Punishment and Personal Responsibility

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But if society is not “great, decent, justifiable, defensible or perhaps
somehow necessary”, then claims that the state has a right, indeed maybe
even a duty, to punish lawbreakers seem problematic, for we could only
justify the defence of a society that is worth defending. And a deeply
unequal society, where poverty breeds crime, may seem precisely an
indefensible society. To say that deprived criminals deserve punishment
here appears stark – indeed a “transcendental sanction of the status quo”,
as Marx put it.
I have two things I want to say about this important critique of retributivism.
They are less counterarguments than reflections of mine.
First, in the case that retributivism should apply to non-ideal settings,
should retributivists advocate policies that reduce crime? We need to ask
whether there is something in retributivism which precludes us from
addressing the kind of social injustices that breed crime. Second, if the
charge that retributivism provides a “transcendental sanction of the
status quo” is to be any different from the objection from non-existence,
it is unclear whether poverty is a justification or an excuse. If the latter, we
still have reasons to hold responsible.
Should we reduce crime? On preventive policies and retributivism.
A curios question, which is a consequence of the symbolic properties of
retribution argued in this book, is this: if punishment is so great, why
should we have less crime?
The awkwardness of this question is not difficult to pinpoint. Intuitively,
most of us would prefer less crime to more crime. In fact, many of
us would prefer a society where most of what we know as crime does not
happen at all. 359 But since retributivists argue that punishment expresses
and reinstates the valuable notion of personal responsibility they seem
forced to ask whether we should in fact prefer less crime to more. If
359 Following what I said in chapter 2, I here assume that there is a list actions or
omissions that are crimes, and that if few/no actions on the list were performed,
there would be little/no crime and hence little/no punishment. I thus do not
assume that society, given that it cuts rates of crime as we know it, would proceed
to criminalize other acts.