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Moving from Punishment to Compensation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 June 2015

Jan Narveson
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Extract

Punishment consists in doing things to people which are expectedly undesirable from the point of view of the recipients. These have typically included the infliction of physical pain, deprivation of life itself, and, for long the standard form, deprivation of liberty of movement, in the form of a period in jail. We have a fairly strong prima facie duty to refrain from inflicting such things on anyone. (Some might even think that we have a rigorous, or “absolute” duty thus to refrain, but that would make punishment necessarily unjustifiable.) But if we accept any such duty—as we all do—then the question of justification for punishment obviously arises, for clearly we need to justify the doing of what is normally wrong. We need to show why certain kinds of non-normal behavior call for punishment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Law & Jurisprudence , Volume 5 , Issue 1: Reflections on Sentencing and Corrections , January 1992 , pp. 57 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 1992

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References

1. Throughout I lean on three extremely valuable articles: Barnett, Randy E., “Restitution: A New Paradigm of Criminal Justice” (1977) 87 Ethics 279,Google Scholar and “The Justice of Restitution” (1980) 25 The American Journal of Jurisprudence 270–reprinted in Narveson, J., ed., Moral Issues (Toronto: Oxford, 1983) 140–53Google Scholar—and especially Hajdin, Mane, “Criminals as Gamblers: A Modified Theory of Pure Restitution” (1987) XXVI Dialogue 77.Google Scholar

2. See Hajdin, ibid, at 78.

3. Ibid, at 83.