Punishment and the Body
1 Honorary Fellow, Department of Philosophy, University of York;
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Received: 23 Feb 2021 / Revised: 15 Apr 2021 / Accepted: 21 Mar 2021 / Published: 25 Apr 2021
Abstract
Suppose we accept that punishment can be legitimate. What form should it take? Many of us believe that it can be acceptable to fine or imprison someone, but that capital punishment, along with corporal punishment in its various manifestations, is wholly unacceptable. I suggest that it is hard to account for or justify this distinction. But granting that resistance to these latter forms is unlikely to be dislodged, and granting too that imprisonment in particular is hardly problem-free, it is worth considering whether there might be alternatives. And I argue here that we should consider enforced coma as a procedure having many advantages over the more familiar methods of delivering a penalty. Of course, there are disadvantages also. The aim isn’t to offer a detailed and practical solution to the problem of crime, but to explore some of the presumptions and principles involved in our thinking about punishment.
Keywords: punishment; crime; capital punishment; death penalty; coma
OPEN ACCESS
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution
License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).
CITE
Belshaw, C. Punishment and the Body. Controversial_Ideas 2021, 1, 10.
Belshaw C. Punishment and the Body. Journal of Controversial Ideas. 2021; 1(1):10.
Belshaw, Christopher. 2021. "Punishment and the Body." Controversial_Ideas 1, no. 1: 10.
Not implemented
SHARE
