it might be that you get punished despite trying to live properly as you claim in 2).
Punishment doesn't work in this context, since it's not a repeated game. Murder is punished because everyone has the chance to do murder - it's a "repeated" game. Destroying the environment isn't.
Destroying various environmental resources is completely a repeated game (for example, look at superfund sites).
If in the future it's decided that I made my money unethically and it needs to be redistributed, I guess I'm fine with that so long as the same standard is applied to everyone's money. I think it'll be close to a great reset, but whatever. I'm not thrilled by the idea, but it might have to happen.
Punishment is not a sustainable measure, it only fosters more bad motives, and rules used to justify the punishment inform malicious actors on how to not get caught (a.k.a. how to follow the letter but not the spirit).
To address the root cause, work out why bad motives exist (what compels people to violate the spirit in the first place) and eliminate those.
I agree that punishment != punishment, and there seem to be many cases where evidence of intentional harm appears to be substantial enough that the majority would support if something was done about it legally, yet unfortunately nothing is done. That aside, I still doubt it would be a fundamental deterrent (it’ll deter some from doing this particular thing, but they’ll find another workaround).
If the powerful bear consequences when something bad happens regardless of fault, then power will be wielded to prevent those outcomes rather than enact them. Anyone who does not wish to take that risk can dispose of their power.
There’s a hint of the idea that “power should be exceedingly inconvenient, not lucrative, and attract people who ‘irrationally’ want to make the world better as opposed to abusing it”, which I don’t disagree with.
However, there’s another big concept, and that is “do not fire an employee who just learned a big and expensive, to you, lesson”. Punishing people simply because they failed, especially in a complex environment with slow onboarding process, is unproductive.
Furthermore, it can sow fear, resentment and distrust. Take China, where a local official risks unpredictable punishment, up to losing their job (or worse), if they fail—such as by allowing COVID cases to happen in their locality. Unfortunately, the side-effect of it is that officials are incentivized to lie up, meaning the government may think the country is COVID-free and be unable to make informed decisions.
This is also why I think COVID lab leak event, if confirmed, should not lead to any repercussions for China in particular. Fear of said repercussions seems likely half of the reason the research is being obscured in the first place, as a result preventing the global community from making informed decisions.
So, if you don’t want such shenanigans to take place in your government (I wouldn’t), you have to agree that whichever human being you elected should be able to make mistakes to learn from them, and thus another measure of their performance should be used.
For example, repeat trend of malicious intent supported by concrete evidence could be a good one.
(And to be make things even trickier, they do not deserve the whole credit in case of any success either. The success or failure of a measure to large extent depends on the whole country and the larger context it exists in. There are situations where one can only win, and situations where losing the least is the best outcome.)
Incentives should be aligned, but I don’t think punishment is the instrument for that.
If you have power and are wielding it to make things worse in order to gain more power, then yes. Stripping you of all of your power later is morally and strategically right.
2) I try to live in such a way that I'm not a wasteful glutton who misuses communal resources.