Punishment and the Appropriate Response to Wrongdoing

Abstract

My main aims in this paper are to further clarify and defend the Duty View of punishment, outlined in my book The Ends of Harm, by responding to some objections to it, and by exploring some variations on that view. I briefly lay out some steps in the justification of punishment that I defend more completely in Chapter 12 of The Ends of Harm. I offer some further support for these steps. They justify punishment of an offender for general deterrence reasons if the beneficiary of general deterrence is the victim of the crime. They do so firstly on the basis that offenders incur compensatory duties to victims. I then show that duties incurred through serious wrongdoing are not limited to the duty to provide full compensation. Because offenders incur the relevant duties, and the duties are enforceable, harming them to protect their victims does not wrong them. I then consider whether an offender can be harmed in order to protect people other than the victims of her crime. In this section, I respond to an important challenge to the general idea that we can justify punishment on the basis of duties incurred as a result of wrongdoing, a challenge that I had met only in part in The Ends of Harm. It might be argued that the duties that we incur through serious wrongdoing are owed only to victims of crime. In punishing offenders, in contrast, we aim to protect people in a society more generally, and not just crime victims. A plausible theory of punishment must demonstrate that we are justified in pursuing this aim. Hence, it might be argued, the Duty View fails. I will respond by showing that the duties incurred through wrongdoing are not limited to duties owed to victims, and hence this challenge to the Duty View can be met.