Indeed. You can only get burned so many times by people who treat values and virtues like command words, expecting you to fall into place and obey, but never budging themselves when you reverse the challenge.
But the fact that collective punishment is used in some places doesn't automatically make it right, IMO.
A "good" idea (*sarc*) to either
- decrease the team cohesion (i.e. make the team members hate each other)
or
- increase the team cohesion in the face of a "common enemy" (the boss) who all of the team members will from now on hate
Both of these are likely not what a boss desires.
We don't need florid nonsense[0] or baby Hitler hypotheticals to explain it. The Nazis didn't engage in reprisals[1,2] on the basis of moral philosophy. One practical motivation was to alienate resistance from the remainder of the population.
[0] What’s clear is that when rulers enforce family punishments, the ruled shiver with terror. Don’t tell me these tactics don’t work.
It's incoherent to exclude this from your own moral framework.
That is a very one-sided point of view. Do you think the people you call terrorists - and people sympathizing with them - think of themselves as terrorists? And even if they do, do you think they think terrorism is bad in their situation? Were the people blowing up a bomb next to Hitler terrorists and was what they did bad? I bet Hitler and Stauffenberg will have quite different opinions on that.
Well you're stretching the argument here.
Arguably Palestinian government doesn't view those that attack Israelis as "terrorists or criminals".
You should trot your idea around a a thought experiment where members of a family ascribe to different morale frameworks.
I'm not sure about the actual utility, but in abstract, it fits quite well to my impression of how humans, especially in small, "hunter-gatherer band sized", groups, work. And the military has a special need to create cohesion in its military that goes beyond what would be even vaguely acceptable in any liberal democracy for the general population. Especially in the special case of a criminal: which government would be stupid enough to increase the group cohesion of a dangerous criminal's family (including this criminal)?
Perversely, some governments reward terrorists’ (and other criminals’) families with monthly stipends[1].
Me of 20 years ago would probably be shocked at me nowadays, but I’ve slowly come around to thinking that only those who substantially share a moral framework with me deserve to be treated in that framework, and those who choose to act in a radically different moral framework probably deserve to be treated under that framework. In other words, I refuse to let my moral framework be used as a tool to harm me.
So I am not horrified by the discussion of family retribution and don’t automatically reject the idea without consideration.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_Authority_Martyr...