IntroductionThis essay seeks to apply the ideas of punishment and utilitarianism to the speech given by John Kerry to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of veterans of the Vietnam War. The normative idea of ​​utilitarianism claims that “actions are good to the extent that they tend to promote happiness, bad to the extent that they tend to produce the opposite of happiness.” Thus, utilitarianism focuses first on the subjective pleasures, satisfactions or preferences of individuals. the actor and secondly, it requires the aggregation of all subjective goods of individuals and it considers the best outcome in which the total individual satisfactions are maximized. The speech delivered by John Kerry highlights the various moral implications and usefulness of the actions of American soldiers during the war. This essay examines whether the utilitarian view of defending torture and punishment by American soldiers during the Vietnam War provides a viable argument to justify torture on these grounds. Kerry's speech raises important questions that criticize a utilitarian view of war by asserting that it ignores the fundamental values ​​of justice and retribution. The essay will first detail the concept of utilitarianism, then proceed to describe the role it plays in the attribution of criminal sanctions, concluding with an analysis of these two concepts in the context of Kerry's speech.UtilitarianismL utilitarianism requires that society be properly ordered and achieve justice. through the different social institutions present in society, working to achieve the maximum possible overall utility. This idea has been applied in various fields such as social... middle of paper ...... the school of thought advocates for the proportional application of sanctions, that is, the punishment should be consistent with the moral culpability of the individual, while the other school of thought maintains that the imposition of criminal sanctions on another human being is itself an unlawful act. Regarding the first school of thought, the steps to consider would be the level of punishment necessary to have a deterrent effect on the individual and society. Whereas the other school of thought needs to think about what the benchmark of justice actually is and what level of punishment is required to help have a preventative effect and have a similar deterrent effect on society as a whole. Thus, the idea of ​​rightful retribution in cases of self-defense plays an equally vital role in assessing what justice allows due to the prevailing morality of society.