In Nietzsche scholarship, little has been done regarding Nietzsche’s reflections on penology and criminology. This dissertation aims to critically examine Friedrich Nietzsche’s thoughts on justice, punishment, and the criminal and to show that his interest in these topics runs throughout his writings. Nietzsche attacked the tradition of Western justice theory and the idea that justice consists in giving each their due. I argue that in place of this notion of justice, he puts forth a non-metaphysical, naturalistic account of justice that (...) refuses to judge and hold man accountable. In addition, I explicate Nietzsche’s passionate critique of punishment, which stops short of calling for its complete abolition, and the various alternatives he sets forth in place of punishing. Finally, I demonstrate that Nietzsche’s reflections on criminality amount to a defense of the criminal whom he considers a valuable and essential feature of society. Nietzsche’s reflections on justice, punishment, and the criminal are important and warrant closer consideration for several reasons. First, these topics intersect with several major themes within Nietzsche’s work, such as causality, freedom, responsibility, guilt, ressentiment, hierarchy of rank, and greatness, or nobility. Second, a thorough understanding of punishment, and its relationship to justice and revenge are essential to understanding why Nietzsche rejects traditional morality and the values he wishes to call forth in its place. Third, his rejection of the traditional notion of justice as revenge, and his affirmation of mercy, as well as his insistence upon overcoming the desire to punish, undermines the idea that he is a champion of violence and cruelty. Fourth, these topics contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of what Nietzsche means by greatness and advances our knowledge of his ideal-types and moral exemplars. Finally, a thorough understanding of Nietzsche’s treatment of justice, punishment, and the criminal lends a coherent dimension to his positive ethics, his political theory, and his vision for society. While some critics have claimed that Nietzsche’s reflections on justice and punishment yield nothing of practical use, this dissertation demonstrates that Nietzsche not only provides valuable critiques but also valuable philosophical and psychological insights concerning justice, punishment, criminal law, and criminal justice reform. (shrink)

Several writers have argued that the state lacks the moral standing to hold socially deprived offenders responsible for their crimes because the state would be hypocritical in doing so. Yet the state is not disposed to make an unfair exception of itself for committing the same sorts of crimes as socially deprived offenders, so it is unclear that the state is truly hypocritical. Nevertheless, the state is disposed to inconsistently hold its citizens responsible, blaming or punishing socially deprived offenders more (...) often or more harshly than other offenders, even when the crimes are the same. The state’s stable disposition to inconsistently hold offenders responsible undermines its standing to hold offenders responsible for the same reasons that hypocrisy undermines standing; instead of making an unfair exception of itself, the state makes an unfair exception of others. Strikingly, this means that the state lacks the standing to hold anyone responsible for a crime for which it is unfairly disposed to hold citizens responsible inconsistently, not just socially deprived offenders. Thus, it is even more urgent that the state regain its moral standing by working toward a justice system that holds offenders responsible consistently. (shrink)

In the 1970s and 1980s, a handful of legal theorists addressed the problem of criminal justice for offenders who faced criminogenic social disadvantages. Their discussions were provocative but alternatively unpersuasive and underdeveloped. More recently, in the wake of mass incarceration in America, philosophers have put forth new analyses that make important headway but remain scattered, partial, and in need of a systematic and integrated review. In this article, I reconstruct and critique the most prominent and well-developed explanations yet offered of (...) the distinctive moral problems that offenders’ criminogenic social disadvantages may pose for criminal justice. I conclude that some views are misguided, others are unduly limited, and one – based on the ideals of fair opportunity to avoid crime and punishment – is particularly promising but as yet underdeveloped. (shrink)

A deterrence theory of punishment holds that the institution of criminal punishment is morally justified because it serves to deter crime. Because the fear of external sanction is an important incentive in crime deterrence, the deterrence theory is often associated with the idea of severe, disproportionate punishment. An objection to this theory holds that hope of escape renders even the severest punishment inapt and irrelevant. -/- This article revisits the concept of deterrence and defend a more plausible deterrence theory of (...) punishment—the wide-scope deterrence theory. The wide-scope theory holds that we must make the best use of all the deterrence tools available, including both external and internal sanctions. Drawing on insights from the early Confucian tradition, the article develops a deep deterrence theory, which holds that the most important deterrence tool involves internal, not external, sanction. It describes how internal sanctions deter potential offenses and why relevant policies need not conflict with liberalism’s respect for neutrality. (shrink)

Abolitionism is the view that if no one is responsible, then we ought to abandon the reactive attitudes. Proponents suggest that reactive attitudes can be replaced in our emotional repertoire by non-reactive analogues. In this paper, I dispute and reject a common challenge to abolitionism according to which the reactive attitudes are necessary for protesting unfairness and maintaining social harmony. While other abolitionists dispute the empirical basis of this objection, I focus on its implications. I argue that even if non-reactive (...) analogues cannot perform the interpersonal and social functions of reactive attitudes, it does not follow that the losses of abandoning them outweigh the gains of retaining them. The force of the challenge rests on a mistake, identified by John Stuart Mill among others, that is common when evaluating entrenched social practices. (shrink)

The article analyses the necessary conditions an argument for popular punishment would need to meet, and argues that it faces the challenge of a dilemma of reasonableness: either popular views on punishment are unreasonable, in which case they should carry no weight, or they are reasonable, in which case the reasons that support them, not the views, should carry weight. It proceeds to present and critically discuss three potential solutions to the dilemma, arguing that only an argument for the beneficial (...) effects of coherence between popular views and penal policy is persuasive, but that it makes popular punishment less important than proponents claim, and offers a justification proponents will find it difficult to advance. (shrink)

Extremely harsh treatment (for example, unanesthetized tooth, branding with a hot iron, violent shaking, repeated beatings, and car-battery shocks to the genitalia) is often considered unjust. On different accounts, extremely harsh treatment fails to respect persons because it infringes on an absolute right, fails to respect a person’s dignity, constitutes cruel or inhumane treatment, violates rules that rational persons would choose under fair and equal choosing conditions, or results in a person losing his agency to another. Others respond that in (...) some cases extremely harsh treatment is just because some individuals forfeit their moral rights against extremely harsh treatment or because it is the fair way to distribute a danger that was created by the person to be so treated. In this paper, I develop an argument that is designed to sidestep these criticisms. (shrink)

Vice crimes, crimes prohibited in part because they are viewed as morally corrupting, engage legal theorists because they reveal importantly contrasting views between liberals and virtue-centered theorists on the very limits of legitimate state action. Yet advocates and opponents alike focus on the role law can play in suppressing personal vice; the role of law is seen as suppressing licentiousness, sloth, greed etc. The most powerful advocates of the position that the law must nurture good character often draw on Aristotelian (...) theories of virtue to ground the connection between law and virtue. While Aristotle believed that law and character were linked, it is ironic to note that he did not argue for the position evidenced in our vice laws that law was likely to succeed in instilling virtue. Indeed, Aristotle thought the project of using law to instill private virtue was nearly certain to fail. Aristotle’s deep concern was not for the way law protected private virtue within each person but the way law had to protect civic virtue between citizens. This article argues that even from its foundations, the project of vice crimes as moral instruction is misconceived. The use of law for overly instrumental or narrow reasons opens law and legal institutions to abuse and factionalism. Lawyers, judges and others specially connected to law must first and foremost aim at addressing “legal vices,” vices internal to the institutions of law. Particularly, increasing factionalism and instrumentalism which disconnects law from the pursuit of the common good threatens our civic bonds. Most importantly, where civic bonds are disrupted, citizens have no reason to remain law abiding. The striking lesson, captured both in ancient philosophy and modern history, is that when legal vices grow unchecked and factions use the law to pursue narrow interests, ultimately law abidingness is corrupted and interest groups harm themselves as much as others. (shrink)

Two recent discussions concerning punishment of the socially deprived reach conflicting conclusions. Andrew von Hirsch and Andrew Ashworth argue that we should sympathize with the predicament of the poor and therefore mitigate their sentences. Peter Chau disputes von Hirsch and Ashworth’s conclusion, contending that having to face strong temptations is not an appropriate ground for reducing anyone’s punishment for their crimes. I argue that neither von Hirsch and Ashworth’s account nor Chau’s critique of it is persuasive. I then take up (...) the challenge of showing why social deprivation renders punishment problematic. I contend that it establishes a perverse incentive structure that is persistent and powerful, requiring the disadvantaged to exercise self-control on an ongoing basis. Repeated acts of self-control are difficult, especially for youths whose skills at it are not yet fully developed. Also, in a variety of more and less subtle ways, social deprivation reduces the incentives for self-control and may work to stunt its development. In closing, I briefly consider the options for responding to the crimes of the chronically disadvantaged. (shrink)

Neither currently prevalent justifications of punishment, nor a modified, contractarian version of a justification that I develop here, can be used to justify actual state punishment, even if some forms of punishment may remain legitimate. I argue in this thesis that alternative punitive practices such as developed by some Canadian aboriginal communities are more likely to conform to the criteria of punitive justice developed by standard justifications, as well as being more likely to conform to criteria developed in feminist ethics.

Retributive approaches to the justification of legal punishment are often thought to place exacting and unattractive demands on state officials, requiring them to expend scarce public resources on apprehending and punishing all offenders strictly in accordance with their criminal ill deserts. Against this caricature of the theory, I argue that retributivists can urge parsimony in the use of punishment. After clarifying what parsimony consists in, I show how retributivists can urge reductions in the use of punishment in order to conserve (...) scarce resources for other valuable social purposes, minimize the foreseeable and adverse effects of legal punishment on the innocent, and accommodate the fact that existing societies fail in numerous ways to satisfy the conditions that make retributive punishment fully justified. (shrink)

Tommie Shelby argues that social injustice undermines the moral standing states would have, were they just, to condemn criminal wrongdoers. He makes a good argument, but he does not go far enough to reject the blaming function of punishment. Shelby’s argument from “impure dissent,” in particular, helps to demonstrate the limits of blame in criminal justice.

In this paper, I defend fairness-based retributivism against two important objections, the no-benefit objection and the social injustice objection. I argue that the theory can defeat the no-benefit objection by developing an account of how crimes can be sources of unfairness by inflicting losses on people, and that it can blunt the social injustice objection by toning down the theory’s distributive aspirations. I conclude that fairness-based retributivism, contrary to received wisdom, merits further attention from legal and political philosophers.

Psychopathy presents a difficult challenge to moral and criminal responsibility theorists. Persons with the disorder have an impaired capacity for empathy and other moral emotions, and fail to feel the force of moral considerations. They have some rational impairments, but they reason adequately to manipulate, con, and exploit their victims, and otherwise to engage successfully in antisocial behavior. Is it appropriate to hold them morally responsible for their wrongdoing? Should the law hold psychopaths criminally responsible? This essay discusses philosophical debates (...) involved in addressing these questions. (shrink)

Punishment is a grave intrusion into individual liberty, yet in most liberal criminal justice systems, including England and Wales, those punished are rarely directly engaged in determining their sentence. Consequently, the offender’s agency in respect of sentence—i.e. the offender’s capacity to play an active part in the sentencing process—is limited. Drawing on existing theories of punishment, the article argues that there may be justifications and scope for allowing offenders to exercise agency in a state-centred sentencing process, even though this scope (...) is inevitably limited. It aims to develop a conceptual account of an ‘agentic’ sentencing system, arguing this should be based on the paradigm of a dialogue between the judge and offender. To preserve the state’s fundamental role in sentencing, constraints should be placed on the exercise of agency. The proposed model embodies a conception of sentencing as a decision-making process to be done _with_ offenders, rather than _to_ offenders. Nonetheless, while some objections can be rebutted, others demonstrate the gap between the theoretical ideal of respecting the offender’s agency at sentencing and how an agentic sentencing system might function in practice. (shrink)

This article addresses the theoretical difficulty of justifying the use of penal coercion in circumstances of marked, unjustified social inequality. The intuitive belief behind the text is that in such a context—that of an indecent State—justifying penal coercion becomes very problematic, particularly when directed against the most disfavored members of society.

This is a slightly revised text of Jeffrie G. Murphy’s Presidential Address delivered to the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, in March 2006. In the essay the author reconsiders two positions he had previously defended—the liberal attack on legal moralism and robust versions of the retributive theory of punishment—and now finds these positions much more vulnerable to legitimate attack than he had previously realized. In the first part of the essay, he argues that the use of Mill’s liberal harm principle (...) against legal moralism cannot be cabined in such a way as to leave intact other positions that many liberals want to defend—in particular, certain fundamental constitutional rights and character retributivism in criminal sentencing. In the second part of the essay, he expresses serious doubts—some inspired by Nietzsche—about the versions of character retributivism that he had once enthusiastically defended and now describes himself as no more than a reluctant retributivist. (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)

El artículo expone dos visiones acerca de la legitimidad del castigo en contextos de exclusión social. En la primera parte, uno de los autores defiende la idea de que los Estados que incumplen con obligaciones legales previas no pueden inculpar a quienes cometan delitos vinculados con ese incumplimiento. No pueden hacerlo porque no tienen el estatus moral para hacerlo de acuerdo a dos objeciones: la de complicidad y la de hipocresía. En la segunda parte, la segunda autora critica esta solución (...) al sostener que la falta de reciprocidad que caracteriza a la relación política vuelve inaplicables las objeciones de hipocresía y complicidad al ámbito del castigo penal estatal. (shrink)

O objetivo desse artigo é investigar o problema da justificação da punição, a saber, como é possível justificar normativamente o dano intencional retributivo reprobatório infligido pelo Estado aos ofensores? Nossa estratégia será tentar conectar a função corretiva e os eventos de remorso, arrependimento e perdão do âmbito privado da punição com o domínio público, de forma a questionar a correção normativa da punição legal. Posteriormente, veremos como o contratualismo pode justificar a instituição da punição de uma forma mais eficiente e (...) como a ética das virtudes pode ser um atrativo modelo quando pensamos em quem punir e o quanto. Por fim, defenderemos que uma teoria moral mista seria desejável para melhor resolver os complexos problemas da justificação da punição. (shrink)

‘Optimistic’ normative theories of criminal justice aim to justify criminal sanction in terms of its reprobative/rehabilitative value rather than its punitive nature as such. But do such theories accord with ordinary intuitions about what constitutes a ‘just’ response to wrongdoing? Recent empirical work on the psychology of punishers suggests that human beings have a ‘brutely retributive’ moral psychology, making them unlikely to endorse normative theories that sacrifice retribution for the sake of reprobation or rehabilitation; it would mean, for example, that (...) we cannot expect people to support such optimistic theories democratically, calling their feasibility into question. Taking the civic republican theory as an exemplar of optimistic theories, we argue that it does not fail this feasibility test. We review recent empirical research, including studies of our own, to support the claim that, far from being brute retributivists, human beings are generally satisfied only with punishment that delivers something other than mere retribution. And we show that this coheres very closely with the goals and policies that civic republicanism would support, as it may be expected to cohere also with other optimistic proposals. (shrink)