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Chapter 5 - On Social Punishment

from Part II - Commentaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2020

Linda Radzik ,
Christopher Bennett ,
Glen Pettigrove  and
George Sher
By
George Sher
Linda Radzik
Affiliation:
Texas A & M University
Christopher Bennett
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Glen Pettigrove
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
George Sher
Affiliation:
Rice University, Houston
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Summary

This essay critically discusses Chapter 2 of Linda Radzik’s 2018 Descartes Lectures. Radzik’s topic in those lectures is social punishment – that is, the familiar practices of criticizing, reprimanding, and withdrawing by which we informally respond to those whom we take to have violated moral norms. Radzik’s aim in her second chapter is to justify social punishment by adapting and extending a prominent approach to legal punishment that combines retributive and consequentialist elements. However, unlike most retributivists, Radzik holds that what the relevant wrongdoers deserve is not any form of suffering but only the coercive violation of certain rights, while, unlike most consequentialists, she holds that the benefit that is crucial to punishment is not deterrence but the moral improvement of the wrongdoer. The current essay discusses some of the problems that are raised by these interesting new proposals.

Keywords

Linda Radzikpunishmentdesertretributivismconsequentialismmoral improvementethics
Type
Chapter
Information
The Ethics of Social Punishment
The Enforcement of Morality in Everyday Life
 , pp. 99 - 112
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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