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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Punishment cannot be justified even in principle and is m... — Carmelics
    Home/Justice & Punishment
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Punishment cannot be justified even in principle and is morally wrong.

    Justice & Punishment
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.When the state imposes punishment, it treats some people in ways that would typically (outside the context of punishment) be impermissible.
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    • 2.The state subjects punished individuals to intentionally burdensome treatment and to the condemnation of the community.
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    • 3.The various attempted justifications of this intentionally burdensome condemnatory treatment fail.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Retributive justice, from Kant through contemporary thinkers like Michael Moore, holds that wrongdoers deserve to suffer proportionate consequences as a matter of basic moral fairness.
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    • 2.A moral universe in which wrongdoers suffer no consequences treats victims and perpetrators as morally equivalent, violating the principle that persons are responsible for their choices.
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    • 3.If desert-based suffering is intrinsically morally required, then the claim that punishment is morally wrong in principle is false regardless of whether consequentialist justifications succeed.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.H.L.A. Hart's mixed theory distinguishes the general justifying aim of punishment from the principles governing its distribution, allowing consequentialist goals to justify the institution without reducing each instance to mere utility.
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    • 2.The abolitionist argument conflates the failure of any single monolithic justification with the failure of all possible justifications, committing a disjunctive syllogism error.
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    • 3.A pluralist justification combining crime prevention, victim recognition, and communicative censure—as in Antony Duff's expressive theory—need not fail simply because purely retributive or purely deterrent accounts face objections.
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    Justice & Punishment

    Related

    A moral universe in which wrongdoers suffer no consequences treats victims and p...A pluralist justification combining crime prevention, victim recognition, and co...H.L.A. Hart's mixed theory distinguishes the general justifying aim of punishmen...If desert-based suffering is intrinsically morally required, then the claim that...
    +5 moreShow less
    Retributive justice, from Kant through contemporary thinkers like Michael Moore,...The abolitionist argument conflates the failure of any single monolithic justifi...The state subjects punished individuals to intentionally burdensome treatment an...The various attempted justifications of this intentionally burdensome condemnato...When the state imposes punishment, it treats some people in ways that would typi...

    Similar

    Punishment of the innocent being justified is morally unacceptable.83%Violation of a justified law is wrongful even when the underlying cond...81%Violating a justified law is wrongful even if the conduct is not indep...81%Stigmatization is morally objectionable80%

    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: legal-punishment
    View source passageHide passage
    Even this way of putting the matter oversimplifies it, by implying that we can hope to find a ‘complete normative account of punishment’: an account, that is, of how punishment can be justified. It is certainly an implicit assumption of much philosophical and legal discussion that punishment can, of course, be justified, and that the theorists’ task is to establish and explicate that justification. But it is an illegitimate assumption: normative theorists must be open to the possibility, startling and disturbing as it might be, that this pervasive human practice cannot be justified. Nor is thi...

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit