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Marius comments on Many of us *are* hit with a baseball once a month. - Less Wrong Discussion
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Punishments are supposed to be rehabilitative.
The thinking today has evolved somewhat, away from thinking the pain of childbirth is a punishment. Yet there is still a widespread tendency (including amongst nonreligious people) to claim that a painful childbirth is a natural childbirth, and to overemphasize and invent dangers of epidurals.
The idea of rehabilitation is relatively recent. Punishment is just a disincentive: people who do X get hurt, so don't do X or you'll get hurt.
Both recent and ancient; people have gone back and forth between rehabilitation/disincentive as punishment's goals for millennia. Look at confession/penance and the theologic justifications for that. Various penalties described in Ancient Rome and the Old Testament filled either or both those roles. We've had phrases like "teach him a lesson," "now, this is for your own good," and "spare the rod, spoil the child" for quite some time.