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Notes -
I think the assumption that is built into your thinking is that the only legitimate justification for proactive violence (that is, violence not in defense of self or others) is as punishment for an offense by the person targeted for violence. If we assume that, then it follows that the cases above consist of punishing people for the acts of other people. But not everyone holds that assumption, and I don't hold it myself.
Note: I am not necessarily defending the actions described below, but I am trying to articulate the alleged moral justification in the minds of the killers.
In Case 1, I assume you are referring to the story of Achan in Joshua 7. Notice how often this phrase occurs in the Bible: In this way you shall put evil away from you (some examples can be found here). That means that the execution is justified, not by punishing someone who committed a bad act, but by the desire to rid the tribe of certain genetic predispositions. It isn't bad acts that are being punished, but bad genes that are being extirpated. This also applies to the genocide of other tribes that have too many bad apples (e.g., the Midianites and Amalekites). It's not that the Amalekite infants have done anything wrong; it's that they are likely to infected with something akin to zombie-ism or orc-ism. That doesn't explain the killing of Achan's wife, but it explains the killing of his children.
The killing of the wives and children also has an enhanced deterrent effect. What good does it do to punish someone for crime in the first place? From a utilitarian standpoint, the benefit of punishing crime isn't the pain and loss of the offender as a positive good in itself; it is the deterrent effect. Killing the whole family enhances the deterrent, and thus has the same kind of justification as killing the offender himself, or even flogging him. From a utilitarian standpoint, IMO, it is indefensibly arbitrary to just punish the offender, when punishing people he cares about has a larger deterrent effect -- and when no immediate, intrinsic good comes from punishing anybody in the first place. (But I'm not a utilitarian).
Case 2 is unique in this list. This is the only case where the killing is not a state action. But in warfare, whether between clans or nations, your duty to kill enemy combatants, and perhaps even noncombatants, is not justified by the fact that you are punishing them for some offense they committed. On the contrary, they may be right good fellows through and through. Killing in warfare (or clan warfare) is not punishment at all; it falls under a different heading.
In Case 3, for example in the Glencoe massacre, I presume the real justification was to cement the power of William of Orange, which might otherwise have been on shaky ground. This action was widely condemned, but not universally condemned, and William felt he could get away with it so it must have been plausibly justified in his culture. When I see something like this, I don't ask, "Wow, how could they be so crazy?". I ask, "Wow, what makes that moral convention adaptive for national survival?" What I take away from events like this is how important it was to the survival of feudal nations for the King to have strong moral authority. Without that, national defense would be a tragedy of the commons.
Case 4 is, in my opinion, the one that is truly based on a notion collective punishment.
How could people be so crazy?What is adaptive about that? What is adaptive about that is that, if you manage to convince enough people that the targeted class (the bourgeoise, white people, Jews, whatever) is the root of all evil, then, like Lenin, Hitler, and Mao, you and your constituents can self-righteously steal the property of large numbers of people who have done nothing wrong. The push for reparations is nothing but a pretext for banditry -- the same as in Marxism and Nazi antisemitism.This seems wrong in context. SOP in societies where the law of slavery made it a possibility (which OT Israel very much was) was to enslave the women and children of the vanquished tribe. Killing them is salting the earth of Carthage or melting down Ned Stark's Valyrian steel greatsword - it is needless destruction of newly-acquired war booty to make a point (probably mostly to your own side) about how destructive your vengeance can be.
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Case 3 I’m pretty sure is most common in Chinese dynasties.
Agreed - massacring relatives who might pose a threat is very widespread, but Chinese law was unusual in legitimating clan extermination for cases of real or imagined high treason. I seem to recall this was the fate of the sequence of imperial in-laws that dominated most of the Eastern Han (which makes you wonder why families kept putting that much energy into attaining that position).
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