Abstract

Is it permissible to punish people for crimes they haven’t committed yet—to prepunish? Recently Saul Smilansky has argued that compatibilists lack a principled way to say no, and that thus their claim that determinism makes no moral difference is refuted. In this paper, I offer a response on behalf of the compatibilist. I argue that prepunishment is as much an issue for the libertarian as it is for the compatibilist, and then I gesture towards a solution to the problem of prepunishment that should be available to both