Philosophers of criminal punishment disagree about whether infliction of punishment for negligence can be morally justified. One contending view holds that it cannot be because punishment requires culpability and culpability requires, at a minimum, advertence to the facts that make one’s conduct wrongful. Larry Alexander and Kim Ferzan are prominent champions of this position. This essay challenges that view and their arguments for it. Invoking a conceptual distinction between an agent’s being blameworthy for an act and their deserving punishment (or suffering) for that act, it explains that an agent can be blameworthy for negligent conduct, and thus liable to reasonable blaming practices, even if negligence is not culpable, hence not sufficient to ground negative desert. Turning from conceptual inquiry to substantive questions of political morality, it then argues that a faulty actor’s lack of culpability does not render them immune from just punishment, but does significantly limit the severity of punishment that may be inflicted, for punishment should not be disproportionately severe relative to an agent’s culpability in relation to wrongdoing.

刑事处罚的哲学家们不同意对过失进行处罚是否在道德上是合理的。一种有争议的观点认为，这不可能是因为惩罚需要有罪，而有罪至少需要注意使一个人的行为成为不法行为的事实。Larry Alexander 和 Kim Ferzan 是这一职位的杰出拥护者。这篇文章挑战了这种观点和他们的论点。援引代理人的行为应受谴责与他们应受的惩罚之间的概念区别（或痛苦），它解释了代理人可能因疏忽行为而受到指责，因此容易受到合理的指责，即使疏忽不是罪魁祸首，因此不足以构成消极应得的理由。从概念上的探究转向政治道德的实质性问题，然后论证了有过错的行为者没有过错并不能使他们免于受到公正的惩罚，但确实大大限制了可能施加的惩罚的严重程度，因为惩罚不应该过分严厉相对于代理人因不当行为而承担的责任。