Institutions can be assigned duties, and thus can also be blamed for failing to discharge them. But how can we respond to this type of failure? Punishment is a prominent and problematic response to institutional delinquency.

I argue that R.A. Duff’s and Sandra Marshall’s liberal-communitarian justification for punishment doesn’t account for a troubling kind of subordination that results from communicative punishment. Communicative punishment requires a specific interpretation of the nature of the wrong. I focus on victims with incorrect but plausible interpretations of the wrong they’ve suffered to illustrate how a victim’s view a community or other’s view. In the end, I suggest that conceptualizing wrongs as against individuals in relations, rather than as members of communities (...) with shared values, minimizes this kind of subordination. (shrink)

Duff offered an argument for the conclusion that just or legitimate punishment of socially deprived offenders in our unjust society is impossible. One of the claims in his argument is that our courts have the standing to blame an offender only if our polity has the right to do so since our courts are acting as the representatives of, or to use the exact phrases by Duff, “in the name of”, or “on behalf of”, the whole polity. In this paper (...) I will challenge that claim. I will argue that the courts can be seen as acting, not on behalf of the whole polity, but only on behalf of a subset of its citizens, namely, the just citizens (i.e. the citizens who cannot be seen to have wronged the deprived offenders). (shrink)

The punishment of criminals is a topic of long-standing philosophical interest since the ancient Greeks. This interest has focused on several considerations, including the justification of punishment, who should be permitted to punish, and how we might best set punishments for crimes. This entry focuses on the most important contributions in this field. The focus will be on specific theoretical approaches to punishment including both traditional theories of punishment (retributivism, deterrence, rehabilitation) and more contemporary alternatives (expressivism, restorative justice, hybrid theories, (...) unified theories) with an additional section on capital punishment, perhaps the particular form of punishment that has received the most sustained philosophical attention. These theories of punishment address two important questions: first, who should be permitted to punish and, secondly, who should be permitted to be punished. These questions then concern the justification of punishment and its distribution. While the majority today often identifies their theories as retributivist, there is a great diversity of theories defended. This entry will highlight the leading work for each view. (shrink)

In this essay I develop and defend a theory of state punishment within a wider conception of political legitimacy. While many moral theories of punishment focus on what is deserved by criminals, I theorize punishment within the specific context of the state's relationship to its citizens. Central to my account is Rawls's “liberal principle of legitimacy,” which requires that all state coercion be justifiable to all citizens. I extend this idea to the justification of political coercion to criminals qua citizens. (...) I argue that the liberal principle of legitimacy implicitly requires states to respect the basic political rights of those who are guilty of committing crimes, thus prohibiting capital punishment. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned with a problem for communicative theories of punishment. On such theories, punishment is justified at least in part as the authoritative censure or condemnation of crime. But is this compatible with a broadly liberal political outlook? For while liberalism is generally thought to take only a very limited interest in its citizens’ attitudes (seeing moral opinion as a matter of legitimate debate), the idea of state denunciation of crime seems precisely to be focused on (...) the attitudes expressed in action. In this paper I analyse the elements of the communicative theory of punishment, assessing the extent to which they can be considered anti-liberal. I argue that, understood in a certain way, the communicative theory, though in some sense communitarian, is compatible with at least one central and attractive non-perfectionist strand in liberalism. Key Words: communicative theory • Devlin • Duff • Hegel • von Hirsch • punishment. (shrink)

According to the self-defense view, the moral justification of punishment is derived from the moral justification of an earlier threat of punishment for an offense. According to the forfeiture view, criminals can justly be punished because they have forfeited certain rights in virtue of their crimes. The paper defends three theses about these two views. (1) The self-defense view is false because the right to threaten retaliation is not independent of the right to carry out that threat. (2) A more (...) plausible account of the right to threaten says instead that the right to retaliate is primary to the right to threaten, and that the former right in turn arises because aggressors forfeit the right not to suffer retaliation. (3) The ?fair warning thesis,? according to which just punishment must be preceded by a threat, is less plausible than first appearances suggest and is therefore no serious obstacle to the view of threats described above. (shrink)

This piece is a review essay on Victor Tadros’s The Ends of Harm. Tadros rejects retributive desert but believes punishment can be justified instrumentally without succumbing to the problems of thoroughgoing consequentialism and endorsing using people as means. He believes he can achieve these results through extension of the right of self-defense. I argue that Tadros fails in this endeavor: he has a defective account of the means principle; his rejection of desert leads to gross mismatches of punishment and culpability; (...) and he cannot account for punishment of inchoate crimes. (shrink)

Davidovic asks what gives the international community the authority to punish some crimes? On one prominent view some crimes (genome, torture) are so heinous that the international community, so long as its procedures are fair, is justified in prosecuting them. Another view contends that heinousness alone is not enough to justify international prosecution: what is needed is an account of why the international community, in particular, has standing to hold the perpetrators to account. Davidovic raises concerns about both of these (...) views and then defends her own account. On her view, the heinousness of the crimes is relevant, but what makes these crimes the business of the international community is that the community in fact recognizes certain norms against especially heinous crimes. If the international community fails to prosecute and punish those who perpetrate these crimes, this impunity undermines the rule of law, and thereby hinders the maintenance of peace the the protection of human rights. (shrink)

The fourth volume in the Criminalization series, this volume explores some of the most general principles and theories of criminalization. It includes not only philosophical work, but also historical, legal, and sociological investigations into criminalization, clarifying the state of the discipline today.

Retributivism so dominates criminal theory that lawyers, legal scholars and law students assert with complete confidence that criminal law is justified only in light of violations of another person’s rights. Yet the core tenet of retributivism views criminal law fundamentally through the lens of individual actors, rendering both offender and victim unrecognizably denuded from their social and civic context. Doing so means that retributivism is unable to explain even our most basic criminal law practices, such as why we punish recidivists (...) more than first time offenders or why “hate crimes” are of special concern. A republican view of criminal law brings our most natural intuitions back into focus by insisting that the core of criminal responsibility lies in the offender’s attack on the civic bonds that make living in a society as equals possible. By grounding our punishment practices in an Aristotelian republicanism that for so long was the unquestioned basis of mutual responsibility, we understand that hostility, as expressed in the offender’s “civic character,” matters to us all while still seeing our obligations to reintegrate both victim and offender into our shared civic project. (shrink)

In a paper published in 2006, I argued that the best way of defending something like our current practices of punishing war criminals would be to base the justification of this practice on an expressive theory of punishment. I considered two forms that such a justification could take—a ‘denunciatory’ account, on which the purpose of punishment is supposed to communicate a commitment to certain kinds of standard to individuals other than the criminal and a ‘communicative’ account, on which the purpose (...) of the punishment is to communicate with the perpetrator, and argued for a denunciatory account which I developed at some length. In this paper I would like to reconsider the plausibility of a communicative account. One difficulty that such accounts face is that the punishment of war criminals often involves the inflicting of harsh treatment on them by individuals who are members of states other than their own. On a communicative account this is problematic: on such an account—or at least on the version of it proposed by Duff (2000)—it is essential that those who are punish and those who punish them belong to a single community. When this requirement is not satisfied harsh treatment does not constitute punishment. Duff has argued that the problem can be solved by regarding all human beings as members of a single moral community: here I argue that this suggestion is unsatisfactory and propose an alternative. One consequence of my account is that if it is correct there may limitations on the range of kinds of war criminal that can legitimately be punished by international tribunals. (shrink)

Various authors debate the question of whether neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility. However, a plethora of different techniques and technologies, each with their own abilities and drawbacks, lurks beneath the label “neuroscience”; and in criminal law responsibility is not a single, unitary and generic concept, but it is rather a syndrome of at least six different concepts. Consequently, there are at least six different responsibility questions that the criminal law asks—at least one for each responsibility concept—and, I will suggest, (...) a multitude of ways in which the techniques and technologies that comprise neuroscience might help us to address those diverse questions. In a way, on my account neuroscience is relevant to criminal responsibility in many ways, but I hesitate to state my position like this because doing so obscures two points which I would rather highlight: one, neither neuroscience nor criminal responsibility are as unified as that; and two, the criminal law asks many different responsibility questions and not just one generic question. (shrink)

Most people who think seriously about the criminal law think that there should be less of it. Not only should there be less of it in some areas, there should be less of it overall. Douglas Husak is...

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)

In philosophical writings, the practice of punishment standardly features as a terrain over which comprehensive moral theories—in the main, versions of ‘consequentialism’ and ‘deontology’—have fought a prolonged and inconclusive battle. The grip of this top-down model of the relationship between philosophical theory and punitive practice is so tenacious that even the most seemingly innocent concern with the ‘consequences’ of punishment is often read, if not as an endorsement of consequentialism, then at least as the registering of a consequentialist point. But (...) to suppose that repentance or crime prevention, for example, are goods that punishment characteristically aims to secure is hardly to endorse the maximization of some value or set of values as the fundamental criterion of moral rightness. Equally, an appeal to desert or rights in the justification of punishment does not commit one to the deontological claim that these norms have a basis independent of human interests. This suggests that the prevalence of the top-down model may owe more to the inertia of established usage, or the temptations of over-intellectualization, than one might initially have supposed. (shrink)

In this article, I ask whether the state, as opposed to its individual members, can intelligibly and legitimately be criminalized, with a focus on the possibility of its domestic criminalization. I proceed by identifying what I take to be the core objections to such criminalization, and then investigate ways in which they can be challenged. First, I address the claim that the state is not a kind of entity that can intelligibly perpetrate domestic criminal wrongs. I argue against it by (...) building upon an account of the modern state as a moral agent proper, capable of both culpable moral and legal wrongdoing. I then consider objections to the intelligibility and legitimacy of subjecting states to domestic criminal processes, which primarily find their source in the assumption that such subjection would necessarily involve the state prosecuting, judging, and punishing itself. I argue that whether this (questionable) assumption is sound or not, it does not create the kinds of unsolvable quandaries its exponents think it does. I then move on to reject the distinct, yet related, objection that, at least in aspiring liberal jurisdictions, treating the state as a criminal objectionably involves extending to it various substantive and procedural guarantees that, given its nature and raison d’être, it should not have. Finally, I discuss three central objections to punishing the state. First, that organizations like states do not have the phenomenal consciousness required to suffer punishment. Second, that the constant possibility of dispersion of state punishment amongst individual members stands in the way of its justification. Lastly, that whatever justification there may be for making things harder for the state in response to its culpable wrongdoing, such treatment need not be understood as punishment. While partially conceding the strength of these objections, I strive to loosen their grip in ways that show that justified punishment of the state, meaningfully understood as such, remains a distinct possibility. I conclude by contrasting supposed alternatives to the criminalization of states, and by contending that my analysis leaves us with enough to keep the possibility of state criminalization on the table as a justifiable response to state wrongdoing. (shrink)

Crimes against humanity are supposed to have a collective dimension with respect both to their victims and their perpetrators. According to the orthodox view, these crimes can be committed by individuals against individuals, but only in the context of a widespread or systematic attack against the group to which the victims belong. In this paper I offer a new conception of crimes against humanity and a new justification for their international prosecution. This conception has important implications as to which crimes (...) can be justifiably prosecuted and punished by the international community. I contend that the scope of the area of international criminal justice that deals with basic human rights violations should be wider than is currently acknowledged, in that it should include some individual violations of human rights, rather than only violations that have a collective dimension. (shrink)

The Herald of Free Enterprise, a ferry operating in the English Channel, sank on March 6, 1987, drowning nearly two hundred people. The official inquiry found that the company running the ferry was extremely sloppy, with poor routines of checking and management. “From top to bottom the body corporate was infected with the disease of sloppiness.”1 But the courts did not penalize anyone in what might seem to be an appropriate measure, failing to identify individuals in the company or on (...) the ship itself who were seriously enough at fault. As one commentator put it, “The primary requirement of finding an individual who was liable . . . stood in the way of attaching any significance to the organizational sloppiness that had been found by the official inquiry.”2 In a case like this it can make good sense to hold that while the individuals involved may not bear a high degree of personal responsibility, together as a corporate enterprise they should carry full responsibility for what occurred. Although the members may not fully satisfy the conditions for being held personally responsible—although there are mitigating circumstances that excuse them in some mea-. (shrink)

Antony Duff has argued that an important precondition of criminal liability is that the state has the moral standing to call the offender to account. Conditions of severe social injustice, if allowed or perpetuated by the state, can undermine this standing. Duff’s argument appeals to the ordinary idea that a person’s own behaviour can sometimes negate his standing to call others to account. It is argued that this is an important issue, but that the analogy with individual standing is problematic. (...) Moreover, Duff’s account of standing needs to address two interconnected issues: first, when and in what way the state can lose its standing to call offenders to account, and second, over what range of offences. Key Words: criminal liability • Duff • punishment • social injustice. (shrink)

For over a century the so-called ‘Peelian’ principles have been central to the self-understanding of Anglo-American policing. But these principles are the product of modern state-building and speak only partially to the challenges of urban policing today. In fact, they stand in the way of clear thinking and better practice. In this paper, I argue that these principles ought to be radically recast and put to work in new ways. The argument proceeds as follows. First, I recover and outline the (...) current ‘Peelian’ principles and argue that they lack the specificity, sufficiency and status required in order to do real work in the governance of policing. Second, I make the case for principles both as a regulative ideal guiding our aspirations for what policing can become and as a means of regulating police work in the here-and-now. I then develop a revised set of principles and indicate, in conclusion, how they can guide the formation of trust-producing and democracy-enhancing practices of civic policing. (shrink)

When most people think of legal punishment, they envision a judge or jury convicting a person for a crime, and then sentencing that person in accordance with clearly prescribed penalties, as specified in the criminal law. The person serves the sentence, is released (perhaps a bit early for A good behavior"), and then welcomed back into society as a full-functioning member, adorned with all the rights and responsibilities of ordinary citizens.

This paper provides a discussion of the role that emotions may play in the justification of punishment. On the expressivist account of punishment, punishment has the purpose of expressing appropriate emotional reactions to wrongdoing, such as indignation, resentment or guilt. I will argue that this expressivist approach fails as these emotions can be expressed other than through the infliction of punishment. Another argument for hard treatment put forward by expressivists states that punitive sanctions are necessary in order for the law (...) to be valid. But this justification of punishment, too, is unconvincing. There are no good reasons to assume that we have to resort to punitive measures in order to vindicate the law. I will then raise the more general worry whether there is any intelligible link at all between moral emotions such as indignation, resentment or guilt and retributive behaviour. I will finally conclude with some sceptical remarks on the moral worth of retribution. (shrink)

In this follow up to I Was Wrong: The Meanings of Apologies, Nick Smith expands his ambitious theories of categorical apologies to civil and criminal law. After rejecting court-ordered apologies as unjustifiable humiliation, this book explains that penitentiaries were originally designed to bring about penance - something like apology - and that this tradition has been lost in the assembly line of mass incarceration. Smith argues that the state should modernize these principles and techniques to reduce punishments for offenders who (...) demonstrate moral transformation through apologizing. Smith also explains the counterintuitive situation whereby apologies come to have considerable financial worth in civil cases because victims associate them with priceless matters of the soul. Such confusions allow powerful wrongdoers to manipulate perceptions to disastrous effect, such as when corporations or governments assert that apologies do not equate to accepting blame or require reform or redress. (shrink)

A parallel may be drawn between the communicative aspect of civil disobedience and the communicative aspect of lawful punishment by the state. In punishing an offender, the state seeks to communicate both its condemnation of the crime committed and its desire for repentance and reformation on the part of the offender. Similarly, in civilly disobeying the law, a disobedient seeks to convey both her condemnation of a certain law or policy and her desire for recognition that a lasting change in (...) policy is required. When disobedients and authorities target each other, their confrontation allows for a direct comparison of the respective justifiability of their conduct. Their confrontation is explored in this paper with an eye to analysing how civil disobedients and authorities should engage with each other. (shrink)

Does communicative retributivism necessarily negate capital punishment? My answer is no. I argue that there is a place, though a very limited and unsettled one, for capital punishment within the theoretical vision of communicative retributivism. The death penalty, when reserved for extravagantly evil murderers for the most heinous crimes, is justifiable by communicative retributive ideals. I argue that punishment as censure is a response to the preceding message sent by the offender through his criminal act. The gravity of punishment should (...) be commensurate to the preceding criminal message, so that the offender can face up to the nature and significance of his crime. All murders are not the same. To measure up to the most evil and humanity-degrading murderous message, capital punishment should be the counter-message. Next, I argue that capital punishment does not necessarily violate human dignity. The death penalty and torture may both disrupt human dignity, yet in distinct ways. The death penalty terminates life, the vessel that holds together autonomy, while torture directly assaults autonomy. Torture is never permissible as a form of punishment. But death penalty, when used only on the extravagant evildoers, is justifiable, as life is thoroughly degraded by his own evil act. Further, I argue that mercy is integral to communicative retributivists’ theory of capital punishment. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss the criminalization of conduct based on human dignity arguments. It proposes a modest version of integrating human dignity into discussions about criminalization. After a critical examination of both the notion of “human dignity as an objective value” and the assumption that the meaning of human dignity can be explained by referring to Kant’s moral philosophy, human dignity violations are characterized as severe humiliations.

The idea that victims of social injustice who commit crimes ought not to be subject to punishment has attracted serious attention in recent legal and political philosophy. R. A. Duff has argued, for example, a states that perpetrates social injustice lacks the standing to punish victims of such injustice who commit crimes. A crucial premiss in his argument concerns the fact that when courts in liberal society mete out legitimate criminal punishments, they are conceived as acting in the name of (...) all citizens—on behalf of the whole political community. Resisting this premiss, Peter Chau has suggested that courts ought to be conceived as acting only in the name of “just citizens”: citizens who cannot be plausibly seen as having contributed to distributive injustice. When conceived in this way, Chau argues, courts can no longer plausibly be regarded as lacking standing to punish. This article uses the debate between Duff and Chau to explain why the question of whether to punish socially deprived offenders can only be answered adequately when connected to broader concerns of democratic theory. Specifically, it argues that Chau’s proposal is not available within the context of the kind of political community upon which (Duff rightly believes) a system of liberal criminal law depends for its justification and maintenance: a community in which citizens see the law as embodying shared norms whose specific demands they disagree about. State officials are morally permitted to see themselves as acting on behalf of a subset of the citizenry, I argue, only in circumstances of democratic crisis : circumstances in which a moral community can no longer be plausibly said to exist. (shrink)

Should the state punish its disadvantaged citizens who have committed crimes? Duff has recently argued that where disadvantage persists the state loses its authority to hold individuals to account and to punish for criminal wrongdoings. I here scrutinize Duff’s argument for the claim that social justice is a precondition for the legitimacy of state punishment. I sharpen an objection to Duff’s argument: with his framework, we seem unable to block the implausible conclusion that where disadvantage persists the state lacks the (...) authority to punish any citizen for any crime. I then set out an alternative line of argument in support of the claim that social deprivation can threaten the states legitimate punitive authority. I argue that a penal system must incorporate certain proportionality principles, and that these principles cannot both be met where citizens suffer from deprivation. (shrink)

Some philosophers think that the challenge of justifying punishment can be met by a theory that emphasizes the expressive character of punishment. A particular type of theories of this sort - call it Expressive Retributivism [ER] - combines retributivist and expressivist considerations. These theories are retributivist since they justify punishment as an intrinsically appropriate response to wrongdoing, as something wrongdoers deserve, but the expressivist element in these theories seeks to correct for the traditional obscurity of retributivism. Retributivists often rely on (...) appeals to controversial intuitions involving obscure concepts. While retributive intuitions can be compelling, some worry that the justificatory challenge cannot be met merely by appealing to them. ER tries to enhance the clarity and justificatory power of these intuitions and the concepts they invoke by appealing to an expressive conception of punishment. I argue that these theories fail to justify punishment and that there is reason to think that they cannot, in principle, justify punishment. (shrink)

Expressivist theories of punishment received largely favorable treatment in the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps predictably, the 2000s saw a slew of critical rejections of the view. It is now becoming evident that, while several objections to expressivism have found their way into print, three concerns are proving particularly popular. So the time is right for a big picture assessment. What follows is an attempt to show that these three dominant objections are not decisive reasons to give up the most plausible (...) forms of the view. Moreover, in addition to the three common objections, expressivism has an acknowledged question mark concerning whether the value of punitive expression outweighs its drawbacks. Here I also map out some promising avenues that the expressivist can take to answer this question. (shrink)

Part of the Studies in Crime and Public Policy series, this book, written by one of the top philosophers of punishment, examines the main trends in penal theorizing over the past three decades. Duff asks what can justify criminal punishment, and then explores the legitimacy of actual practices by examining what would count as adequate justification for them. Duff argues that a "communicative conception of punishment," which he presents as a third way between consequentialist and retributive theories, offers the most (...) fruitful way of understanding punishment's meaning and justification. Duff addresses such questions as how much sentences should be constrained by proportionality requirements; what modalities of punishment best communicate their intended meaning; and what decisionmaking procedures he envisions. This book will appeal to criminologists, philosophers, and others interested in theories of punishment. (shrink)

Christopher Bennett presents a theory of punishment grounded in the practice of apology, and in particular in reactions such as feeling sorry and making amends. He argues that offenders have a 'right to be punished' - that it is part of taking an offender seriously as a member of a normatively demanding relationship that she is subject to retributive attitudes when she violates the demands of that relationship. However, while he claims that punishment and the retributive attitudes are the necessary (...) expression of moral condemnation, his account of these reactions has more in common with restorative justice than traditional retributivism. He argues that the most appropriate way to react to crime is to require the offender to make proportionate amends. His book is a rich and intriguing contribution to the debate over punishment and restorative justice. (shrink)

The principle that a sentence should be proportionate to the seriousness of the offence remains at the centre of penal practice and scholarly debate. This volume explores highly topical aspects of proportionality theory that require examination and further analysis. von Hirsch and Ashworth explore the relevance of the principle of proportionality to the sentencing of young offenders, the possible reasons for departing from the principle when sentencing dangerous offenders, and the application of the principle to socially deprived offenders. They examine (...) the claim that the principle tends to be associated with greater severity in sentencing, and explore the relevance of penance and of restorative justice to proportionality theory. Their examination of arguments and counter-arguments culminates in a re-statement of the main criteria for proportionate sentencing.The authors are well known for their previous writings on proportionality theory, and this volume broadens the theory to deal with important contemporary issues in crime and punishment. (shrink)

This collection of original essays, by some of the best known contemporary criminal law theorists, tackles a range of issues about the criminal law's 'special part' - the part of the criminal law that defines specific offences. One of its aims is to show the importance, for theory as well as for practice, of focusing on the special part as well as on the general part which usually receives much more theoretical attention. Some of the issues covered concern the proper (...) scope of the criminal law, for example how far should it include offences of possession, or endangerment? If it should punish only wrongful conduct, how can it justly include so-called 'mala prohibita', which are often said to involve conduct that is not wrongful prior to its legal prohibition? Other issues concern the ways in which crimes should be classified. Can we make plausible sense, for instance, of the orthodox distinction between crimes of basic and general intent? Should domestic violence be defined as a distinct offence, distinguished from other kinds of personal violence? Also examined are the ways in which specific offences should be defined, to what extent those definitions should identify distinctive types of wrongs, and the light that such definitional questions throw on the grounds and structures of criminal liability. Such issues are discussed in relation not only to such crimes as murder, rape, theft and other property offences, but also in relation to offences such as bribery, endangerment and possession that have not traditionally been subjects for in depth theoretical analysis. (shrink)

In this book, David Boonin examines the problem of punishment, and particularly the problem of explaining why it is morally permissible for the state to treat those who break the law in ways that would be wrong to treat those who do not? Boonin argues that there is no satisfactory solution to this problem and that the practice of legal punishment should therefore be abolished. Providing a detailed account of the nature of punishment and the problems that it generates, he (...) offers a comprehensive and critical survey of the various solutions that have been offered to the problem and concludes by considering victim restitution as an alternative to punishment. Written in a clear and accessible style, The Problem of Punishment will be of interest to anyone looking for a critical introduction to the subject as well as to those already familiar with it. (shrink)

This book was the first booklength treatment of the philosophical foundations of international criminal law. The focus is on the moral, legal, and political questions that arise when individuals who commit collective crimes, such as crimes against humanity, are held accountable by international criminal tribunals. These tribunals challenge one of the most sacred prerogatives of states - sovereignty - and breaches to this sovereignty can be justified in limited circumstances, following what the author calls a minimalist account of the justification (...) of international prosecution. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book should appeal to anyone with an interest in international law, political philosophy, international relations, and human rights theory. (shrink)

This book offers a critical examination of those theories and advances a new argument for punishment's justification, calling it the 'duty view'.

In _The Immorality of Punishment_ Michael Zimmerman argues forcefully that not only our current practice but indeed any practice of legal punishment is deeply morally repugnant, no matter how vile the behaviour that is its target. Despite the fact that it may be difficult to imagine a state functioning at all, let alone well, without having recourse to punishing those who break its laws, Zimmerman makes a timely and compelling case for the view that we must seek and put into (...) practice alternative means of preventing crime and promoting social stability. (shrink)