Given your question, you may be interested in a discussion of Strawson's NYTimes article at the free will/moral responsibility blog, Flickers of Freedom, here.

There's also a discussion on retribution and punishment (and psychopaths) at the blog here.

You'll see in these discussions that there are plenty of philosophers (called compatibilists) who think that free will and moral responsibility are possible even if determinism is true, and who reject Strawson's argument against the possibility of freedom and responsibility. These compatibilists will generally say that retributive punishment is justified, though they might also think that punishing (or treating) criminals for consequentialist reasons (such as deterrence and rehabilitation) is also important.

My own view is that we can have free will and moral responsibility (determinism is irrelevant to this issue), but that we have less than we think (because the sciences of the mind are showing that we have less self-knowledge and conscious control than we think). So, I think retributive punishment can be justified, but usually criminals deserve less of this sort of punishment than our system doles out. We should put more emphasis on the forward-looking purposes of punishment (or, if you wish, call it quarantine and rehabilitation).

You make two good points. On the first, re death penalty, I would agree that there are cases where it's crystal clear that the accused is guilty. But this is really beside the point. The question is whether we can design a mechanism that correctly identifies these cases. In the absence of such a mechanism, we must be especially reluctant to use the death penalty.

Your other point is that perhaps we should incorporate into criminal verdicts an assessment (by the judge or jury) of the degree of certainty. But again, there is the question how accurate this assessment would be. And there is the further point that it would look quite bad to impose a severe punishment on someone with the comment that we've just barely reached the minimally required level of certainty. Better then perhaps to handle this issue unofficially: just as jurors sometimes acquit someone who very clearly did what the law proscribes when they feel the person did nothing wrong (example: the killing of a suffering and terminally ill spouse), a judge may sometimes impose a lesser penalty because she is less than fully convinced that the person really committed the crime.

And a possibly interesting footnote on this second point. In the case of acquittals, as well, one could incorporate an assessment (by the judge or the jury) of the degree of certainty. And this is actually done, I believe, in Scottish jurisprudence, which allows -- aside from "guilty" and "innocent" -- a third verdict of "not proven." The accused goes free, but has not been fully cleared of the charges brought against her or him.

Thank you for your message. I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind when you presuppose, in your first sentence, that "we" consider the death penalty immoral in the situation you describe. So far as I can tell, at least in the U.S., a good many people consider the death penalty in such a situation moral. But to continue the line of thought you begin, let's see whether it might be possible to make sense of those people who consider it immoral in that situation.

1. You're right that the sadist might get a lot of benefits at taxpayer expense. On the other hand, it's well known that at least given the current difficulty of prosecuting a death penalty case, and all the hurdles that must be got over after that, lifelong incarceration is actually less expensive than the death penalty. As a result, if your argument rests on the financial considerations, a life sentence is clearly the best option for such a person.

2. You ask whether reluctance to inflict the death penalty is out of fear, and that all moral argumentation is simply rationalization. Of course that's possible, but I have no idea how we would go about settling such a question short of subjecting each person offering this moral argumentation to rigorous psychotherapy. I think that unless you're able to provide evidence of which I'm not aware, you'd have to agree that there's no current way to know the answer to your question. Of course that means that we shouldn't accept any suggestion, whether you're making it or not, that moral argumentation really *is* motivated by fear. The same goes for your rhetorical question whether we are really just moral cowards. My answer would simply be: I don't know, do you?

3. One can be relieved that a dangerous and morally evil person has died, while still valuing his life. Consider another case: A very old and ailing relative might finally pass away, and all of those who were caring for her might find her passing a relief, both because it relieved her suffering and lessened their burden. But I think they would be offended, and rightly so, by someone suggesting that they didn't value her life. Of course they did; it is just that their valuing it didn't mean they wanted it to go on forever no matter its quality. So too, just because I might be relieved that the sadist is dead, doesn't mean that I don't value his life. More generally, many people will say that a person's life has value no matter how evil they are or have been. I'm not saying that those people are definitely correct, but when you describe the sadist's life as one "we obviously do not value at all," I would suggest that view is not obvious; many reasonable people will even deny it.

So I hope you'll consider whether the issues here might be more complex than your question suggests. I should stress that I would share all the repugnance and horror at the sadist that you do; as would most everyone else. I am only stressing, in my reply, that those who would refrain from inflicting the death penalty in such a case might have more to be said on their behalf than you perhaps envision.

Mitch Green

This kind of objection often comes up, but I think is based upon a misunderstanding of what it means to be a "peer" in the required (legal) sense. One is my "peer" if one is a fellow citizen with all associated rights and responsibilities. That person doesn't have to be my equal in strength, or intelligence, or at basketball--he or she simply has to be my equal as a citizen. If their vote counts as much as mine, they're my peer.

In his Republic, Plato said (with evident contempt) that democracy was something like government by "bald-headed tinkers." (I resemble that!) But at the heart of democratic theory is the idea that all people are "created equal," by which the theorist cannot sensibly mean "equal in all things." The point is that we are all, or at least should be all, regarded as politically and legally equal. Other political theories--including especially Plato's--obviously reject this idea. Plato especially thought that political decisions--just like all medical decisions--should be made only by those with appropriate expertise. It is a little difficult to identify just how we would identify this expertise, however, how we could produce it in a class of rulers (or judges), and how we could avoid corruption of such a system.

I'm with you. But for me, the concern is not so much men vs. women and their respective rights, but the nature of punishment and who really ought to become a parent. The crucial problem with this case is that the murderer in question is currently incarcerated. There are certain rights which prisoners maintain, despite their crimes. The right to medical care. The right to worship. The right to have access to legal counsel. The right to live in a place that is safe while incarcerated. Putting someone in a dank hole to rot isn't justice, no matter the crime committed. One of the many social purposes of incarceration is punishment.

Punishment ought to hurt, but not too much (see note on dark hole above). No doubt it is painful for prisoners not to be able to do things that free people otherwise enjoy. But this strikes us as the fair price paid for committing crimes. I think the human right to have a family is on shaky grounds, much more shaky than the right for prisoners to have health, spiritual, and legal care. One reason for this is our tradition of human rights long predates the required biotechnology. Locke and Hobbes just weren't worried about smuggling sperm out of jail. A better reason why we shouldn't think of prisoners as having a human right to have a family while incarcerated is the potential life at stake: the future child. Society should come to the point of admitting that ethically, not everyone ought to become a parent. Who would I ban from parenting? It would be a great list to debate. But people currently incarcerated sounds like a good place to start. It would be taking things too far to say that convicted murderers should never become parents. If someone earns parole, turns his life around, and becomes a model citizen then I think - as far as the law is concerned - a convicted murderer might have the same chance that anyone else has to parent. Of course, would I say the same thing if the person in question was a convicted child molester-murder? Probably not, but my concern again would be ethics and not the reach of the law.

I think it comes down to a question of guilt or innocence. A criminal has committed a major sin, and hence deserves a major punishment: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and a life for a life. Even just an ordinary adult will have some track-record of sin behind them -- none of us are perfect. They might not quite be evil enough to deserve to be targetted directly, but nevertheless it wouldn't be such a terrible thing if they were to become the victims of collateral damage in war. But an unborn baby, having had no opportunity to sin, is completely and utterly innocent, an unblemished soul, and consequently of greater moral worth.

As far as I can discern, that's roughly the idea that those fundamentalists have. Speaking for myself, I regard this attitude as wholly abhorrent, both antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and morally repugnant in itself. But, hey, that's just my opinion, and what do I know?

I agree that standard utilitarians would find it hard to justify retribution as such, that is, without appeal to such further effects as you mention: deterrence and satisfaction to injured parties. But I do not agree that this leaves many punishments without a utilitarian justification. The problem you see is that "it is easy to conceive of scenarios in which punishment does not act (1) as a deterrent to crime or (2) to relieve the suffering of any injured parties."

In fact, I believe, this is not so easy. Let's start with (2). Suppose someone murders a man who was a bit of a loner and not much liked by the few people who knew him. He won't be missed. So it may seem that punishing the murderer won't give satisfaction to any injured parties because no one is really injured by the man's demise. But this overlooks that there are others who have lost a loved one to murder and others on whose life an attempt has been made. They, too, are injured parties -- not injured, to be sure, by the murderer of our man, but injured by others with murderous intent. And they are likely to get satisfaction from the fact that murderers get caught and punished appropriately. Or so the utilitarian might say in response to you.

Somewhat similar thoughts apply to your (1). Here you may have in mind, perhaps, very rare crimes that virtually no one has any inclination to commit. It may seem that punishing such a crime would not deter anyone. But now imagine that we accepted your argument and stopped punishing crimes that virtually no one has any inclination to commit. Then those who have such very rare inclinations would take notice and feel much freer to follow them. The utilitarian response then is that, by punishing a crime that virtually no one would want to commit we are deterring not merely crimes of this kind, but also all the many other kinds of crimes that almost no one has any inclination to commit.

Perhaps you had another thought in the deterrence case. Perhaps you thought of crimes whose incidence would not be affected by the prospect of punishment. The law does recognize such cases, and does in fact offer leniency when the accused is shown to have been temporarily insane, for example. Utilitarianism would endorse such leniency, but with caution: there is a genuine danger that such leniency can have deleterious effects on deterrence by encouraging prospective criminals to believe that, with some advance planning and a good lawyer, they'll probably be able later in court to create some reasonable doubt about their sanity at the time of their crime.

In conclusion, I do not think that there really are many scenarios of pure retribution where punishment neither strengthens deterrence of crime nor gives satisfaction to any injured parties. With respect to the problem you pose, utilitarianism can account pretty well for our punitive practices. Utilitarianism does poorly, I think, in accounting for the severity of the punishments we mete out. Utilitarians would impose severe punishments when the extra harm to the criminal brings a larger reduction in the harm done by crime. Utilitarians might then impose a very severe punishment for a very slight crime, so long as this punishment has a dramatic impact on the incidence of this crime. An extreme example: imposing the death penalty for not wearing seat belts might cause a good number of executions annually. But it would also terrify millions of current scofflaws into reliably wearing their seat belts, thus saving perhaps many more persons than get executed from dying in accidents. If this were so, utilitarians might approve the death penalty in this case, while it would strike the rest of us as insanely disproportionate.