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Instructors: Dr. Costanza Porro
Event type:
Introductory seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
Hours per week:
2
Credits:
3,0
Language of instruction:
English
Min. | Max. participants:
5 | 30
Allocation scheme: Phil_Standard_WS1415
Comments/contents:
Because legal punishment involves the intentional infliction of significant hardships and burdens by the state it gives rise to many problems and questions regarding its nature, legitimacy and justification, which will be explored in this course, by looking primarily, but not exclusively, at the literature in the analytic tradition.
Firstly, we will look at the justification of punishment, the question of why the state is justified in imposing punishment on those convicted for a criminal offense. Is punishment to be justified, by its consequences, say because it reduces the number of crimes? Or is punishment justified because those who commit criminal wrongs deserve to be punished? In exploring the different justifications of punishment, we will pay particular attention to communicative theories of punishment that argue that punishment is justified as a form of communication with the offender and society as a whole, and we will discuss the role that they assign to moral censure and blame in criminal punishment.
Secondly, we will explore the problem of punishment from a political theory perspective, by addressing the question of whether and under which circumstances it is legitimate for the state to punish people. In particular, we will discuss whether in unjust societies the state's right and standing to punish can be undermined. We will also reflect on the problem of criminalization and its limits, looking at the question of which sort of acts the state is permitted and has reasons to render criminal offenses.
We will then look at the issue of which types of punishment the state is justified in adopting. Our main focus will be the justification of incarceration, in the attempt to determine whether the legitimate criticisms moved to this type of punishment are mainly grounded in its uses and abuses in the real world and incarceration can in principle be defended or prisons should instead be abolished .
Another debate we will be exploring, which has attracted significant public attention in recent years, is that on the aim and role of policing and the question of whether the police should be reformed or even abolished in its current form.
Finally, we will look at critical perspectives that question whether legal punishment, at least as we know it, should indeed be preserved. We will explore abolitionist theories, which argue that the criminal justice system should not simply be reformed but abolished its entirety, and the restorative justice perspective, which offers an alternative approach to crime and its resolution focused on the restoration of moral relationships raptured by crime.
Literature:
Bennett, Christopher. 2008. The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boonin, David. 2008. The Problem of Punishment. Cambridge?; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Braithwaite, John, and Philip Pettit. 2002. Not Just Deserts: A Republican Theory of Criminal Justice. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Brettschneider, Corey. 2007. ‘The Rights of the Guilty: Punishment and Political Legitimacy’. Political Theory 35 (2): 175–99. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591706297714.
Burgh, Richard W. 1982. ‘Do the Guilty Deserve Punishment?’ The Journal of Philosophy 79 (4): 193. https://doi.org/10.2307/2026220.
Christie, Nils. 1981, Limits to Pain. Oxford.
Duff, Antony. 2001. Punishment, Communication, and Community. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.
Duff, Antony, and Stuart P. Green, eds. 2011. Philosophical Foundations of Criminal Law. Oxford?; New York: Oxford University Press.
Duff, Koshka. 2017. ‘The Criminal Is Political: Policing Politics in Real Existing Liberalism’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 3 (04): 485–502. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2017.39.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books.
Howard, Jeffrey. 2013. ‘Punishment, Socially Deprived Offenders, and Democratic Community’. Criminal Law and Philosophy 7 (1): 121–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-012-9179-4.
Hulsman, Louk H. C. 1986. ‘Critical Criminology and the Concept of Crime’. Contemporary Crises 10 (1): 63–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00728496.
Kelly, Erin. 2018. The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Lacey, Nicola. 1988. State Punishment: Political Principles and Community Values. London; New York: Routledge.
Lacey, Nicola, and Hanna Pickard. 2012. ‘From the Consulting Room to the Court Room? Taking the Clinical Model of Responsibility Without Blame into the Legal Realm’. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 33 (1): 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1093/ojls/gqs028.
Lippke, Richard L. 2007. Rethinking Imprisonment. Oxford?; New York: Oxford University Press.
Marshall, S.E., and R.A. Duff. 1998. ‘Criminalization and Sharing Wrongs’. The Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 11 (01): 7–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0841820900001661.
Matravers, Matt. 2011. ‘Duff on Hard Treatment’. In Crime, Punishment, and Responsibility, edited by Rowan Cruft, Matthew H. Kramer, and Mark R. Reiff. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199592814.001.0001.
Morris, Herbert. ‘Persons and Punishment’. The Monist 52, no. 4 (1968): 475–501.
Ramsay, Peter. 2016. ‘A Democratic Theory of Imprisonment’. In Democratic Theory and Mass Incarceration, edited by Albert W. Dzur, Ian Loader, and Richard Sparks, First edition, 84–114. Oxford?; New York: Oxford University Press.
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