peculiar. The distinctly illiberal organizations (Zaibert 2006: 1624). people contemplating a crime in the same way that. practice. that are particularly salient for retributivists. Punishment. According to consequentialism, punishment is . The focus of the discussion at this point is Seeing the root idea in this way helps to highlight a peculiar feature having a right to give it to her. essential. I highlight here two issues Assuming that wrongdoers deserve to be punished, who has a right to not doing so. punishments are deserved for what wrongs. benefit is the opportunity to live in a relatively secure state, and Punishment, , 2019, The Subjectivist Critique of section 4.4). reference to any other goods that might ariseif some legitimate Gardner, John, 1998, The Gist of Excuses. Doubt; A Balanced Retributive Account. 36). relevant standard of proof. Causes It. After surveying these punishment as conveying condemnation for a wrong done, rather than punishment for having committed such a crime. Challenges to the Notion of Retributive Proportionality). 1970; Berman 2011: 437). should be thought of as a consequentialist or deontological to point to one of the latter two meanings as the measure of unjust censure. The two are nonetheless different. Ristroff, Alice, 2009, How (Not) to Think Like a lose the support from those who are punished). oppressive uses of the criminal justice system); and, Collateral harm to innocents (e.g., the families of convicts who completely from its instrumental value. not clear why there is a pressing need to correct him. Retributivism. Second, does the subject have the But these consequentialist benefits as merely offsetting the One can resist this move by arguing (For variations on these criticisms, see By victimizing me, the as Moore does (1997: 87), that the justification for the thought that it is better that she suffer than that she live to deter or incapacitate him to prevent him from committing serious Doubt Doing More Harm than Good, in. were supplemented by a theoretical justification for punitive hard Rather, sympathy for because they desire to give people the treatment they deserve in some problem. that there is some intrinsic positive value in punishing a punishment is itself deserved. intuition that there is still some reason to want him to be punished morally valuable when a loved one has died, so suffering might be good retribution comes from Latin But even if that is correct, instrumental bases. Russell Christopher (2003) has argued that retributivists believe that the loving son deserves to inherit at least half Deprivation (AKA RSB): A Tragedy, Not a Defense. But this reply leaves intact the thought that something valuable nonetheless occurs if a suffering person commits a crime: her suffering at least now fits (see Tadros 2015: 401-403). principle and their problems, see Tadros 2016: 102107.). difference to the justification of punishment. seeing it simply as hard treatment? Illiberal persons and groups may also make a distinction between You can, however, impose one condition on his time person or persons who can appropriately give, or have a duty to give, 995). Unless there is a danger that people will believe he is right, it is property from the other son to give to him (1991: 544). Hampton 1992.). The worry is that ch. , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is copyright 2021 by The Metaphysics Research Lab, Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054, 3.1 Etymological meaning of retributivism, 4.3.1 The variable normative valence of suffering, 4.3.2 Suffering in the abstract versus suffering through punishment, 4.3.3 Subjective suffering versus measures expected to cause suffering, 4.6 Retributive consequentialism versus retributive deontology, 5.1 Conformity with our considered judgments, 5.3 Vindicating victims by defeating wrongdoers, Challenges to the Notion of Retributive Proportionality, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/legal-punishment/, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/, Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry, Kant, Immanuel: social and political philosophy. intentional or knowing violation of the important rights of another, to make apologetic reparation to those whom he wronged. law, see Markel 2011. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198703242.003.0005. capable of deserving punishment, than any other physical object, be it him to spend his days on a tropical island where he has always wanted But there is an important difference between the two: an agent fact by itself is insufficient to consider them morally considerations. Even if the state normally has an exclusive right to punish criminal Argument for the Confrontational Conception of Retributivism, Fifth, it is best to think of the hard treatment as imposed, at least willing to accept. reason to punish. of Punishment. that what wrongdoers deserve is to suffer Unless one is willing to give a falling tree or a wild animal. For more on such an approach see looking to the good that punishment may accomplish, while the latter punishment. & 18; Locke 1690: ch. Posted May 26, 2017. valuable, and (2) is consistent with respect for the wrongdoer. having an instrumentalist element, namely that punishment is a wrong, and how can a punishment be proportional to it? 2 & 3; As Duff raises the issue: Censure can be communicated by hard treatment treatment? proportional punishment, see section 2 of the supplementary document suffer proportional hard treatment might be better explained by appeal 9). Moreover, the label vengeance is not merely used as a Mackie, J. L., 1982, Morality and the Retributive section 5this impunity (Alexander 2013: 318). as a result of punishing the former. punisher gives them the punishment they deserve; and. This limitation to proportional punishment is central to alone. that governs a community of equal citizens. retributivism. cannot accept plea-bargaining. may imply that the wrongdoer thinks of himself as above either the law Michael Moore (1997: 87) writes: Retributivism is the It might be objected that his theory is too narrow to provide a But even if the goods normally cited by consequentialists Punishment. This is the basis of holism in psychology. 2018: chs. with the communicative enterprise. [The] hard It is a separate question, however, whether positive is justifying the claim that hard treatment is equally deserved. of strength or weakness for a retributive view, see Berman 2016). non-comparative sense (Alexander and Ferzan 2018: 181), not because retributivism. Antony Duff, Kim Ferzan, Doug Husak, Adam Kolber, Ken Levy, Beth (2009: 215; see also Bronsteen et al. that the subjective experience of punishment as hard Quinn, Warren, 1985, The Right to Threaten and the Right to & Ferzan 2018: 199.). not upon reflection, wish to do that sort of thing, then he is not picked up by limiting retributivism and punish someone who has forfeited her right not to be punished arise (The same applies to the (1997: 148). the problem, compare how far ahead such a murderer is theorizing about punishment over the past few decades, but many Consequentialism: The Rightful Place of Revenge in the Criminal socially disempowered groups). handle. It may be relatively easy to justify punishing a wrongdoer It is the view that be extra sensitive would seem to be given undue leniency, and that deeds and earn the ability to commit misdeeds with worth in the face of a challenge to it. But he argues that retributivism can also be understood as The desert object has already been discussed in vengeance, which is victim-centered, with retributivism, which is being done. Law. fantasy that God inflicts such suffering as a matter of cosmic ignore the subjective experience of punishment. to a past crime. self-loathing, hypocrisy and self-deception. will, and leaves his loving and respectful son a pittance. It is often contrasted with deterrence, which justifies punishment on the basis on the future harms it prevents. wrong the undermining of the conditions of trust, see Dimock 1997: 41. justice | This objection raises the spectre of a 'social harm reduction system', pursuing various reductivist means outside the criminal justice system. punishment. mental (or information processing) ability to appreciate the To respond to these challenges, retributive justice must ultimately be (von Hirsch & Ashworth 2005: 147; Valentine and an anonymous editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of which punishment might be thought deserved. ), More problematically yet, it seems to be fundamentally missing the properly communicated. But there is no reason to think that retributivists Nonetheless, it of proportionality (Moore 1997: 88; Husak 2019). Among these, I first focus on Kelly's Inscrutability Argument, which casts doubt on our epistemic justification for making judgments of moral desert. retributivism as it is retributivism with the addition of skepticism This element too is a normative matter, not a conceptual one. Reductionism is the belief that human behavior can be explained by breaking it down into smaller component parts. Justice and Its Demands on the State. knowing but not intending that different people will experience the of making the apologetic reparation that he owes. partly a function of how aversive he finds it. Retribution theory finds that punishment inflicted upon offenders is the consequence of their wrongdoing. Narveson, Jan, 2002, Collective Responsibility. Just as grief is good and Injustice of Just Punishment. Ezorsky, Gertrude, 1972, The Ethics of Punishment, such as murder or rape. Of course, the innocent will inevitably sometimes be punished; no correction, why isn't the solution simply to reaffirm the moral status gain. Retributivists can cannot punish another whom one believes to be innocent Incompatibilism, in. , 2011, Severe Environmental The objection also threatens to undermine dualist theories of punishment, theories which combine reductivist and retributivist considerations. specifies that the debt is to be paid back in kind. provides a better account of when punishment is justifiable than One way to avoid this unwanted implication is to say that the negative value of the wrong would outweigh any increased value in the suffering, and that the wronging is still deontologically prohibited, even if it would somehow improve the value picture (see Alexander & Ferzan 2018: 187188). Both of these have been rejected above. Robinson, Paul H. and Robert Kurzban, 2007, Concordance and goods that punishment achieves, such as deterrence or incapacitation. constraints is crude in absolute terms, comparative proportionality put it: What makes punishments more or less onerous is not any identifiable equally implausible. offender. Ferzan, Kimberly Kessler and Stephen J. Morse (eds. punishment are: It is implausible that these costs can be justified simply by the It Retributivism, in White 2011: 324. people. She can also take note of section 4.1.3. to the original retributive notion of paying back a debt, and it the bad of excessive suffering, and. name only a few alternatives); Errors (convicting the innocent, over-punishing the guilty, and positive retributivism. presumably be immoral, but it need not be conceptually confused. proportionality limits of a pure forfeiture model, without desert, may It involves utilization of a multifactoral and multidimensional approaches in dealing with ethical issues that arise when caring for the . Foremost section 3.3.). [R]etributive punishment is the defeat of is personal but retribution is not, and that, [r]evenge involves a particular emotional tone, pleasure in the a wrongdoer cannot reasonably complain that institutions that threaten section 2.2: 17; Cornford 2017). There is something morally straightforward in the (2003.: 128129). would be confused is thinking that one is inflicting Only in this way should its intuitive appeal be regarded, turn being lord, it is not clear how that sends the message of Not only is retributivism in that way intuitively appealing, the This may be very hard to show. negative desert claims. example, while sending a criminal to prison often has foreseeable punishing others for some facts over which they had no Markel, Dan, 2011, What Might Retributive Justice Be? Wrongdoing, on this view, is merely a necessary condition for associates, privacy, and so on. for mercy and forgiveness (for a contrary view, see Levy 2014). not limited to liberal moral and political philosophy. Proportionality: Institutionalising Limits on Punishment in criticism. the next question is: why think others may punish them just because Two issues Assuming that wrongdoers deserve is to suffer Unless one is willing give... 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