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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Deterrent punishment is permissible.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Deterrent punishment treats the individual offender as a means to influence the behavior of others who have not yet acted.
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    • 2.Using a person's suffering as a tool to shape third-party conduct violates the Kantian imperative to treat persons as ends in themselves.
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    • 3.The societal self-defence analogy fails because self-defence targets the actual threat-source, not a symbolic example made of one person for others' benefit.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Deterrence theory requires that punishment be calibrated to its preventive effect on potential offenders, not to the moral desert of the actual offender.
      ?

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    • 2.Punishing beyond or below what an offender deserves — as deterrence often demands — constitutes a fundamental injustice recognised since Kant's 'Metaphysics of Morals'.
      ?

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    • 3.A system that permits instrumentalising the innocent or over-punishing the guilty for social utility collapses the moral distinction between punishment and scapegoating.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Punishment (in particular deterrent punishment) is a species of societal self-defence.
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    • 2.To defend oneself against a wrongful attack is not to use the attacker merely as a means, or to fail to show him the respect that is his due.
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