Recent research in moral psychology has attempted to characterize patterns of moral judgments of actions in terms of the causal and intentional properties of those actions. The present study directly compares the roles of consequence, causation, belief and desire in determining moral judgments. Judgments of the wrongness or permissibility of action were found to rely principally on the mental states of an agent, while judgments of blame and punishment are found to rely jointly on mental states and the causal connection (...) of an agent to a harmful consequence. Also, selectively for judgments of punishment and blame, people who attempt but fail to cause harm more are judged more leniently if the harm occurs by independent means than if the harm does not occur at all. An account of these phenomena is proposed that distinguishes two processes of moral judgment: one which begins with harmful consequences and seeks a causally responsible agent, and the other which begins with an action and analyzes the mental states responsible for that action. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. (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)

Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning (...) the willingness of experimental subjects to punish uncooperative free-riders at a cost to themselves. In this article, I distinguish between a “narrow” and a “wide” reading of the experimental evidence. Under the narrow reading, punishment experiments are just useful devices to measure psychological propensities in controlled laboratory conditions. Under the wide reading, they replicate a mechanism that supports cooperation also in “real-world” situations outside the laboratory. I argue that the wide interpretation must be tested using a combination of laboratory data and evidence about cooperation “in the wild.” In spite of some often-repeated claims, there is no evidence that cooperation in the small egalitarian societies studied by anthropologists is enforced by means of costly punishment. Moreover, studies by economic and social historians show that social dilemmas in the wild are typically solved by institutions that coordinate punishment, reduce its cost, and extend the horizon of cooperation. The lack of field evidence for costly punishment suggests important constraints about what forms of cooperation can or cannot be sustained by means of decentralised policing. (shrink)

Alfredo Traps in Durrenmatt’s tale discovers that he has brought off, all by himself, a murder involving considerable ingenuity. The mock prosecutor in the tale demands the death penalty “as reward for a crime that merits admiration, astonishment, and respect.” Traps is deeply moved; indeed, he is exhilarated, and the whole of his life becomes more heroic, and, ironically, more precious. His defense attorney proceeds to argue that Traps was not only innocent but incapable of guilt, “a victim of the (...) age.” This defense Traps disavows with indignation and anger. He makes claim to the murder as his and demands the prescribed punishment—death. (shrink)

Cooperation towards public goods relies on credible threats of punishment to deter cheats. However, punishing is costly, so it remains unclear who incurred the costs of enforcement in our evolutionary past. Theoretical work suggests that human cooperation may be promoted if people believe in supernatural punishment for moral transgressions. This theory is supported by new work in cognitive psychology and by anecdotal ethnographic evidence, but formal quantitative tests remain to be done. Using data from 186 societies around the globe, I (...) test whether the likelihood of supernatural punishment—indexed by the importance of moralizing “high gods”—is associated with cooperation. (shrink)

Taking a fresh look at a central controversy in criminal law theory, The Ethics of Capital Punishment presents a rationale for the death penalty grounded in a theory of the nature of evil and the nature of defilement. Original, unsettling, and deeply controversial, it will be an essential reference point for future debates on the subject.

I want to discuss philosophically, to glance at the logic of, the parts of this expression “the justification of punishment” and then to draw from this discussion one or two morals for discussions of the justification of punishment. This paper is based on one originally given to the Scots Philosophy Club at its Aberdeen meeting in 1953, as the third part of a symposium on The Justification of Punishment.

Many philosophers and laypeople have the following two intuitions about legal punishment: the state has a pro tanto moral reason to punish all those guilty of breaking a just law and to do so in proportion to their guilt. Accepting that there can be overriding considerations not to punish all the guilty in proportion to their guilt, many philosophers still consider it a strike against any theory if it does not imply that there is always a supportive moral reason to (...) do so. In this paper, I demonstrate that censure theory accounts for these intuitions much better than any other theory, including forms of retributivism such as desert theory and fairness theory, and explain why censure theory is able to do so. (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)

Suppose we embrace the republican ideal of freedom as non-domination: freedom as immunity to arbitrary interference. In that case those acts that call uncontroversially for criminalization will usually be objectionable on three grounds: the offender assumes a dominating position in relation to the victim, the offender reduces the range or ease of undominated choice on the part of the victim, and the offender raises a spectre of domination for others like the victim. And in that case, so it appears, the (...) obvious role for punishment will be, so far as possible, to undo such evils: to rectify the effects of the crime that make it a repugnant republican act. This paper explores this theory of punishment as rectification, contrasting it with better established utilitarian and retributivist approaches. (shrink)

I argue that contemporary liberal theory cannot give a general justification for the institution or practice of punishment, i.e., a justification that would hold across a broad range of reasonably realistic conditions. I examine the general justifications offered by three prominent contemporary liberal theorists and show how their justifications fail in light of the possibility of an alternative to punishment. I argue that, because of their common commitments regarding the nature of justification, these theorists have decisive reasons to reject punishment (...) in favor of a non-punitive alternative. I demonstrate the possibility of this alternative by means of a careful examination of the nature of punishment, isolating one essential characteristic—the aim to impose suffering—and showing how this characteristic need not guide enforcement. There is logical space for a forceful and coercive, yet non-punitive method of enforcement. This fact poses difficulties for many classical and contemporary justifications of punishment, but it poses particularly crippling problems for general liberal justifications. (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)

The article discusses the link between freedom, crime and punishment. According to some theorists, crime does not only cause a person to have less freedom; it constitutes, _in and of itself_, a breach of the freedom of others. Punishment does not only cause people to have more freedom, for instance by preventing crimes; it constitutes, _in and of itself_, respect for mutual freedom. If the latter claims are true, crime and punishment must have certain _meanings_ that make them denials/affirmations of (...) freedom irrespective of their consequences. My aim is to show that such an immanent connection between crime/punishment and freedom exists. I do so by explicating the “natural meaning” of crime and punishment. This way of addressing the topic is inspired by Jean Hampton’s use of H. P. Grice’s concept of natural meaning. Expanding on Hampton’s theory, drawing on both H. L. A. Hart and Kant, I argue that crime has the natural meaning of denying freedom, and punishment has the natural meaning of affirming freedom. The paper presents an ideal theory, not a justification for actual criminal justice practices, which in most countries unfortunately fail to instantiate the value of mutual freedom. (shrink)

Using ethnographic data gathered at a mandated, community-based drug treatment program for women offenders, this article analyzes how gendered notions of the self and of autonomy shape penal governance. This study examines how psychological models of women's deviance, racialized visions of motherhood, and therapeutic techniques of the self come into tension with expectations of responsible, autonomous citizenship. The program prioritized therapeutic ways of governing its clients over those that emphasized economic self-reliance, rational decision making, and normalizing gender. This is because (...) staff attributed criminal and addictive behaviors to women's inadequate self-understanding and lack of emotional autonomy in personal relations. Staff discouraged women's motherhood and paid labor because they saw these external obligations as a threat to women's autonomous selfhood. This research complicates claims that contemporary forms of penal treatment manage offenders through rational incentives and personal responsibility by pointing to the ways that subject formation is a gendered process. (shrink)

The United States carceral system, as currently designed and implemented, is widely considered to be an immoral and inhumane system of criminal punishment. There are a number of pressing issues related to this topic, but in this essay, I will focus upon the problem of prison violence. Inadequate supervision has resulted in unsafe prison conditions where inmates are regularly threatened with rape, assault, and other forms of physical violence. Such callous disregard and exposure to unreasonable risk constitutes a severe violation (...) of the rights of prisoners by the state. While there have been numerous legal, political, and activist efforts to draw attention to this issue—with the goal of reforming and making prisons safer—my goal is different. I argue that inmates who are victims of prison violence should have their sentences automatically reduced. Two distinct arguments are advanced in support of this claim. First, I argue that acts of prison violence are a sort of state-mediated harm which can thus be appropriately described as punishment-constituting. Second, and more straightforwardly, I argue that the compensation owed to prisoners who are victims of prison violence may naturally take the form of a reduced sentence. (shrink)

Kant is often regarded as an extreme retributivist, but recently commentators emphasize the importance of deterrence in Kant's basic justification of punishment. Kant's combination of deterrence and retributive elements, however, must be distinguished from others that are less plausible. To interpret Kant as merely adding retributive side-constraints to a basic deterrence aim fails to capture fully the retributive strain in Kant's thought. The basic questions are: who should be punished, how much, in what manner, and why? Kant held that all (...) and only the legally guilty ought to be punished, the legally guilty being also morally guilty, except when the legal requirement was to do something "immoral in itself." This case aside, violations of law also transgress an ethical duty to obey the law. Criminal punishments should be designed to match victims' empirically discernable losses in degree and kind, except when this would be impossible or degrading; courts cannot measure the ultimate moral desert of criminals, which depends on their inner "will." "Punishment" is not a mere disincentive in a "price" system of social control; it has an inherent expressive function, conveying a public message of moral disapproval of the criminal conduct in question. Understanding this together with Kant's basic theory of justice may help to explain his acceptance of ius talionis and condemnation of making exceptions for pragmatic reasons. It also accounts for the retributive "tone" of Kant's remarks, despite his insistence that public courts deal only with "external actions," not overall moral worth and character assessment. Kant wird oft als Vertreter einer extremen Vergeltungstheorie gesehen. Auf der anderen Seite betonen verschiedene Autoren in der letzten Zeit die Abschreckung als grundlegendes Element in Kants Rechtfertigung der Strafe. Ihnen gegenüber muß Kants Verknüpfung von Vergeltung und Abschreckung von anderen ähnlichen Verknüpfungen unterschieden werden, die weniger plausibel sind. Kant so zu interpretieren, als füge er zum Hauptziel der Abschreckung nur einige nebensächliche Elemente der Vergeltung hinzu, verfehlt den Vergeltungsaspekt in Kants Straftheorie. Die grundlegenden Fragen sind: Wer soll bestraft werden, wie schwer, in welcher Weise und warum? Kant war der Ansicht, daß alle, aber auch nur diejenigen bestraft werden sollen, die sich vor dem juridischen Gesetz schuldig gemacht haben. Wer sich vor dem juridischen Gesetz schuldig gemacht hat, hat sich auch moralisch schuldig gemacht, es sei denn, das vom Recht Geforderte sei etwas "an sich selbst Unmoralisches". Sieht man von diesem letzteren Fall einmal ab, dann enthält jede Übertretung des juridischen Gesetzes immer auch eine Verletzung der ethischen Pflicht, dem juridischen Gesetz zu gehorchen. Strafe sollte darauf angelegt sein, den empirisch erkennbaren Verlusten des Opfers nach Art und Ausmaß zu entsprechen, außer, wenn dies unmöglich oder erniedrigend wäre; Gerichte können die tatsächliche moralische Schuld von Verbrechern, die von ihrem inneren "Willen" abhängt, nicht messen. "Strafe" ist kein bloßes Abschreckungsmittel in einem "Preis"-System sozialer Kontrolle. Statt dessen hat sie die ganz wesentliche und ausdrückliche Funktion, die moralische Mißbilligung des jeweiligen verbrecherischen Verhaltens öffentlich zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Diese Interpretation, zusammen mit Kants grundlegender Theorie der Gerechtigkeit, kann helfen zu verstehen, warum Kant das ius talionis akzeptiert hat und warum er Ausnahmen, die aus pragmatischen Gründen gemacht werden, mißbilligt. Sie erklärt auch den "Tonfall" in Kants Äußerungen, der mir seiner Vergeltungstheorie zusammenhängt, auch wenn Kant darauf beharrt, daß staatliche Gerichte sich immer nur mit "äußeren" Handlungen befassen, nicht mit dem moralischen Wert insgesamt oder mit einer Beurteilung des Charakters einer Person. (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)

Chad Flanders has argued that retributivism is inconsistent with John Rawls’s core notion of public reason, which sets out those considerations on which legitimate exercises of state power can be based. Flanders asserts that retributivism is grounded in claims about which people can reasonably disagree and are thus not suitable grounds for public policy. This essay contends that Rawls’s notion of public reason does not provide a basis for rejecting retributivist justifications of punishment. I argue that Flanders’s interpretation of public (...) reason is too exclusionary: on it, public reason would rule out any prominent rationale for punishment. On what I contend is a better interpretation of public reason, whether retributivism would be ruled out as a rationale for punishment depends on whether a retributivist account can be constructed from shared political commitments in a liberal democracy. Some prominent versions of retributivism meet this requirement and so are consistent with public reason. (shrink)

How do people respond to others' accidental behaviors? Reward and punishment for accidents might be depend on the actor's intentions, or instead on the unintended outcomes she brings about. Yet, existing paradigms in experimental economics do not include the possibility of accidental monetary allocations. We explore the balance of outcomes and intentions in a two-player economic game where monetary allocations are made with a "trembling hand": that is, intentions and outcomes are sometimes mismatched. Player 1 allocates $10 between herself and (...) Player 2 by rolling one of three dice. One die has a high probability of a selfish outcome, another has a high probability of a fair outcome, and the third has a high probability of a generous outcome. Based on Player 1's choice of die, Player 2 can infer her intentions. However, any of the three die can yield any of the three possible outcomes. Player 2 is given the opportunity to respond to Player 1's allocation by adding to or subtracting from Player 1's payoff. We find that Player 2's responses are influenced substantially by the accidental outcome of Player 1's roll of the die. Comparison to control conditions suggests that in contexts where the allocation is at least partially under the control of Player 1, Player 2 will punish Player 1 accountable for unintentional negative outcomes. In addition, Player 2's responses are influenced by Player 1's intention. However, Player 2 tends to modulate his responses substantially more for selfish intentions than for generous intentions. This novel economic game provides new insight into the psychological mechanisms underlying social preferences for fairness and retribution. (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)

Discussions of the morality of capital punishment, and indeed discussions of the morality of punishment in general, usually assume that there are two possible justifications of punishment, a deterrence justification associated with utilitarianism and other consequentialist moral theories, and a retributive justification associated with deontological moral theories. But now that rights-based theories are attracting the increasing attention of moral philosophers it is worth asking whether these theories may not employ a different justification of punishment, with different consequences for the morality (...) of particular forms of punishment. I will argue that rights theories do employ a different justification of punishment, and that this justification combines many of the attractive features of the deterrence and retributive justifications while avoiding their unattractive features. In particular, I will argue that the rights-based justification has more attractive consequences for the morality of capital punishment than either the deterrence or retributive justifications. (shrink)

Guala raises important questions about the misinterpretation of experimental studies that have found that subjects engage in costly punishment. Instead of positing that punishment is the solution for social dilemmas, earlier research posited that when individuals facing a social dilemma agreed on their own rules and used graduated sanctions, they were more likely to have robust solutions over time.

Most philosophers reject what we might call "penal pluralism": the idea that punishment can and should encompass multiple penal goals or principles. This is rejected because it is often held that different penal goals or principles will conflict: the goal of punishing an offender to the degree deserved may differ and even undermine the goal of enabling deterrence or rehabilitation. For this reason, most philosophers argue that we must make a choice, such as choosing between retribution and its alternatives. In (...) "Some Remarks on Punishment," F. H. Bradley re-examines the justification of punishment in light of a critique of Darwinism's importance for ethics. My primary focus is on how Bradley's substantive discussion of punishment only because it is here that this article's arguments have most relevance for us today. (shrink)

I examine here a wide array of interlocking Socratic doctrines, especially as they show up in the ideas of Socratic Ignorance and the Examined Life —along with such other Socratic claims as the following. First, that No one errs willingly. Second, that, in acting intentionally, everyone is always seeking their own greatest available good, given their present circumstances, where that greatest good is taken over the rest of their lives. Third, that those who don’t see that harming others will not, (...) over the rest of their lives, serve their own greatest good, deserve not punishment but instruction. I conduct this examination with my eye on two blatant contemporary inequalities across race and class. The first is that involved in differentially funding different schools and thereby shortchanging the ability of those of our children who need it most to work out better means to their own greatest good over the rest of their lives; the second is that across race, class, and educational background in our extensive incarceration practices. In the longest part of this essay, I argue that a principal philosophical presupposition of punishment practices can be shown to be well wide of the mark by the Socratic theory I explore here. This is the presupposition that there is some kind of philosophical justification—for example, in modern “under the description” theories—for the decidedly questionable view that we can almost always determine quite sufficiently what a person’s intentions are for purposes of justifiably and usefully punishing supposed malefactors. (shrink)

I examine emotional reactions to wrongdoing to determine whether they offer support for retributivism. It is often thought that victims desire to see their victimizer suffer and that this reaction offers support for retributivism. After rejecting several attempts to use different theories of emotion and different approaches to using emotions to justify retributivism, I find that, assuming a cognitive theory of emotion is correct, emotions can be used as heuristic guides much as suggested by Michael Moore. Applying this method to (...) the actual emotional reactions of victims' relatives, however, does not find support for retributivism. Instead, it suggests punishment should be understood as part of a process of recovery with a complex set of demands. Retributive concerns can play a role in the process, but they don't have the priority that retributivism requires. (shrink)

Professor Flew's vigorous and interesting paper, “The Justification of Punishment,” in PHILOSOPHY for October 1954 discusses my article on Punishment in Mind for April 1939. It merits some rejoinder. Flew's paper ranges far beyond the particular issue of punishment, and much of what is most interesting in it has this wider relevance. I, too, therefore shall use punishment as a peg on which to hang some discussion of the wider problems of ethics.

We will consider alternative ways that Kant’s philosophical views on ethics generally and on punishment more particularly could be brought into harmony with the present near consensus of opposition to the death penalty. We will make use of the notion of the contemporary consensus about certain issues, particularly equality of the sexes and the death penalty, found in widespread agreement, though not unanimity. Of course, it is always possible that some consensuses are wrong, or misguided, or mistaken. We should not (...) put too much philosophical weight on the notion of a consensus here. If there is a consensus for the equality of women as citizens, and against the death penalty, this will simply suggest to us that we will want to reconsider Kant’s views on such topics. In both instances mentioned, his views lie outside the current consensus. We will consider how to revise Kant’s views to bring them into accord with these current consensuses, within a theory that is still, in as significant a sense as possible, Kantian. Since the use of the idea of a consensus is a sort of short-cut, there will not be much direct discussion of arguments for or against the equality of women as citizens, or for or against the advisability of using the death penalty. Yet the discussions of these issues will illuminate certain facts about the structure of Kant’s moral and political theories, and about how the basic principles within those theories relate to particular moral applications or topics. If we can still end up with a thoroughly Kantian view on the death penalty, that also will tell us something about the relation of Kantian ethical and legal principles to the death penalty as that issue is discussed today. Opposition to the death penalty in present day circumstances is not at variance with the basic principles of Kantian ethical, political, and legal theory, including his retributivism in the justification of punishment. Indeed, there is a way of revising Kant’s views to bring them into harmony with abolition. (shrink)

"Do the Crime, Do the Time," is a commonplace formula for the meaning of incarceration. But time is precisely what a person is prevented from doing under conditions of incarceration. The prison regime becomes increasingly inhuman as time is displaced, represented in the extreme manifestation of solitary confinement, where all meaning of time is purged to the point that "the box" in New York houses 4.4 percent of inmates and accounts for 31.6 percent of suicides as reported in 2001.

Much has been written about how we should understand proportional punishment. A standardised sentence may, in the presence of pre-existing disadvantage, produce morally significant additional harms. Others argue that modifying a standard punishment to avoid such harm is to show leniency in light of social disadvantage. I disagree: Where the standardised sentence can be amended to minimise unnecessary additional harms at a reasonable cost, while preserving a proportionate amount of punishment, the state has a duty to make the amendment. I (...) articulate a partial reconstruction of proportionality calculations to put proportionality into perspective. Rather than disproportionate leniency, such variation is demanded by principles of political equality and by proportionality itself, if we take seriously the principle of punishing like cases alike. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the question of whether crime victims can be said to have a moral right to see their victimizers punished that could explain why they often feel wronged or cheated when the state fails to punish offenders. In the first part, I explain what I mean by a “right to punishment” and what it is for such a right to “explain” the frustrated crime victim’s reaction. In the second part, I distinguish such a right from a (...) Lockean-style right to punish, which is also shown incapable of providing the needed explanation. In the third part I argue that it is difficult to identify any benefit such that the right to punishment could plausibly be understood as a right to that benefit. I discuss two main candidates here: the vaguely Hegelian idea that punishment is itself some sort of restitution for the wrong done to the victim; and the idea, due to Victor Tadros, that punishment is a form of compensation for wrongdoing by contributing indirectly to protecting victims from future harm. In the final section, I suggest instead that the frustrated crime victim’s reaction, when justified, is best explained, not by the violation of any right to punishment, but rather by the state’s failure to treat the victim as an equal. (shrink)

Unlike that of most liberal thinkers, Kant's theory of punishment is unabashedly retributive. For classical liberals punishment is justified only by the harms it can prevent, not by any allegedly intrinsic good served by making the guilty suffer. Here Hobbes' blunt insistence that the aim of punishment ‘is not a revenge, but terror’ is prototypical in substance, if not in style. Hobbes, Locke, Mill, Bentham and Beccaria, for all their differences, agree that punishment must look to future good rather than (...) to avenging past wrongs. This attitude on the part of classic liberalism toward retribution is not surprising, given its association with the kind of theocratic politics liberalism arose to combat. (shrink)

There are religious and philosophical versions of the thesis that AIDS is a punishment for homosexual behaviour. It is argued here that the religious version is seriously incomplete. Because of this incompleteness and because of the indeterminacies that ordinarily attend religious argumentation, it is concluded that the claim may be set aside as unconvincing. Homosexual behaviour is then judged for its morality against utilitarian, deontological, and natural law theories of ethics. It is argued that such behaviour involves no impediment to (...) important moral goals and is not therefore immoral. Where natural law might be used to condemn homosexual behaviour, it is argued that the theory itself is not well established. Consequently there is a prima facie reason for rejecting the philosophical version of the punishment thesis. This conclusion is further supported by noting the lack of proportion between the purported immorality of homosexuality and a punishment as devastating as AIDS. (shrink)

abstract Shame punishments have become an increasingly popular alternative to traditional punishments, often taking the form of convicted criminals holding signs or sweeping streets with a toothbrush. In her Hiding from Humanity, Martha Nussbaum argues against the use of shame punishments because they contribute to an offender's loss of dignity. However, these concerns are shared already by the courts which also have concerns about the possibility that shaming might damage an offender's dignity. This situation has not led the courts to (...) reject all uses of shaming, but only to accept shaming within certain safeguards. Thus, despite Nussbaum's important reservations against shame punishments, it may still be possible for her to accept shaming within specific parameters such as those set out by the courts that protect the dignity of an offender. As a result, she need not be opposed to the use of legitimate shame punishment. (shrink)