Criminal sanctions, the most serious kind of sanctions we
have in a civil society, have traditionally been reserved for conduct
that not only causes or risks serious harms but is also unambiguously
wrongful. In some unusual cases involving necessity
or other justification defenses, a defendant might argue that killing
another human being or causing some other serious harm
was the right thing to do. But in the typical case of core criminal
offenses such as murder, rape, and robbery, there is an underlying
assumption that what the defendant did—if in fact she did
do it—was, from a moral perspective, a very bad thing.