The Morality of Punishment for Actions Essay

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According to Hoskins (2010), the legal foundation of punishment is morally challenging as it usually involves harsh treatment, sometimes morally unacceptable, to the offender. What makes it acceptable to subject an offender to such kind of punishment is a big moral question.



Customarily, the rationale behind punishment is either retributivist or consequentialist. Consquensialists argue that punishment is necessary towards achieving a noteworthy purpose, an example of which is crime reduction. Retributivists, on the other hand, argue that punishment is a basic or natural response for doing something wrong. However, abolitionists argue that punishment is morally unacceptable and thus both defenses are not valid. The question now is: how should the society respond to wrongdoings?

The Philosophical Theories That Justify Punishment



According to Hobbes (2010), the justification for punishment is based on the following theories of philosophy: incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution, restoration and/or deterrence.



Oleson and Mackinnon (2015) believe that retribution punishes someone for committing a crime because doing so is morally upright. Retributivism believes that it is the society's moral duty to punish a criminal.



Incapacitation involves enforcing various means of physical restraints to reduce the ability or capacity of an offender to commit a crime.

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According to Hobbes (2010), the imprisonment condition may be so unbearable that the offender would be discouraged to misbehave or commit a crime, but this does not guarantee improvement in behavior.



Deterrence, on the other hand, is based on the idea that man freely chooses his actions in such a way that his pleasure would be maximized and his pain minimized. Committing criminal acts to solve one's problems becomes less likely as one realizes the certain, swift and harsh punishment for committing such acts. According to Oleson & Mackinnon (2015), any kind of sanction has a likely deterrent effect on an individual as long as one recognizes its certainty, severity and swiftness.



According to Hobbes (2010), the utmost aim or purpose of rehabilitation is to bring back an offender to society by means of education, treatment and training. The importance of rehabilitation is shown by the modern-day jargon of "reformatories," "therapeutic community," and "correctional facilities" that are now being used to describe prisons, jails, and incapacitation institutions. It concentrates on the specific characteristics of an offender that require intervention and treatment.



Restoration involves the process of….....

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REFERENCES


Hobbes, T. (2010). Philosophies of Punishment. Retrieved from https://marisluste.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/soda-filozofijas-3.pdf

Hoskins, Z. (2010). The Moral Permissibility of Punishment. Retrieved from Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.iep.utm.edu/m-p-puni/

MacKenzie, D. L. (2000). Criminal Justice and Crime Prevention. Retrieved from National Criminal Justice Reference Service: https://www.ncjrs.gov/works/chapter9.htm

Oleson, J. C., & Mackinnon, T. (2015). Seeing Saw through the Criminological Lens: Popular Representations of Crime and Punishment. Criminology, Criminal Justice Law & Society, 16(1), 35-50. Retrieved from https://ccjls.scholasticahq.com/api/v1/attachments/557/download

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