6 - Punishment, retribution, and the coercive enforcement of right

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Most philosophers who have considered legal punishment suppose that penal institutions, either as they exist or at least as they would exist if they lived up to some normative concept of them, can be morally ­justified. This supposition, when we consider it in relation to ­existing criminal justice systems, has long seemed to me dubious in the extreme. But the moral justifications that are commonly offered fall into two general types:

1. (1) Retributivist: criminal acts inherently deserve to be punished simply on account of their wrongness or moral wickedness and in some proportion to their injustice or moral badness.

2. (2) Consequentialist: the punishment of criminal acts is morally justifiable as a way of achieving one or more goals that are highly desirable or even socially compelling and indispensable. Chief among these is the prevention of crime through deterrence. Other ends that have been suggested are the moral improvement of the criminal, expression of the public's disapproval of the crime, and the satisfaction of a desire to see offenders harmed on the part of the public generally or else the victims of crimes or their relations. (It is noteworthy that these last two justifications, whatever their merits, are consequentialist, not retributivist justifications.)