Research
Research
We hope that criminal punishment will persuade offenders to morally reform. At the least, we should not punish in a way that will hinder the offender coming to recognise their own wrongdoing. This claim is widely endorsed as a basic constraint upon permissible punishment, and yet it is mysterious how punishment might communicate these types of moral messages. This article draws on communicative justifications of punishment to develop three models for how punishment might morally persuade. I evaluate imprisonment by this standard, showing that prisons are inherently and distinctively ineffective at morally persuading offenders, and indeed that they will undermine any such process.
We ought not punish criminals more harshly than they deserve — their punishment should be proportionate to their wrongdoing. Philosophers of punishment widely believe that proportionality tells us nothing about how we should punish, only that we impose the appropriate quantity of punishment. But I argue that some punishments are inherently clumsy and ineffective tools of proportionate justice. Punishments that impose a wide scope of deprivations upon offenders, such as imprisonment, face two distinctive challenges: we are unable to accurately assess how severe these punishments are and we are unable to reliably impose a punishment of our intended severity.
Moral and aesthetic deference is distinctively strange. If you assert to me that an action was immoral or that some artwork is beautiful, I should think about it for myself, not simply defer to your expertise. Philosophers widely view this as part of a broader phenomenon concerning the strangeness of (some forms of) normative deference. But no good reason has been offered for viewing this as a distinctively normative phenomenon. I demonstrate that this same phenomenon of strange deference arises regarding a range of non-normative claims. What these strange instances of deference have in common is instead a failure to think for oneself about one's self. On this basis, I offer a novel explanation of the phenomenon grounded in practical identity.