Can an Action be its Own Punishment?

Abstract

An attempt to vindicate Retributivism as a moral theory has been made by Professor Winch in the context of a discussion of punishment and reward as non-institutional concepts. His method is to divorce the concepts from the institutions of punishment and reward by considering them as they feature in the recipient's consciousness. It is in the area of the agent's awareness of his relation to his past actions that Retributivism can be made to flourish again and its moral content revealed. I am in sympathy with Winch's attempt to reinstate the theory but, whatever the strengths of his position, there seem to be insuperable difficulties for the approach that takes the recipient's state of mind as having priority over the institutions. I shall examine Winch's argument in order to show that the Utilitarian theory cannot be so easily jettisoned and that the truth would seem to lie in a compatibilism between the two.