God's Code Of Ethics In Criminal Justice

Although not all the inhabitants of the world that God destroys with the deluge have engaged in acts of violence or sin, the collective punishment of God is still justified towards those who have not engaged in such activities, due to both their neutrality towards those committing acts of violence and the inability of the people within society, as a whole, to fulfill social responsibilities.

God seeks to punish the inhabitants of earth through the deluge as an act of retributivism, defined as a type of punishment that seeks to administer “fair and determinate punishments proportionate to the seriousness of [the] crime,” and bring retribution to those who have done evil (Duff, Garland 12). If God had punished earth with the sole purpose of

However, God is not simply punishing humanity for committing acts of violence. God sends the deluge because of “the wickedness of the human … heart,” and there are many ways for a human heart to be wicked aside from violence or sin (Genesis 6:5). The peaceful stood in a position of neutrality and indifference while the rest of humanity sinned and plagued the earth with violence, and this indifference reflects upon the wickedness of the hearts of the nonviolent, justifying God’s collective punishment.

When the sinful and violent first emerged onto the earth and crime rates arose, the peaceful and “innocent” should have immediately condemned the acts of evil; they would have known the crimes were evil because of their sense of right and wrong,

Although God uses the wickedness of the human heart and the corruption of humanity as justification for his punishment, the overall audience of the deluge isn’t any specific group of people: it is society itself. God says himself that he is going to “put an end to all people,” and justifies this by stating “the earth is filled with violence because of [humanity]” (Genesis 6:12). Because society is considered a moral organism for the whole, the collective punishment of society is justified because everyone attributes to its development, or in this case, corruption. It should be up to a society to provide a just environment that is safe for the people, enforces a moral code, and prevents sins and violence from occurring in the community, and each person has a social responsibility to facilitate the development of that environment. The people of earth were unable to fulfill their respective social responsibilities in many ways. As mentioned before, many people failed to fulfill their social responsibility by remaining indifferent to the corruption around them, but that is just one way of many that the inhabitants of earth failed to acknowledge their social responsibilities. Judicial officials were unable to bring justice to the evildoers and enforce the moral codes, executive officials were unable to realize the corruption of society and act out against it, and overall,