“Punishment and the Body”

The title of this post is the title of this notable new article authored by Christopher Belshaw that I just saw in the new Journal of Controversial Ideas.  Here is its abstract:

Suppose we accept that punishment can be legitimate.  What form should it take?  Many of us believe that it can be acceptable to fine or imprison someone, but that capital punishment, along with corporal punishment in its various manifestations, is wholly unacceptable.  I suggest that it is hard to account for or justify this distinction.  But granting that resistance to these latter forms is unlikely to be dislodged, and granting too that imprisonment in particular is hardly problem-free, it is worth considering whether there might be alternatives.  And I argue here that we should consider enforced coma as a procedure having many advantages over the more familiar methods of delivering a penalty.  Of course, there are disadvantages also.  The aim isn’t to offer a detailed and practical solution to the problem of crime, but to explore some of the presumptions and principles involved in our thinking about punishment.