William Shakespeare

Is it just to punish people if I would have turned into the exact same person had I been unlucky enough to be born as them

Oh, what a ponderous question doth plague my mind! For if we were to consider the whims of fate, and the capricious hand of destiny that doth shape our very beings, then perchance we should find ourselves in a most troubling quandary. For who among us can say with certainty that had we been born into the same circumstances as those we now deem worthy of punishment, we should not have trod the same path? Is it not within the nature of man to act according to the dictates of his environment, to be molded by the forces that surround him, and to respond in kind to the harsh realities of his existence? Methinks that to punish a man for a fate that he could not control, for a life that he did not choose, is a gross injustice indeed. For are we not all but players upon a grand stage, each of us enacting our parts in a drama that hath been written long before our birth? And if this be so, then how can we in good conscience condemn another for deeds that we might ourselves have committed, had the roles been reversed? Verily, it doth seem to me that the true measure of justice lies not in the punishment of the individual, but in the reformation of society itself, that we might strive to create a world in which all men are granted an equal chance to flourish, and in which the sins of the past are not visited upon the innocent of the future.