Rethinking Punishment
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| Anteprima |
The
age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become
deadlocked. Retributivists continue to privilege desert over all else,
and consequentialists continue to privilege punishment's expected
positive consequences, such as deterrence or rehabilitation, over all
else. In this important intervention into the debate, Leo Zaibert argues
that despite some obvious differences, these traditional positions are
structurally very similar, and that the deadlock between them stems from
the fact they both oversimplify the problem of punishment. Proponents
of these positions pay insufficient attention to the conflicts of values
that punishment, even when justified, generates. Mobilizing recent
developments in moral philosophy, Zaibert offers a properly pluralistic
justification of punishment that is necessarily more complex than its
traditional counterparts. An understanding of this complexity should
promote a more cautious approach to inflicting punishment on individual
wrongdoers and to developing punitive policies and institutions.
