly?

Make the punishment for burglary the death penalty, and burglary would go down. And yet, such harsh punishment is generally frowned upon.

This doesn't seem an adequate analogy to banning someone from sports: if a burglar was sentenced to death we would be taking all he has and also permanently punishing his loved ones. By banning a sportsman we take away his career, but he is free to pursue anything else and continue life in his community, contributing to it. We may consider taking back some of the winnings as punishment. Removing someone from a circle of trusted athletes is not really a punishment -- it's a punishment for that community to endure such misconduct.

My point is that the efficacy of a punishment as a deterrent isn't sufficient reason to instate that punishment. There needs to be proportionality between the offense and the punishment.

So, just because lifetime bans would be an effective deterrent doesn't mean that we should instate lifetime bans.

Yes, I agree that how strong a deterrent is is not necessarily the best way to decide how to punish. But again, I can't claim it _would_ work, I'm just saying that there are other reasons to punish people who willingly violate basic rules they agreed to previously. If there were no consequences to those violations (like there often aren't any if you violate some less important road traffic rules) I'd say "screw the rules", but if someone is winning millions, fame, respect etc. at the expense of his fair competitors, I'd say "bye bye" as soon as I could.

Such moral violation is for me first sign that counterparty is dangerous to the well being of others. Why not exclude such counterparties from the game altogether? I don't care as much if it will deter the future ones, I just want the ones already caught to be out of the game!

> Make the punishment for burglary the death penalty, and burglary would go down.

Depends on the context, if it's hard to be caught or people who commit burglary today are people that are ready to accept any risk due to their socioeconomic condition then it's not a good deterrent.

If you make the penalty for burglary the death penalty, then any burglar will kill anyone they can to avoid being caught. I.e. why rob a house with an elderly occupant who might identify you when you could just kill them? Escalating penalties put more things on the table, too.