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Since responsibility (as construed in the previous chapter) is necessary for punishment, then the extent to which persons are unfree (in capitalist societies or otherwise) is the extent to which they do not qualify as punishable agents. Thus if punishment abolitionism of this variety is correct, then it would be morally wrong to punish offenders no matter what crimes they commit. This claim assumes that act utilitarianism about punishment and responsibility is implausible in its allowing for the punishment of persons who are not guilty so 5 Karl Marx, “Capital Punishment,” in L.

39 But there is even more to responsibility than the preceding paragraph indicates. One question to be raised here is the extent of the scope of responsibility for one’s actions. 40 That depends on whether or not I acted voluntarily. But what sense of “acting voluntarily” is relevant here: acting voluntarily to drink, or to drive, or both? If one is a genuine alcoholic, at least a serious one, then one suffers from a disease that mitigates substantially one’s freedom to, say, not drink. Thus one’s drinking is not under sufficient control to hold the alcoholic responsible for drinking.

G. E. Moore also defends a version of retributivism in G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 214. Rawls, Collected Papers, p. 22. For a discussion of the differences between utilitarian and retributivist models of punishment, see Mark A. ” American Philosophical Quarterly, 29 (1992), pp. 2f. CHAPTER 2 38 to others caused by the criminal, all things considered, and based on the proper assessment of the criminal’s moral retrospective liability responsibility for the harm.