Honor and Revenge: A Theory of Punishment

This book addresses the problem of justifying the institution of criminal punishment. It examines the “paradox of retribution”: the fact that we cannot seem to reject the intuition that punishment is morally required, and yet we cannot (even after two thousand years of philosophical debate) find a morally legitimate basis for inflicting harm on wrongdoers. The book comes at a time when a new “abolitionist” movement has arisen, a movement that argues that we should give up the search for justification and accept that punishment is morally unjustifiable and should be discontinued immediately. This book, however, proposes a new approach to the retributive theory of punishment, arguing that it should be understood in its traditional formulation that has been long forgotten or dismissed: that punishment is essentially a defense of the honor of the victim. Properly understood, this can give us the possibility of a legitimate moral justification for the institution of punishment.?

• | Author: Whitley R.P. Kaufman
• | Publisher: Springer
• | Publication Date: Sep 21, 2014
• | Number of Pages: NA pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 9401784752
• | ISBN-13: 9789401784757