It is a common idea, and an element in many legal systems, that people can deserve punishment when they commit criminal (or immoral) actions. A standard philosophical objection to this retributivist idea about punishment is that if human choices and actions are determined by previous events and the laws of nature, then we are not free in the sense required to be morally responsible for our actions, and therefore cannot deserve blame or punishment. It has recently been suggested that this (...) argument can be backed up by neuroscience, since neuroscientific explanations of human behavior leave no room for non-determined free actions. In this thesis, an argument of this sort is discussed. According to this argument, that I call “the Revision Argument”, we should revise the legal system so that any retributivist justification of punishment is removed. I examine some objections to the Revision Argument according to which compatibilism about free will and responsibility is a morally acceptable basis of retributive punishment. I argue that these objections have difficulties in providing a plausible account of the relevant difference between people who deserve punishment for their actions and people who do not. Therefore, I argue that they fail to refute the conclusion of the Revision Argument. (shrink)

A companion to ‘Punishment: Consequentialism’, and also ‘Punishment: The Future’, this paper examines various nonconsequentialist attempts to justify punishment, that is, attempts that appeal to claims concerning the innate worth or intrinsic character of punishment, quite apart from any consequential good or benefit punishment may be thought to produce. The paper starts with retributive theories, and turns then to the denunciation and expressive theories, before considering combined communicative–retributive theories.

This article explores the forms of moral repair that the wrongdoer has to perform in an attempt to make amends for her past wrongdoing, with a focus on the issues of interpersonal moral repair; that is, what a wrongdoer can do to merit her victim‘s forgiveness and achieve reconciliation with her community. The article argues against the very general demands of atonement that amount to an obligation to stop being someone who commits wrongs—to become a moral saint—and suggests a new (...) form of atonement that is more practical and useful in our everyday life. (shrink)

Current sentencing practice in England and Wales is incoherent. This stems from the combination of conflicting philosophies of punishment, with no clear method adopted by sentencers in choosing between them. This presents a significant challenge as sentencing can have a profound impact on an offender’s life, as well as having wider implications for family members. Therefore, a coherent decision-making process is essential in order to limit arbitrary sentencing and support the legitimacy of the penal system. This thesis argues that Restorative (...) Justice might offer a more coherent decision-making process. Restorative Justice is hypothesised to operate as a kind of mediation process between the philosophies of punishment and understandings of justice held by participants. Their voluntarily agreed outcome should therefore represent the best possible compromise between participants’ ideas of justice and philosophies of punishment. Analysis of existing empirical research has been undertaken, involving the examination of existing studies of Restorative Justice in Northern Ireland, England and Wales, Australia and New Zealand. This empirical research has explored problems which can arise in practice for the theoretical conception of Restorative Justice as a mediation process between ideas. The thesis concludes that Restorative Justice can in theory offer a more coherent process of sentencing, but that there are a number of obstacles to realising this in practice. (shrink)

According to Christopher New, prepunishment is punishment for an offence before the offence is committed. I will first analyze New’s argument, along with theepistemic conditions for practicing prepunishment. I will then deal with an important conceptual objection, according to which prepunishment is not a genuine kind of ‘punishment’. After that, I will consider retributivism and present conclusive reasons for the claim that it cannot justify prepunishment without leading to paradoxical results. I shall then seek to establish that from the utilitarian (...) point of view it is possible to provide a plausible justification of this practice. Finally, I shall attempt to defend the claim that the fact that utilitarianism can justify prepunishment in a satisfactory way is clearly a favourable characteristic of this ethical position. (shrink)

Advances in forensic techniques have expanded the temporal horizon of criminal investigations, facilitating investigation of historic crimes that would previously have been considered unsolvable. Public enthusiasm for pursuing historic crimes is exemplified by recent high-profile trials of celebrities accused of historic sexual offences. These circumstances give new urgency to the question of how we should decide which historic offences to investigate. A satisfactory answer must take into account the ways in which the passage of time can erode the benefits of (...) criminal investigation, the costs associated with investigating old crimes, and the need to prioritize investigations in the face of limited police resources. This article emphasizes the first of these factors. It begins by considering the moral goals of a criminal justice system and the contribution of criminal investigations to the achievement of these goals, distinguishing between contributions that depend on further steps in the criminal justice process, such as prosecution and punishment, and contributions that can have value independently of these further steps. Using this important distinction, the article then examines a range of factors that relate the passage of time to criminal justice goals, including the seriousness of the crime; deterioration of evidence; death of the offender, victim and others affected by the crime; and diminished psychological connectedness between those affected by the crime and their current selves. While the range and non-uniformity of relevant factors preclude a simple answer to the question of when historic crimes should be investigated and call instead for case-by-case assessment, we find that the analysis does support some general conclusions that can guide such an assessment. (shrink)

During the last half of the twentieth century, legal philosophy (or legal theory or jurisprudence) has grown significantly. It is no longer the domain of a few isolated scholars in law and philosophy. Hundreds of scholars from diverse fields attend international meetings on the subject. In some universities, large lecture courses of five hundred students or more study it. The primary aim of the Law and Philosophy Library is to present some of the best original work on legal philosophy from (...) both the Anglo-American and European traditions. Not only does it help make some of the best work avail able to an international audience, but it also encourages increased awareness of, and interaction between, the two major traditions. The primary focus is on full-length scholarly monographs, although some edited volumes of original papers are also included. The Library editors are assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board of internationally renowed scholars. Legal philosophy should not be considered a narrowly circumscribed field. (shrink)

Retributivism is often explicitly or implicitly assumed to be compatible with the harm principle, since the harm principle (in some guises) concerns the content of the criminal law, while retributivism concerns the punishment of those that break the law. In this essay I show that retributivism should not be endorsed alongside any version of the harm principle. In fact, retributivists should reject all attempts to see the criminal law only through (other) person-affecting concepts or “grievance” morality, since they should endorse (...) the criminalization of conduct that is either purely self-harming or good for somebody and bad for nobody (i.e., Pareto improvements). (shrink)

It is customary to remark, in writings on retributivism, that the meaning of the term is so diffuse and variably applied that there is no one concept or justificatory principle picked out by the term. Cottingham identified 9 different ideas captured by the term retributivism, and a similar paper could today no doubt identify as many again. This edited volume of essays on retributivism does justice to that customary remark, by bringing together a range of writings on retributivism many of (...) which present quite different ways of construing the core of retributivist thinking, the virtues of it, and its role in criminal justice.The book is organised around three themes: the first part entitled ‘Conceptualizing Retributivism’, the second ‘Philosophical Perspectives on Retributivism’, and the third ‘Retributivism and Policy’. In the following I provide an overview of the chapters, before making some general remarks on the emerging themes of the edited collec .. (shrink)

The belief that some misfortunes are punishments sent from God has been affirmed by many different cultures and religions throughout human history. The belief has proved a pervasive one, and is still endorsed today by many adherents of the great western religions of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Invariably, what is believed is that a present misfortune is divine punishment for a past sin. But could a present misfortune in fact be divine punishment for a future sin? That is, could God prepunish (...) people for their future transgressions? The aim of this paper will be to show that there are solid philosophical grounds for supposing that he could and would do so. (shrink)

This paper describes developments in punishment theory since the middle of the twentieth century. After the mid–1960s, what Stanley I. Benn called “preventive theories of punishment”—whether strictly utilitarian or more loosely consequentialist like his—entered a long and steep decline, beginning with the virtual disappearance of reform theory in the 1970s. Crowding out preventive theories were various alternatives generally (but, as I shall argue, misleadingly) categorized as “retributive”. These alternatives include both old theories (such as the education theory) resurrected after many (...) decades in philosophy’s graveyard and some new ones (such as the fairness theory). Only in the last decade or so have new vares o “consequentialism” appeared to dilute a debate among philosophers that had become almost entirely about “retributivism”. I shall describe this trend in more detail. The description will be less an update of my 1990 survey than a rethinking of it. The conclusion I draw from this rethinking is that we need to drop the utilitarian–retributivist (and nonconsequentialist–nonconsequentialist) distinction in favor of one sorting punishment theories according to whether they rely in part on empirical considerations (externalist theories) or instead rely (almost) entirely on conceptual relations (internalist theories). (shrink)

Retributivist accounts of punishment maintain that it is right to punish wrongdoers, even if the punishment has no future benefits. Research in experimental economics indicates that people are willing to pay to punish defectors. A complementary line of work in social psychology suggests that people think that it is right to punish wrongdoers. This work suggests that people are retributivists about punishment. However, all of the extant work contains an important potential confound. The target of the punishment is expected to (...) be aware of the punitive act. Thus, it's possible that people punish because they want to communicate something to the wrongdoer, e.g. disapproval, the presence of a norm, etc. In three studies, we examine whether people will punish even when the punishee will be ignorant. We find that people are no less likely to punish when the punishee will be ignorant. This finding emerges both in a survey study and in a monetized behavioural decision study. (shrink)

Strawson's view on punishment has been either neglected or recoiled from in contemporary scholarship on ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (FR). Strawson's alleged retributivism has made his view suspect and troublesome. In this article, we first argue, against the mainstream, that the punishment passage is an indispensable part of the main argument in FR (section 1) and elucidate in what sense Strawson can be called ‘a retributivist’ (section 2). We then elaborate our own hypothesis of symbolic retribution to explain the continuum between (...) moral reactive attitudes and punishment that Strawson only adumbrates (section 3). After this justification of the punitive response to wrongdoing, we compare and contrast our specific kind of retributivist hypothesis with other positions in the so-called ‘new retributivism’ (section 4). Our hypothesis differs from other subvarieties of expressive retributivism in putting centre stage the idea of punishment as taking up a reverential stance towards the victim. (shrink)

This paper will in good part concern six arguments taken as making up what is called the New Retributivism. It will also have to do with a seventh retributivist argument, and with the unexamined idea that reflection on punishment can lead a life of its own, independently of political philosophy. Both that idea and the arguments bear on the main question of whether punishment in our societies is right or wrong. It is a question not worn to a frazzle, as (...) is the one of how it is that punishment is right, which piously presupposes that it is. My answer to the impious question gets very little wear in this reactionary and, as it sometimes seems, vengeful time. For a particular reason, it will have to go undefended here. (shrink)

Punishment involves deliberating harming individuals. How, then, if at all, is it to be justified? This, the first of three papers on the philosophy of punishment (see also 'Punishment: Nonconsequentialism' and 'Punishment: The Future'), examines attempts to justify the practice or institution according to its consequences. One claim is that punishment reduces crime, and hence the resulting harms. Another is that punishment functions to rehabilitate offenders. A third claim is that punishment (or some forms of punishment) can serve to make (...) restitution to victims, and a fourth is that it can strengthen social values. The paper examines these claims, and finally considers pluralist theories which combine retributive and harm-reductive or utilitarian considerations. (Retributive theories are examined in their own right in 'Punishment: Nonconsequentialism'.). (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Michael Moore’s (1997), and other similar formulations of desert retributivism – viz., the theory that holds punishment to be justified because of the deserved suffering it imposes on guilty offenders – are epistemically problematic. The argument draws on John Dewey’s inchoate critique of retribution, and on Dewey’s more general contention that the justification of ethical judgments and principles proceeds ex post – viz., that it depends on the experiences elicited by acting on those judgments (...) and principles. Based on Dewey’s ex post take on justification, I more specifically argue that, given its commitment to moral naturalism and to coherentism, Moore’s version of desert retributivism is epistemically unwarranted. This is because we have evidentially grounded reasons to think that many of the retributive judgments that underlie the principle of retributive justice are not clearly supported ex post in the relevant, desert retributivist sense. (shrink)

In the United States, the identities of criminal offenders are matters of public record, accessible to prospective employers, the press, and ordinary citizens. In European countries, the identities of offenders are routinely kept hidden, with some exceptions. The question addressed in this discussion concerns whether the public disclosure of the identities of offenders is part and parcel of their legal punishment. My contentions are that public disclosure is not conceptually part of legal punishment, necessary to serve substantive penal aims, or (...) likely to enhance penal aims. At times, it will conflict with defensible aims of legal punishment. Other values might support or require the public identification of criminal offenders, but the aims of legal punishment do not appear to do so. (shrink)

I argue that penal philosophy should focus more on our attitudes towards offenders, since these attitudes can shed new light on theories or principles of punishment (of which they are often expressions) and also play a significant role in changing the face of criminal justice. Building on Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment,” I define attitudes as certain ways of seeing human beings that logically include or exclude various emotional, behavioral, and linguistic responses, that can be more or less natural, and over (...) which we have some degree of voluntary control. I argue that, understood in this sense, there are broadly speaking six attitudes towards offenders: the retributive, the hostile, the moralistic, the paternalistic, the merciful, and the actuarial. After presenting each of these attitudes, I sum up my analysis by focusing on the Polanski sexual abuse case. I then introduce the concept of second-order attitudes, where egalitarianism is the attitude that consists of taking the same attitude towards all offenders, and particularism is the attitude that consists of adjusting your attitude to each offender. Finally, I briefly explain why a mix of the retributive and the merciful should be our default attitude. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss retributivist justifications for legal punishment. I argue that the main moral retributivist theories advanced so far fail to support a plausible system of legal punishment. As an alternative, I suggest, with some reservations, the legal retributivism advanced by Alan Brudner in his Punishment and Freedom.

Ratio Juris, Volume 34, Issue 4, Page 293-314, December 2021.

-/- Amongst contemporary theorists, the most widespread interpretation of Hegel's theory of punishment is that it is a retributivist theory of annulment, where punishments cancel the performance of crimes. The theory is retributivist insofar as the criminal punished must be demonstrated to be deserving of a punishment that is commensurable in value only to the nature of his crime, rather than to any consequentialist considerations. As Antony Duff says: -/- [retributivism] justifies punishment in terms not of its contingently beneficial effects (...) but of its intrinsic justice as a response to crime; the justificatory relationship holds between present punishment and past crime, not between present punishment and future effects. -/- Punishment is given only to persons responsible for committing crime. In addition, the degree of punishment is set in proportion to the relative badness of the precipitating crime. Thus, retributivism can be understood as an individualistic theory because the only relevant factors pertain solely to the individual criminal himself. -/- The general attraction of Hegel's version of retributivism is that the punishments his theory is thought to endorse are commensurable in value with precipitating crimes, in contrast to the strict equivalence required by Kant's theory of punishment. As a result, Hegel's theory is praised both for being more acceptable to modern readers than Kant's so-called ‘pure retributivism’, as well as for being an ‘emphatically anti-utilitarian’ theory. Despite widespread agreement on these general features, it is hotly contested how exactly we are to understand the way in which punishment cancels crimes, and Hegel's difficult style has only served to make the controversy deeper. For example, Ted Honderich says: ‘A punishment is an annulment, a cancellation or a return to a previous state of affairs … All this, of course, is obscure. It is by Hegel’. (shrink)

One of the most potent motivations for retributivist approaches to punishment has been their apparent connection to an ethical background shaped by the Kantian notion of morally autonomous and rational human agency. The present article challenges the plausibility of this connection. I argue that retributivism subverts, rather than embodies, the normative consequences of moral autonomy, justifying a social practice that conflicts with the considered judgments that the proper recognition of moral autonomy would authorize. The core of my case is the (...) analysis of whether a punishment should be understood as a restriction of a criminal's freedom properly understood. I argue that the affirmative view faces serious difficulties that have not been, and are not likely to be, resolved by retributivist justifications that draw their support from Kantian moral theory. (shrink)

Many philosophers and legal scholars believe that the principle of retribution can be employed as a basis for respecting the offender as a person and for imposing relatively soft sentences. This belief is inspired, at least to a certain extent, by the penal philosophy of Kant and Hegel. My aim in this article is to question this widely held belief, with my contention being that retributivists locate the basis of these normative considerations in the wrong place. It is not the (...) application of the principle of retribution that makes systems of criminal law fair and restrained, but rather the other way around: Only by restricting the application of the principle of retribution in various ways can we arrive at a system of penal law that is reasonable and just. These restrictions themselves are not retributive in nature, but are intended to keep the principle of retribution in check. To substantiate these claims, I discuss the views of an older generation of philosophers and scientists, specifically those of Sidgwick, Durkheim, Malinowski, and Piaget, and hold that these provide a fruitful basis for a better understanding of the principle of retribution. In the second part of the article, I investigate how this alternative understanding relates to the principles of proportionality and mens rea, while also making some clarifying remarks about the issue of moral luck. (shrink)

‘Retributivism’ covers a wide range of theories which, even though they differ in various ways, all give some room for proportionality considerations with regard to the question of how severely offenders should be punished. This article addresses the question—well‐known from traditional ethical theory—as to whether proportionality constraints should be given an absolutist or a non‐absolutist interpretation. It is argued that both absolutist and some non‐absolutist accounts of proportionality constraints have counter‐intuitive implications and, more generally, that the non‐absolutist interpretation, to which (...) most retributivists seem to subscribe, faces serious challenges with regard to how the thresholds of such constraints should be determined. It is concluded that, given the aspiration of providing genuine action guidance for penal practice, the retributivist faces a dilemma that is not easily resolved. (shrink)

Retributivist approaches to the philosophy of punishment are usually based on certain claims related to moral desert. I focus on one such principle:Censuring Principle : There is a moral reason to censure guilty wrongdoers aversively.Principles like CP are often supported by the construction of examples similar to Kant’s ‘desert island’. These are meant to show that there is a reason for state officials to punish deserving wrongdoers, even if none of the familiar goals of punishment, such as deterrence, will be (...) achieved. When suitable variants of such examples are presented, however, it is evident that there cannot be much reason to punish such wrongdoers, even if there is some. The same problem besets claims that there is intrinsic value in the suffering of wrongdoers, or that wrongdoers deserve to suffer. All such claims are relatively weak normatively. (shrink)

This paper will in good part concern six arguments taken as making up what is called the New Retributivism. It will also have to do with a seventh retributivist argument, and with the unexamined idea that reflection on punishment can lead a life of its own, independently of political philosophy. Both that idea and the arguments bear on the main question of whether punishment in our societies is right or wrong. It is a question not worn to a frazzle, as (...) is the one of how it is that punishment is right, which piously presupposes that it is. My answer to the impious question gets very little wear in this reactionary and, as it sometimes seems, vengeful time. For a particular reason, it will have to go undefended here. (shrink)

This article seeks to reveal, conceptualize, and analyze a trend in the development of the retributive theory of punishment since the beginning of the 21st century. We term this trend “retributarianism.” It is reflected in the emergence of retributive approaches that through expanding the concepts of censure and culpability extend the relevant time-frame for assessing the deserved punishment beyond the sentencing moment. These retributarian approaches are characterized by the individualization of retributivism. On one hand, retributarianism shares with classic retributivism the (...) rhetoric of justice, a focus on the moral evaluation of the severity of the offense, and the primary importance ascribed to maintaining proportionality. On the other hand, it shares with utilitarianism the possibility of taking into account, in addition to the severity of the offense, the offender’s personal circumstances, with a future-oriented perspective that also considers developments subsequent to the commission of the offense. This article analyzes the emergence of retributarianism, suggests possible explanations for its development, and assesses its possible implications for penal theory and policy. (shrink)

Cet article porte sur le déterminisme compatibiliste de Kazimierz Twardowski. Dans un premier temps, j’explique ce qu’est le déterminisme selon Twardowski et pourquoi il s’agit d’après lui d’une position plus probable que l’indéterminisme. Dans un deuxième temps, je présente son analyse du concept d’imputation [poczytywanie] – très proche de ce qu’on appelle en philosophie pénale la character theory of excuses – qui lui permet de concilier déterminisme et imputation. Cette analyse pose qu’un acte ne peut être imputé (à faute ou (...) à mérite) que s’il émane du caractère de l’agent. Dans un troisième temps, j’expose son analyse du concept de responsabilité. Dans un dernier temps, je montre que Twardowski penche vers l’incompatibilisme lorsqu’il est question du remords ou du sentiment de responsabilité, mais qu’il ne pense pas que cela doive nous conduire au scepticisme éthique. Cet article comporte en annexe une traduction d’une publication synthétique de Twardowski sur ce sujet. (shrink)

Prior research on the psychology of retribution is complicated by the difficulty of separating retributive and general deterrence motives when studying human offenders . We isolate retribution by investigating judgments about punishing animals, which allows us to remove general deterrence from consideration. Studies 2 and 3 document a “victim identity” effect, such that the greater the perceived loss from a violent animal attack, the greater the belief that the culprit deserves to be killed. Study 3 documents a “targeted punishment” effect, (...) such that the responsive killing of the actual “guilty” culprit is seen as more deserved than the killing of an almost identical yet “innocent” animal from the same species. Studies 4 and 5 extend both effects to participants' acceptance of inflicting pain and suffering on the offending animal at the time of its death, and show that both effects are mediated by measures of retributive sentiment, and not by consequentialist concerns. (shrink)

The article examines the relationship between a wrongdoer and his victim. Based on this examination, a justification for criminal punishment is proposed. It is argued that crime violates thea prioriequality of constituent boundaries and of infinite human value between the wrongdoer and the victim. Criminal punishment re-equalizes respective boundaries and infinite human value. To develop this argument, the article observes how subject-subject boundaries are essential for the formation of separateness between subjects - separateness which is recognized and acknowledged by them (...) in a cooperative process. The article further discusses the value of boundaries and the significance of theira prioriequality in every human relationship. It then shows how crime, which is intrusion of the victim’s boundaries, works to demolish the victim’s self-recognizing separateness and hence to create inequality in the parties’ value. Last, the article demonstrates that only punishment can reset the relationship between the parties and re-equate their (still infinite) human value in the relationship. (shrink)