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Retributive Justice And Standing: A Critique Of State Punishment, Benjamin H. Lawrence

Honors Theses

This thesis investigates the philosophical justifications of punishment, focusing in particular on the idea of standing to punish, and how the state can have standing. The two main doctrines of justifying punishment, retributivism and consequentialism, are considered. According to retributivism, punishment is justified by the desert of the wrongdoer, whereas consequentialism contends that punishment is justified by the good consequences that follow from punishing wrongdoers. This thesis concludes that retributivism better captures the moral intuitions associated with punishment, and is better suited to articulating the concept of standing to punish. Standing to punish can be seen as the “moral authority” …