Punishment: The problem
Before we take up these questions, however, it will help to say a little more about why the nature and justification of punishment is so central a question in the philosophy of law.
We can begin, once more, with an attempt at a rough definition of how the term is used. We call “punishment” the infliction of penalties on offenders, by people in authority over them, for offenses they have committed. This rough definition will cover both the punishment of children by parents and teachers and the punishment of criminals by courts. In each case there is a class of people who are entitled to punish—those in charge of children, courts—and they inflict a penalty of some kind because of an offense the offender has committed. Inflicting a penalty involves doing something to someone that they have a right not to have done to them for no reason. We may not spank children just for the fun of it; we may not lock people up or take their money (as a “fine”) without offering an explanation of why the normal moral rule against doing so does not apply in this case.So what makes criminal punishment cry out for justification is the fact that it involves inflicting on people either some suffering or the deprivation of some liberty (or—in the extreme case—of life), and that each of these is, in itself, is something we should normally avoid. When Jeremy Bentham, one of the founding utilitarians and a great nineteenth-century British philosopher and social reformer, said that all punishment in itself was evil, that was what he meant.
He did not mean that all punishment was wrong. Indeed, as we shall see in a moment, Bentham developed in great detail one of the main philosophical accounts of how the infliction of punishment could be justified. But one of the major reasons why we ought to be concerned about the morality of punishment is that it does involve using the coercive apparatus of the state to treat people in ways that would be quite wrong without justification.
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More on the topic Punishment: The problem:
- Justifying punishment: Deterrence
- Conclusions
- Most crimes eventually became understood as collective problems to be solved by the state acting on society's behalf.
- Baldwin Peter. Command And Persuade: Crime, Law, And The State Across History. MIT Press,2021. — 475 p., 2021
- Ever Inward
- USE OF REFLECTION DURING CONFLICT
- Introduction
- Justifying theories II: Popper and falsification
- ONE OF THE more useful things I did as chairman of the Howard League for Penal Reform (a post I held from 1973 to 1984) was in May 1976, when I convened a committee of independent experts to review and report on the law and practice in relation to ‘dangerous’ offenders.
- Crime Expands