Let us then examine more closely wherein Desert consists; and we will begin with Good Desert or Merit, as being of the most fundamental and permanent importance; for we may hope that crime and its punishment will decrease and gradually disappear as the world improves, but the right or best distribution of the means of wellbeing is an object that we must always be striving to realise.
(Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1981], bk. III, chap. V, sec. 5, p. 283 [first published in 1907; 1st ed. published in 1874])
Note from KBJ: Sidgwick might well have added: "We may hope that humans evolve wings, so that they may fly." How could a man as intelligent as Sidgwick have thought that crime and punishment might one day disappear? Did he not study history? Did he think that, all of a sudden, humans would change their nature? It's mind-boggling to see such detachment from reality in a man who is otherwise sensible. I chalk it up to progressive ideology, which views humans as perfectible rather than, as conservatives see it, incorrigible.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 