Crimes and Punishments Giuliano Torrengo UniversitĂ del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli (Italy) Achille C. Varzi Columbia University, New York (USA) A (fine) puzzle John was driving 150 km/h. The law says you cannot exceed 130 km/h, so John got fined. He got fined twice. "Why twice?" Because there were two speed detection devices-one at km 50 and one at km 100-so they caught him twice. "What if the devices were closer to each other, at km 50 and at km 60?" Same story: if they catch you twice, you get fined twice. "What if there was a third device in between, at km 55?" Three devices, three measurements, three infractions-hence three fines. "But they could measure any number of times in between. What if they placed a device every kilometer?" They would fine you for each time a distinct device would measure an infraction. "But that is absurd. By that pattern, I could be fined uncountably many times for speed driving a single meter."1 Speed limits and other prohibitions Obviously, the "pattern" is a mathematical abstraction, and no one will ever risk bankruptcy for a brief infringement of the Traffic Code. But John's law- yer has a point. How long should the infringement last in order for two or more fines to be applicable? A fine is a punishment in which we incur if we perform a forbidden action-a crime-and there is a strong intuition to the effect that crimes and punishments should go hand in hand: every criminal act ought to be matched by a corresponding punishment, and every punishment ought to reflect a criminal act. We know how to count punishments, espe- cially if they come in the form of a fine. But how do we count crimes? 1 The puzzle is based on a (true) story reported in Ferraris (2004). 1
Consider the following suggestion. A crime is a criminal act, and we know how to count acts. There may be disagreement on how exactly this should be done, for there is no one-to-one correspondence between the words we use to pick out actions and the actions that we pick out. (Anscombe and Davidson famously argued that, say, Brutus's killing of Caesar and his stab- bing of Caesar are one and the same action under two different descriptions; Goldman and Kim argued that they are two different actions.2) But never mind that. A responsible philosopher should better have some views on this important matter; she should have some criteria for counting actions, at least actions of a kind. Hence, to the extent that our question is a philosophical one, every responsible philosopher should be able to answer it, some way or an- other. If it is forbidden to o, and if we know how to count an agent's pings, then we know how many times the agent should be punished for having ped. Unfortunately, the suggestion falls short of a general solution to our prob- lem. Our concept of an action is a mixed bag, and it is