Two Examples

Abstract

A set of interconnected concepts — ‘authority’, ‘rules’, ‘punishment’, ‘institutions’, and others — mark, as I see it, logically inevitable or inexpellable features of human social life or interaction: concepts which are bound to have some application or instantiation, and which it will be both senseless and unnecessary to ‘challenge’, ‘question’, or ‘justify’ in general. This view stands in fairly sharp contrast to a good deal of philosophical literature; and the contrast is particularly evident in relation to one of these notions, the notion of punishment. For fairly obvious reasons, this notion has caused a good deal of soul searching among the tender-minded, and forms a good point of entry. Thus Peters, in a section entitled ‘The justification of punishment’ (1966, p. 169):

Punishment, then is retributive by definition. It is part of the meaning of the term that it must involve pain or unpleasantness and that it must be as a consequence of an offence…. It is not a law of nature that if people commit offences pain is inflicted on them. This happens regularly only because men have instituted legal systems which ordain that offenders will have pain inflicted on them.