The sanction is the application of some type of penalty or punishment to an individual for certain behavior considered inappropriate, dangerous or illegal. In this sense, the concept of sanction can be understood in two different ways, although similar and interconnected. These two senses are basically the legal and the social, each having particular elements.
In the first place, a sanction is one of the main elements of the legal field and has been created to represent the penalty or punishment that a subject may receive as a consequence of committing some type of crime or illegal act. In this space, sanctions are established by law and appear as the result of a whole system of categories and hierarchies that means that each act receives a specific and particular type of sanction. For example, both a thief and a murderer receive the penalty of being imprisoned, but the number of years that this penalty represents will change in each case because the type of crime committed is different.
On the other hand, the sanction can also get out of the merely legal space when talking about social sanctions. These have to do more than anything with a combination of customs, traditions, behaviors and attitudes approved by each culture that end up jointly building their moral and ethical structure. Understood in this way, the sanction can then become a much more indefinite element since it is not governed by a law but by common sense in most cases. The sanction can then be represented by a challenge, a disapproving look, discrimination and even indifference on the part of the other individuals before the committed act. Such is the case of a person who litters on public roads in a place where such an act is not penalized by law: the social sanction will probably make people look down on him and disapprove of his behavior without necessarily receiving punishment.
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