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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Wrongdoing is merely a necessary condition for punishment... — Carmelics
    Home/Justice & Punishment
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Wrongdoing is merely a necessary condition for punishment, not a sufficient condition, and the desert of the wrongdoer does not provide a positive reason to punish.

    Justice & Punishment
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Wrongdoers forfeit their right not to suffer proportional punishment (the negative component of retributivism).
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    • 2.The positive reasons for punishment must appeal to some other goods that punishment achieves, such as deterrence or incapacitation.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Desert grounds a positive duty to punish: Kant argues in the Metaphysics of Morals that failing to punish the guilty wrongs them by denying their rational agency.
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    • 2.If wrongdoing merely removes a right against punishment without generating positive reasons, the state's decision to punish becomes morally arbitrary rather than just.
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    • 3.A system that treats punishment as optional when guilt is established cannot account for the moral difference between pardoning and simply ignoring wrongdoing.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Moore's moral intuitionism holds that the suffering of the guilty is intrinsically good, giving desert itself positive moral weight independent of consequentialist goods.
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    • 2.The claim collapses retributivism into a hybrid theory, conflating it with consequentialist justifications that retributivists like Duff explicitly distinguish themselves from.
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    Justice & Punishment

    Related

    A system that treats punishment as optional when guilt is established cannot acc...Desert grounds a positive duty to punish: Kant argues in the Metaphysics of Mora...If wrongdoing merely removes a right against punishment without generating posit...Moore's moral intuitionism holds that the suffering of the guilty is intrinsical...
    +3 moreShow less
    The claim collapses retributivism into a hybrid theory, conflating it with conse...The positive reasons for punishment must appeal to some other goods that punishm...Wrongdoers forfeit their right not to suffer proportional punishment (the negati...

    Similar

    If desert provides a limit to punishment, then punishment must be dese...87%An offender's desert provides a reason in favour of punishment: the st...86%If the desert object is punishment rather than suffering, punishment i...85%Positive retributivism holds that desert provides an in-principle suff...84%

    Source

    AI-extracted
    SEP: justice-retributive
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    Not only is retributivism in that way intuitively appealing, the primary alternative, consequentialist theories of punishment that focus on deterrence and incapacitation, seem to confront a deep problem. They have difficulty explaining a core and intuitively compelling feature of retributivism, namely the widely shared sense that it is always or nearly always impermissible both to inflict punishment on those who have done no wrong and to inflict disproportionately large punishments on those who have done some wrong. (Some respond to this point by adopting a mixed theory, according to which ret...

    Details

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