Freedom and blame vs. freedom and punishment

            I think that Scanlon does a good job of showing how freedom is not a necessity for blame.  It is “asking too much to demand that we be ready to enter into relations of trust and cooperation, and various forms of friendly relations, with people who have shown that they no regard for our interests” (189), whether or not the blameworthy people truly chose to have certain attitudes or not.  However, although freedom may not be an important factor in blame in the way Scanlon discusses it, I think there is still a good reason why we care about whether someone was “truly free” in making a decision.

            I think when we move away from blame to legal punishment, whether a person was truly free or not in carrying out an action surely matters.  And while a somewhat vague sort of consideration of how a “factor can interact with blame” (178) may be sufficient when we consider in what way and to what degree we blame someone, it does not seem right to be so unclear when we consider punishment, which has a concrete effect on a person’s life.

            For example, let’s consider two people.  Person A tends to be violent, but he is this way because he grew up in an area A where violence was pervasive.  Had he grown up in another area, say area B, where there is no violence and everyone is well off, he would not be violent at all.  Person B also tends to be violent to the same degree as person A.  Person B also grew up in area B.  One day, let’s say that both person A and B assault someone due to their tendencies.  In Scanlon’s view, both can be blamed, and we are not required to have more friendly attitudes towards person A than person B, regardless of the fact that person A would not have done so had he grown up in area B.  This seems correct to me.  However, if person A and B received the same punishment, I would be uncomfortable with that decision.  Thus, although I may have equally modified attitudes towards the two people considering their violent attitudes, i.e. I blame them equally, I do not think that person A deserves the same punishment.  I think that Scanlon would say that the blame is of a different kind in the two cases, but I do not think that he believes that the degree is different for him.  (When describing the child-killer, he says that the past does not diminish his blameworthiness (179) – other wording that Scanlon uses throughout the chapter suggests that these factors change, but do not necessarily diminish, the blame.)  I am not quite sure how such a difference in kind and not in degree would play out when deciding punishment.

            I also do not think that my uncomfortableness stems from a sort of “society is what made area A worse, so it is wrong for society to punish person A”.  Even if society had no contribution at all to area A’s engendering of violence or if society had no means of helping area A, I would still find it wrong that person A is punished the same way as person B.

            I honestly am not sure what my reasons for thinking this are beyond the fact that I find it unjust to give the two people in this case the same punishment but that I find it reasonable that I not be friends with either of them.  Despite this, I do think that this case shows why Scanlon’s objectors and I do still seem to be hung up on the issue of freedom.  Though freedom may not matter in a philosophical sense for blame, it does seem to matter in these more concrete senses when it comes to punishment, and the fact that people are punished the same way despite different backgrounds seems wrong.  Furthermore, Scanlon’s response that blame can be justified while also desiring social action does not seem to work in the same way with punishment.  Does it really make sense for us to systematically punish people of a certain area while ignoring environmental factors and then suddenly be aware of the factors as we try to address the area’s problem through social action?