Week 12 Punishment en retributive justice

Question 1

What is punishment

Answer 1

= the intentional infliction of hard treatment/suffering on an individual by an official authority for an offense

Question 2

What does condemnatory in this sense mean?

Answer 2

typically for this definition. We don’t just make people suffer, we also send a message through hard treatment.

Question 3

What are the sentencing principles?

Answer 3

1. Deterrence: preventing future crime
2. Rehabilitation: rehabilitating offenders
3. Retribution: imposing deserved suffering on offenders
4. Compensation: making offenders compensate their victims

Question 4

What is rule consequentialism ?

Answer 4

“In particular, rule consequentialism focuses on the moral evaluation of general rules or practices, rather than individual actions.”

Suppose a rule consequentialist is considering the ethical implications of a rule like “Do not steal.” Instead of evaluating each instance of stealing individually, the rule consequentialist would assess the overall consequences of having a societal rule that prohibits theft. They would consider whether such a rule, if universally followed, contributes to positive outcomes in terms of overall well-being, social harmony, and justice. This approach contrasts with assessing the morality of each specific act of stealing independently.

Question 5

What types of theories are there for punishment

Answer 5

intrinsically valuable punisment (desert retributivist theories)

punishment is intrumentally valuable (deterrence theories)

Question 6

What is retributivism?

Answer 6

Retributivism is a theory or philosophy of criminal punishment that maintains that wrongdoers deserve punishment as a matter of justice or right.

intrinsic theory!

Question 7

What sort of retrubitivistic theories are spoken of in this lecture

Answer 7

Fair play
punishment is justified because it restores a fair social balance of benefits and burdens that is disturbed by the criminal offense.

critics on:
1. Proportionality objection: the magnitude of self-restraint is either the same across offenses that vary in seriousness or it varies in ways that do not match our proportionality intuitions
2. Empirical objection: In distributively unjust societies where the conditions for political obligation are not satisfied, the theory is inapplicable

Desert retributivism
* Punishment is justified if it realizes retributive justice, i.e., an intrinsically valuable state of affairs where guilty offenders suffer for their offenses
* Retributive justice: not derived from existing principles of distributive justice, but independently derived from particular retributive judgments via reflective equilibrium