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Note on Defining 'Punishment'

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1978

Don E. Scheid
Don E. Scheid*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Extract

Dictionaries distinguish the following senses of ‘punishment’:

  1. (1a) the act of punishing, or the fact of being punished - where ‘punish’ is defined as: an act of public authority causing an offender to suffer for an offense. As In: ‘the respectable not only obey the law, but punish those who refuse to do so’.

  2. (1b) that which is inflicted as a penalty for an offense. As in: ‘all punishments are to be carried out in the Barrack Yard’, ‘fit the punishment to the crime’.

  3. (2) severe handling or treatment causing heavy damage, injury or loss. As in: ‘the fighter had been subjected to heavy punishment in his losing bout’, ‘the ships received considerable punishment from the batteries’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , September 1980 , pp. 453 - 462
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1980

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References

1 See the Oxford English Dictionary, The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and also Webster's Third New International Dictionary.

2 Flew, Anthony “The Justification of Punishment”, Philosophy 29 (October 1954).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ibid., pp. 292–293.

4 On precising definitions, see: Copi, Irving M. Introduction to Logic, (New York: Macmillan, 1972) pp. 121–122.Google Scholar

5 Benn, S. I. “An Approach to the Problems of Punishment”, Philosophy, 33 (October 1958).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Reprinted in: Benn, S. I. and Peters, R. S. The Principles of Political Thought, (New York: Free Press, 1965).Google Scholar

Hart, H. L .A. “Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 60 (1959-60).Google Scholar Reprinted in: Hart, H. L. A. Punishment and Responsibility, (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

6 See especially: Mabbott, J. D. “Professor Flew on Punishment”, Philosophy, 30 (July 1955).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Manser, A. R. “It Serves You Right”, Philosophy, 37 (October 1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar McCloskey, H. J. “The Complexity of the Concepts of Punishment”, Philosophy, 37 (October 1962).Google Scholar Samek, Robert A. “Punishment: A Postscript to Two Prolegomena”, Philosophy, 41 (July 1966).CrossRefGoogle Scholar McPherson, Thomas “Punishment: Definition and Justification”, Analysis, 26 (October 1967).Google Scholar

7 Op. cit., pp. 293–294.

8 Ibid., p. 292.

9 Ibid., p. 303.

10 Op. cit., in The Principles of Political Thought, p. 202.

11 Op. cit., in Punishment and Responsibility, p. 5.

12 The first of these, (iii), of course refers to the guilty party, the person who broke the rule or committed the crime. In criterion (v), the word ‘authority’ is to be understood broadly. Flew says that authority is not restricted to legal authority; such authorities as a parent, a dean of a college, a court of law, or even an umpire, acting as such, could properly speaking, impose punishment. Op. cit., p. 294.

13 See: Quinton, A.M. “On Punishment”, Analysis, 14 (June 1954);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Baier, K. “Is Punishment Retributive?, Analysis, 16 (December 1955).CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also: Armstrong, K. G. “The Retributivist Hits Back,” Mind, 70 (1961);Google Scholar Ewing, A. C. “Armstrong on the Retributive Theory,” Mind, 72, (January 1963);Google Scholar Locke, Don ‘The Many Faces of Punishment,” Mind, 72 (October 1963).Google Scholar

14 Op. cit., p. 221.

15 In cases where law and order have broken down, however, the vigilance committee may claim a kind of temporary authority.

16 The solutions offered by Quinton and Flew are ably criticized by Baier, op. cit. Armstrong's solution in “The Retributivist Hits Back,” op. cit., is to distinguish a weak way and a strong way in which a sequence of words, X, can make sense. If X makes sense in a weak way, this means that when we hear X we can understand what is being asserted by the speaker, and it is not necessarily implied that he is using all the words in X in their exactly proper way. Armstrong's example is ‘They half killed him’. This makes sense in the weak way, although killing, strictly speaking, is a deed that allows of no degrees — a man is either killed or he is not. On the other hand, if X makes sense in the strong way, then this means that each word has been used correctly “so that an analytical substitution can be made for any term involved without revealing any contradiction, inconsistency, or other logical impropriety.”

Armstrong claims that ‘He was punished for something he did not do’ makes sense in the weak way, but not in the strong way. This analysis of such state– ments is, of course, consistent with a definition of ‘punishment’ which treats criterion (iii) (of an offender) as necessary.

Although I cannot prove that this view is mistaken, I do not find it very per– suasive. It seems to me that it is Just not true that ‘He was punished for some– thing he did not do’ can only make sense in the same weak way that ‘They half killed him’ makes sense. One difference is that when one understands ‘They half killed him', one understands that they did not kill him at all; but to understand ‘He was punished for something he did not do’ is not to understand that he was not punished at all. The final appeal, perhaps, must be to one's linguistic intuitions; but I (and I suspect many others) do not share Armstrong's intuitions on this.

17 Op. cit., pp. 568–569.

18 This example is Flew's in: Acton, H. B. ed., The Philosophy of Punishment, (London: St. Martin's Press, 1969), p. 102.Google Scholar

19 Another of Samek's examples, op. cit.

20 Benn, op. cit., p. 212.

21 This example is taken from: Kasachkoff, Tziporah F. Theories of Punishment, unpublished doctoral dissertation, (New York University, October 1972), p. 87.Google Scholar

22 I wish to thank my former colleague Marilyn Fischer for many helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.