Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The notions of punishment and responsibility display a tight conceptual connection. Punishment reveals the point of holding someone responsible for a wrongful act; and responsibility enables us to make sense of punishment. Both punishment and responsibility are recognized “for” something. The object of the “for” bears certain logical characteristics. Punishment consists in unpleasant consequences imposed for something that has happened in the past. It makes no sense to punish someone now for something that may or may not happen in the future. Also, punishment is typically imposed for a human action. At times in the past, governments ventured to punish animals, but that happened presumably because officials attributed to them responsibility for their actions. The answer to the question “What is punishment?” is philosophical or conceptual. We have a strong intuition that it is not apt to call shooting a dog with rabies an instance of punishment. It is a preventive measure designed to protect the health of human beings. This intuition leads us to perceive the implicit rule for saying that shooting a dog with rabies is non-punitive in nature. We can infer that punishment is always imposed “for” some past event and not for the sake of protecting people from an ongoing danger. There are many human institutions that resemble our preventive actions toward animals. Civil commitment of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text