ABSTRACT
What distinguishes blame and punishment alike from remedial treatment, of the sort we might give to offenders who cannot help themselves, is that they presuppose a capacity on the offender's part to act on rational decisions rather than to be merely a patient, subject to emotions and other forms of stimulation. Some writers, including Hegel and his disciples, have been so impressed by this distinction that they have treated punishment as a sort of tribute to the criminal's moral autonomy, as a kind of fundamental right.12 Others have repudiated the reformative approach to punishment because they feel that it treats the person who has the capacity to make his own rational decisions as if he were a lunatic or a child. To punish or to blame, they would say, is compatible with respecting a man's dignity as a moral agent; to undertake to reform his character is not. Though such views might not be acceptable on other grounds, they do rightly stress the close relation between punishment and responsibility, which distinguishes it from remedial treatment, like that administered by the 'straightener' of Butler's Erewhon. They implicitly admit the distinction we have stressed between what a man does, which conforms to a rule-following purposive model, and things which happen to him which can be sufficiently explained in causal terms.
