Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

ethics stops and public morality begins. There are laws around age of consent, adultery, bigamy, censorship, age limits for alcohol, voting, driving and legislation regarding the use of drugs and the availability of contraception. Whilst all or most of these are personal choices they also impact on others.

What of punishment? Here, alas, there is something of a break in the process that I have been describing over the last several chapters. For better or worse — we believe in the importance of punishment when the principles of fairness appear to have been violated. The awkward fact is that the desire to punish offenders is also based on value. If we are going to allow for innate qualities of goodness, then we seem to be obliged to recognise our innate tendencies towards retribution and even cruelty. We will explore a little more of what this might mean presently, but for now, let’s look at how some of the moral theories we’ve been exploring deal with the issues of punishment and retribution.

Utilitarianism includes punishment of offenders only if this provides some benefit to the offender, to society or to both. The criminal here might become better behaved for being punished, or maybe others will be deterred from crime as a result of the punishment. Criminal activity causes unhappiness for its victims, so preventing crime increases happiness. Utilitarians potentially see no limit to the amount of punishment that can be inflicted if this increases general happiness. They may also justify punishing an innocent person. But we might ask: Is it reasonable that any amount of

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