Punishment and Personal Responsibility

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fewer crimes are committed and hence fewer persons punished – what
happens then to the notion of personal responsibility?
To answer this question, we need to realize that punishment is not
the only way to express and reinforce personal responsibility. First of all,
we may get the same effect from praising and rewarding people. The principle
of personal responsibility is equally served by rewarding praiseworthy
people as it is by punishing blameworthy people. Moreover, our
everyday interpersonal relationships and exchanges are absolutely
steeped with expressions of personal responsibility - if you forget your
spouse’s birthday, you will still be resented even though crime, and
hence legal punishment, has been eradicated. In fact, the whole idea behind
the retributivist case is that crime and punishment should be conceived
just as any other area of social and political life. It is a matter of
making legal punishment resemble the kind of appropriate blame your
spouse will subject you to when you forget his or her birthday, not to
make punishment the bastion and sole expression of personal responsibility.
Once we realize this, nothing stops a retributivist from desiring that
crime be reduced. After all, crime is (most of the time) wrongdoing, and it
would be odd to say that a state of affairs with more wrongdoing is better
than one with less – we do not prohibit theft in order to punish
thieves, but because we want to express that theft is unacceptable. 360
However, a retributivist could not coherently defend any means of reducing
crime. He or she could not, as we have argued, defend pre-emptive
incarceration of risk-individuals. The same goes for “curing” recidivists
by subjecting them to treatment that violates their status as autonomous
agents, or deterring crime through a wildly disproportional penal
scheme. 361 Nothing stops the retributivist from addressing the kind of
360 If it seems backwards to criminalize theft simply to be able to punish thieves,
note that some have argued in structurally similar ways. Aristotle, for instance,
criticized Plato’s scheme of collective property on the ground that it would rob
people of the opportunity to exercise the virtue of generosity (Aristoteles 2003:
1263b). One could say, following this line of thought, that we enact behavioural
rules simply to make wrongdoing possible and thereby allow for the exercise of
self-restraint, or similar virtues.
361 A puzzle, however, is what to make of a system of perfect deterrence. Perfect
deterrence is when punishments or sanctions are so deterring that no unwanted