Amnesia and the Justification of Punishment

Abstract

My thesis considers whether someone should be punished less (or not at all) when she has complete memory loss of the relevant crime. Utilitarianism, rather than supporting our intuition that full punishment is somehow problematic in the case of the amnesiac, furnishes a solid defense of full punishment. Retributivism, on the other hand, does provide some reasons for mitigating punishment—namely, that the ideal goods of punishment can’t be fully achieved and that some potential evils of punishment arise in the case of the amnesiac.