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Undemocratic Crimes, Paul H. Robinson, Jonathan C. Wilt
Undemocratic Crimes, Paul H. Robinson, Jonathan C. Wilt
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One might assume that in a working democracy the criminal law rules would reflect the community’s shared judgments regarding justice and punishment. This is especially true because social science research shows that lay people generally think about criminal liability and punishment in consistent ways: in terms of desert, doing justice and avoiding injustice. Moreover, there are compelling arguments for demanding consistency between community views and criminal law rules based upon the importance of democratic values, effective crime-control, and the deontological value of justice itself.
It may then come as a surprise, and a disappointment, that a wide range of common …
Two Kinds Of Retributivism, Mitchell N. Berman
Two Kinds Of Retributivism, Mitchell N. Berman
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This essay, written as a contribution to a forthcoming volume on the philosophical foundations of the criminal law, challenges the longstanding dominant framework for classifying justifications for criminal punishment. The familiar binary distinction between consequentialism and retributivism is no longer most perspicuous, I argue, because many recognizably retributivist theories of punishment employ a consequentialist justificatory structure. However, because not all do, it might prove most illuminating to carve the retributivist field in two – distinguishing what we might term “consequentialist retributivism” (perhaps better labeled “instrumentalist retributivism”) from “non-consequentialist retributivism” (“non-instrumentalist retributivism”).
Whether or not it is ultimately persuasive, consequentialist retributivism …