Download The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law by Victor Tadros PDF

By Victor Tadros

ISBN-10: 0199554420

ISBN-13: 9780199554423

Each sleek democratic country imprisons millions of offenders each year, depriving them in their liberty, inflicting them loads of mental and occasionally actual damage. Relationships are destroyed, jobs are misplaced, the danger of the criminal being harmed by way of different offenders is elevated and all at nice fee to the state.

How can this brutal and expensive company be justified? generally, philosophers answering this query have argued both that the punishment of wrongdoers is an efficient in itself (retributivism), or that it's a regrettable potential to a precious finish, akin to the deterrence of destiny wrongdoing, and hence justifiable on consequentialist grounds. This ebook bargains a serious exam of these theories and advances a brand new argument for punishment's justification, calling it the 'duty view'. in this view, the permission to punish offenders is grounded within the tasks that they incur in advantage in their wrongdoing. an important tasks that floor the justification of punishment are the obligation to acknowledge that the criminal has performed flawed and the obligation to guard others opposed to wrongdoing. within the mild of those tasks the nation has a permission to punish offenders to make sure that they realize that what they've got performed is incorrect, but in addition to guard others from crime.

In distinction to different justifications of punishment grounded in deterrence, the obligation view is built within the mild of a non-consequentialist ethical thought: a idea which endorses constraints at the pursuit of the nice. it really is proven that it really is ordinarily improper to hurt anyone as a method to pursue a better strong. besides the fact that, there are exceptions to this precept in situations the place the individual harmed has an enforceable responsibility to pursue the great. the consequences of this concept are explored either within the context of self-defense, after which within the context of punishment. in the course of the systematic exploration of the connection among self-defense and punishment, the publication makes major growth in protecting a believable set of non-consequentialist ethical rules that justify the punishment of wrongdoers, and marks an important contribution to the philosophical literature on punishment.

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Extra resources for The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law

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27 separating out the positive justification of punishment that retributivists offer from the claim that this justification is exclusive of other potential justifications. We might call a person that thinks that it is only permissible to punish offenders for these reasons a pure retributivist. A person who believes that the two claims above provide a reason, perhaps a sufficient reason (amongst others), to punish offenders is a retributivist, amongst other things. She holds one kind of ‘mixed’ view of punishment (there are many different mixes and I will make no effort to distinguish between them here).

23 Consequentialists will endorse this conclusion, if they do, only for pragmatic reasons rather than reasons of principle. In principle, they will suggest, we should save the person with the flower. As I noted in the previous section, even if we agree that the instrumental benefits of punishment can contribute to its justification, we might disagree about which instrumental benefits can figure in our decision to set up institutions of punishment and our decisions about whom to punish and to what degree.

If no one is going to see a beautiful flower there is no reason against destroying it. How do we tell who is right? Not an easy question to answer. One puzzle at the centre of the philosophy of punishment is about whether the suffering that offenders experience is intrinsically valuable. Some philosophers of punishment claim that it is. It might initially seem puzzling how this could be so. Suffering is generally regarded as a bad thing in itself, even if it is sometimes not with intrinsic value but with value as a final end.

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