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The Ends of Harm - The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law (Hardcover)
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The Ends of Harm - The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law (Hardcover)
Series: Oxford Legal Philosophy
Expected to ship within 10 - 15 working days
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Every modern democratic state imprisons thousands of offenders
every year, depriving them of their liberty, causing them a great
deal of psychological and sometimes physical harm. Relationships
are destroyed, jobs are lost, the risk of the offender being harmed
by other offenders is increased and all at great expense to the
state. How can this brutal and costly enterprise be justified?
Traditionally, philosophers answering this question have argued
either that the punishment of wrongdoers is a good in itself
(retributivism), or that it is a regrettable means to a valuable
end, such as the deterrence of future wrongdoing, and thus
justifiable on consequentialist grounds. This book offers a
critical examination of those theories and advances a new argument
for punishment's justification, calling it the 'duty view'. On this
view, the permission to punish offenders is grounded in the duties
that they incur in virtue of their wrongdoing. The most important
duties that ground the justification of punishment are the duty to
recognize that the offender has done wrong and the duty to protect
others against wrongdoing. In the light of these duties the state
has a permission to punish offenders to ensure that they recognize
that what they have done is wrong, but also to protect others from
crime. In contrast to other justifications of punishment grounded
in deterrence, the duty view is developed in the light of a
non-consequentialist moral theory: a theory which endorses
constraints on the pursuit of the good. It is shown that it is
normally wrong to harm a person as a means to pursue a greater
good. However, there are exceptions to this principle in cases
where the person harmed has an enforceable duty to pursue the good.
The implications of this idea are explored both in the context of
self-defence, and then in the context of punishment. Through the
systematic exploration of the relationship between self-defence and
punishment, the book makes significant progress in defending a
plausible set of non-consequentialist moral principles that justify
the punishment of wrongdoers, and marks a significant contribution
to the philosophical literature on punishment.
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