Punishment and Personal Responsibility

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thus responses to rule breaking that are compatible with the truth of HD.
They do not presuppose responsibility as retribution does. 307
What about deterrence? This penal aim also seems compatible with
the truth of HD. As long as people are rational in the sense that they respond
to threats, the fact that rule breakers are not morally responsible
for their crimes is unimportant. It is true that if HD is correct, the rule
breakers who in fact break the rules could not have done otherwise –
they were causally determined to do so. It follows that there can be no
sense in blaming them in virtue of fact that they deserve it. But deterrence
as a penal aim has never been about blaming for the sake of blaming,
but about imposing pain or deprivation in order to deter potential
rule breakers from future rule breaking. And as long as some potential
rule breakers are impressionable in this respect, punishment of the undeserving
can be justified on utilitarian grounds. Indeed, even if we assume
that there are people who will commit crime quite regardless of each and
any penal threat, and who thus could never be deterred, one could still
punish the undeterrable in order to deter the deterrable (see Mackie 1990:
ch. 10). A deterrentist penal regime, like a rehabilitationalist one, is thus
fully compatible with HD.
Democracy
I suggested earlier that there is a deep conceptual connection between
retributivism and democracy. Both emphasise autonomy, and both essentially
rest, or claim to rest, on the idea that people’s choices are worthy of
respect. If the thesis of hard determinism challenges retributivism, does it
also challenge democracy?
307 It is instructive to note that hard determinism and some retributivists here
come full circle and coincide. Pereboom actually shares common ground with the
retributivists when he claims that HD invalidates retribution since it invalidates
moral desert. A retributivist who treats desert as purely a conditional for justified
punishment will readily agree. Such a retributivist does not assume that rule
breakers in general deserve punishment. But if they do not deserve punishment,
they cannot be justly punished – and the truth retributivism explains why.
Again, see Corlett 2001.