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Can an Action be its Own Punishment?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Margaret Paton
Margaret Paton
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Extract

An attempt to vindicate Retributivism as a moral theory has been made by Professor Winch in the context of a discussion of punishment and reward as non-institutional concepts. His method is to divorce the concepts from the institutions of punishment and reward by considering them as they feature in the recipient's consciousness. It is in the area of the agent's awareness of his relation to his past actions that Retributivism can be made to flourish again and its moral content revealed. I am in sympathy with Winch's attempt to reinstate the theory but, whatever the strengths of his position, there seem to be insuperable difficulties for the approach that takes the recipient's state of mind as having priority over the institutions. I shall examine Winch's argument in order to show that the Utilitarian theory cannot be so easily jettisoned and that the truth would seem to lie in a compatibilism between the two.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 54 , Issue 210 , October 1979 , pp. 534 - 540
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979

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References

1 ‘Ethical Reward and Punishment’, in Ethics and Action (EA) by Winch, Peter, 210–228Google Scholar; originally published in The Human World No. 1 (11 1970), 34–49.Google Scholar

2 EA 212.

3 ‘Can a Good Man be Harmed?’ (CGMH) included in EA 193–209; originally published in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (1965–1966), 55–70.Google Scholar

4 I am indebted to Mr H. S. Eveling for his remarks on this section of the Tractatus.

5 EA 219.

6 EA 222–223.

7 The question of non-causal punishment is also discussed by Winch in CGMH, EA 199.