Suicide bombings horrify because they make retributive punishment impossible

Evidence

Talal Asad suggests that the horror provoked in Western societies by suicide bombings lies in the fact that the author of the attack, through his action, a priori rules out any kind of retributive justice. By dying with his victim, coagulating both crime and punishment within a single action, he makes punishment impossible and thereby deactivates the fundamental resort of a form of justice conceived in the penal mode. He will never be able “to pay for what he has done.” — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 327

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Asad’s broader work on Western reactions to suicide bombing, and to the book’s theme of drone operators as mirror-images of bombers (next paragraph).
• QUESTION: Arises asymmetry: why does the impossibility of retribution provoke horror rather than relief, and how does this framework carry over to drones?