I recognize that the title of this essay is not strikingly original; nor is the topic. I should say at the outset, therefore, that this is not an essay about Dostoevsky, or even about legal theory—an area about which I am largely ignorant. It is rather about the traditional question of whether punishment can be justified, if at all, on other than practical grounds—and whether the practical, or instrumental, justification suffices.

Familiar justifications for punishment include the idea that the punishment is a deterrent for others; that it is a preventive means that makes the criminal physically incapable, temporarily or permanently, of committing further crimes; that it is an instrument of re-education; and that it is an act of retribution. One also finds some combination of the above. In the first three cases, the justification for punishment is practical; only in the case of retribution is it moral.

None of the practical reasons offered for punishment, it seems, requires the notion of responsibility, at least if this notion implies freedom of choice. One may always argue, as did Spinoza, that such a notion is irrelevant: Don’t we kill poisonous snakes without asking whether they enjoy liberum arbitrium, or even being certain that they do not? Don’t we remove from a road the stone that impairs our movements? On this view, punishing criminals does not differ from these sorts of practical measures.

The obvious trouble with this simple explanation is that we normally believe that people do differ