[tinokid]

Well you yourself said it reflected the same kind of "emotional thinking" that led to millennia of "torture and abuse". What I am trying to show is that there are plenty of good reasons for this kind of punishment (whether or not one accepts a retributive component to justice). It is not simply a knee jerk insensitive reaction.

[csallen]

I never complained about the punishment, nor did I equate the punishment itself to emotional thinking. What I called emotional and dangerous was the unsupported claim that the punishment wasn't enough to be an effective deterrent and should therefore be increased.

[tinokid]

And that is the claim I was contesting. You seem to have an odd intuition that a line of argument that does not reduce to a computing problem is "emotional". Even if one does not believe in retributive justice at all, an adequate deterrent is still going to be in proportion to the seriousness of the crime. It's not something that admits of a resolution by facts and figures alone.

[csallen]

What you are saying here is an order of magnitude milder in its certitude than koolba's assertion that the given punishment was "hardly a deterrent" and "barely a slap on the wrist." In addition, you are comparing this doctor's punishment to the seriousness of this doctor's crime, whereas the koolba unreasonably compared this doctor's punishment to the sum total of the harm caused by an entire epidemic of which this doctor played only a negligible part.

So yes, I stand by my claim that the original poster's point was an emotional reaction.

Had koolba instead said something like, "An adequate deterrent should be in proportion to the crime committed, and I believe 4 years in prison falls below that standard for reasons X, Y, and Z," then I would not have called that a knee-jerk emotional reaction. But he didn't.