Abstract
Suppose we accept that punishment can be legitimate. What form should it take? Many of us believe that it can be acceptable to fine or imprison someone, but that capital punishment, along with corporal punishment in its various manifestations, is wholly unacceptable. I suggest that it is hard to account for or justify this distinction. But granting that resistance to these latter forms is unlikely to be dislodged, and granting too that imprisonment in particular is hardly problem-free, it is worth considering whether there might be alternatives. And I argue here that we should consider enforced coma as a procedure having many advantages over the more familiar methods of delivering a penalty. Of course, there are disadvantages also. The aim isn’t to offer a detailed and practical solution to the problem of crime, but to explore some of the presumptions and principles involved in our thinking about punishment.
Highlights
Ideas of personhood, agency, and responsibility are linked together
To punish someone is surely in some way or other to harm them, and to harm them in such a way that they understand harm is being done in return for what, at least allegedly, they did.[1]
We can only punish persons or quasipersons—not babies, most animals, the seriously brain damaged—and, in contrast to taking revenge, we can punish only those who are at the time it is meted out aware that they are being punished
Summary
Agency, and responsibility are linked together. Linked too is the notion of desert, and along with that the business of reward and punishment. To punish someone is surely in some way or other to harm them, and to harm them in such a way that they understand harm is being done in return for what, at least allegedly, they did.[1] Those being punished, the idea is, see the relation between their activity and this result, and understand the claim, whether or not they agree, that the harm is deserved. Some find the whole idea of punishment as sketched here deeply repellent. Elsewhere this might be discussed at length but I am going to assume that punishment, understood in this way—retributive, backwardlooking, not a million miles from an eye for an eye—can be legitimate or appropriate. The focus is on punishment imposed by the state on those who have been found guilty of some crime
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