ABSTRACT
Antony Duff and I share, as he points out in his chapter, a communicative perspective on the criminal sanction’s general justification:1 punishment, we both believe, should be conceptualised as a form of censure. Penal censure has important moral functions that are not reducible to crime prevention. A response to criminal wrongdoing that conveys blame gives the individual the opportunity to respond in ways that are typically those of an agent capable of moral deliberation: to recognise the wrongfulness of the action; feel remorse; make efforts to desist in future – or else, to try to give reasons why the conduct was not actually wrong. What a purely “neutral” sanction not embodying blame would deny, even if no less effective in preventing crime, is precisely this recognition of the person’s status as a moral agent. A neutral sanction would treat offenders and potential offenders much as beasts in a circus, as creatures which must merely be conditioned, intimidated, or restrained.
