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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
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    Punishment is justified as a means of teaching a moral le... — Carmelics
    Home/Justice & Punishment
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    Punishment is justified as a means of teaching a moral lesson to those who commit crimes, and perhaps to community members more generally.

    Justice & Punishment
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Punishment's role in reducing crime is a central part of its rationale.
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    • 2.Punishment should not merely condition people to behave in certain ways, but rather teach them that what they have done should not be done because it is morally wrong.
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    • 3.Punishment conceived in this way aims to confer a benefit on the offender: the benefit of moral education.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Coercive state institutions lack the moral standing to impose 'lessons' on autonomous rational agents without their consent.
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    • 2.Kant argued that treating punishment as a vehicle for reform instrumentalizes the offender, violating their dignity as an end in themselves.
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    • 3.A state that punishes to moralize conflates legal authority with ethical tutelage, collapsing the distinction between law and virtue.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Empirical evidence consistently shows that punishment's severity has negligible effect on internalized moral belief or genuine moral reform.
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    • 2.If moral education is the justifying aim, imprisonment—which brutalizes and socializes offenders into criminal networks—systematically defeats that aim.
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    • 3.A justification that routinely produces outcomes opposite to its stated purpose cannot ground a legitimate institutional practice.
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    Justice & Punishment

    Related

    A justification that routinely produces outcomes opposite to its stated purpose ...A state that punishes to moralize conflates legal authority with ethical tutelag...Coercive state institutions lack the moral standing to impose 'lessons' on auton...Empirical evidence consistently shows that punishment's severity has negligible ...
    +5 moreShow less
    If moral education is the justifying aim, imprisonment—which brutalizes and soci...Kant argued that treating punishment as a vehicle for reform instrumentalizes th...Punishment conceived in this way aims to confer a benefit on the offender: the b...Punishment should not merely condition people to behave in certain ways, but rat...Punishment's role in reducing crime is a central part of its rationale.

    Similar

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    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: legal-punishment
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    One more mixed view worth noting holds that punishment is justified as a means of teaching a moral lesson to those who commit crimes, and perhaps to community members more generally (the seminal articulations of this view are H. Morris 1981 and Hampton 1984; for a more recent account, see Demetriou 2012; for criticism, see Deigh 1984, Shafer-Landau 1991). Like standard consequentialist accounts, the moral education view acknowledges that punishment’s role in reducing crime is a central part of its rationale (see, e.g., Hampton 1984: 211). But education theorists also take seriously the Hegelia...

    Details

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