Punishment and the Duties of Offenders

This paper offers a partial critique of one of the central lines of argument in Victor Tadros’ The Ends of Harm: his attempt to show that a system of deterrent punishment can avoid the objection that it treats those who are punished ‘merely as means’ to our goals, by arguing that we may legitimately use someone as a means if in doing so we are simply forcing her to do what she anyway had an enforceable duty to do. I raise some questions about the idea of forcing someone to do what she has a duty to do; about what duties a wrongdoer incurs towards his victim, and how they may be enforced; and about whether we can move from such duties to a justification of criminal punishment as a deterrent.