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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
There are many difficulties connected with the notion of punishment, but perhaps it is not disputed that it is at least a deliberate infliction of pain of one kind or another. Of course, that is not an adequate description of its nature, but so far as it goes it seems to be a true one.1 And the idea that it could be morally right deliberately tp inflict pain on another, unlike, for example, the idea that it is morally right to tell the truth, is so manifestly intolerable unless we look beyond the infliction of pain itself that we are tempted to leap forward to the question, “What is the justification of such action?” before making quite explicit to ourselves what it is, over and above its being the deliberate infliction of pain, that constitutes the action punishment at all. The questions “Why hurt?” and “Why punish?” are confused with one another. No doubt some distinction between them is present vaguely in everyone's mind and the confusion may not be in fact serious: but anyhow it is a defect and should be remedied.
page 281 note 1 See, however, the concluding section of this discussion.
page 283 note 1 Ethical Studies, second edition, p. 27.
page 283 note 2 Dr. Ewing, in his book. The Morality of Punishment, does not seem to me to recognize this.
page 284 note 1 It will hardly be denied that action of the first sort is in some sense wrongdoing. But it may be objected that nobody would, in fact, regard an action that was a wrongdoing only in that sense as a case for punishment. Even if that objection is valid against the wording of the present paragraph, it will, I think, be met by the modification of this disjunction on p. 287.
page 286 note 1 Of course, as the Provost of Oriel has suggested (The Right and the Good, pp. 63-4), it may inter alia be the fulfilment of a promise “to the injured person and his friends, and to society” to which a particular right on the side of the injured person, etc., corresponds. But though (on an intuitionist view of the obligation to keep promises) the justification of the penalty will be found pro tanto really and not merely apparently by reference to the past, that in the past to which reference is made will be a promise-making and not a wrongdoing, and the penalty will accordingly also be pro tanto not a punishment but the keeping of a promise. Perhaps the legalistic retributive view just mentioned, which is MrMabbott's, (Mind, April 1939)Google Scholar, confuses punishment with such a promise-keeping; though in this case the promise would be rather to the criminal himself than to society.
page 286 note 2 No doubt the illusion is assisted by the use of the term “desert” mentioned on p. 285, as well as by the second consideration about to be discussed. Indeed, that use of “desert” may perhaps be regarded as a bridge between the two considerations here put forward.
page 287 note 1 I cannot see that the conclusion that the essence of punishment is not retribution for moral guilt follows from the assertion (even if it be true) that no one, in fact, possesses the status that would entitle him to inflict such retribution. It might simply be the case that the word “punishment” names a kind of act no one could be right in performing; or, if the notion of punishment is supposed to include that of its practicability, that the word is a “vox nihili” in the same sense in which “square triangle” is.
page 288 note 1 Pp. 4–6.
page 289 note 1 The Right and the Good, pp. 57–8.
page 289 note 2 Naturally I here leave out of account the Provost's discussion of the considerations governing the State-action that is called punishment.
page 289 note 3 DrEwing's, theory of the sense in which punishment can be an endin-itself (The Morality of Punishment, pp. 107sqq.)Google Scholar is, as he himself says, not strictly a retributive one. Rather he seems to me to be doing in one way what the two following sections of this paper are doing in another. But I do not find his view very clear or convincing.
page 290 note 1 E.g. Rashdall, , Theory of Good and Evil, vol. i, p. 289.Google Scholar
page 291 note 1 Carritt, , The Theory of Morals, p. 110.Google Scholar
page 291 note 2 On this view it seems that the more hardened a criminal is the less is he guilty. The position is not free from paradox, but neither is the denial of it.
page 291 note 3 The act must, of course, be attended by the consciousness that it is wrong, and I do not think that that consciousness can be other than in some degree painful. But is that enough to constitute remorse? Cf.infra, the distinction of “rational” and “pathological” remorse. Certainly the act cannot be accompanied and need not be followed by a renewal of moral resolution.
page 294 note 1 In regard to the foregoing argument it may be noted that some who would accept the view that it is only in virtue of its social reference that a moral failure breeds the sense that punishment is deserved would deny that a reference to a natural society is involved in all cases where this sense is felt. It is then inferred that, certainly in some cases and perhaps in all, the essential condition of the sense that punishment is deserved is an awareness, however obscure, of a relationship with God. Whether this is so cannot here be discussed: but even if the point were conceded, it would constitute a development and not a contradiction of what I have said.
page 295 note 1 It is, however, perfectly in keeping with the New Testament teaching that “whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet stumble in one point, he is become guilty of all” (James ii, 10).
page 296 note 1 Cf. Mr. Carritt's British Academy lecture (1937), “An Ambiguity of the Word ‘Good.’ “
