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Nozick's Revenge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Nigel Walker
Nigel Walker
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

When I first came across Robert Nozick′s Philosophical Explanations I was struck by the purity of his justification of punishment. Most latter-day retributivists are crypto-utilitarians, claiming to find some sort of benefit in penalties, even if it is only symbolic. Nozick too sees punishment as symbolic, but not as having any necessary utility. Paradoxically, perhaps, he is one of the few retributivists who insists that it matters what the offender makes of his penalty. Even more interesting is the importance he attaches to the analogy between retribution and revenge. Most retributivists are at pains to distance themselves from vengeance: but not Nozick.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 70 , Issue 274 , October 1995 , pp. 581 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1995

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References

1 Philosophical Explanations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).Google Scholar

2 Francis, Bacon, Essays, Religious Meditations, Places of Persuasion and Dissuasion (1957, London)Google Scholar

3 B.Bosanquet, Some Suggestions in Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1981);Google ScholarW. Moberly, The Ethics of Punishment (London: Faber and Faber, 1968);Google ScholarJ. Feinberg, Doing and Deserving (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980);Google ScholarH. Gross, A Theory of Criminal Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979);Google ScholarA. von Hirsch, Past or Future Crimes (Manchester University Press, 1985);Google ScholarA. Duff, Trials and Punishments (Cambridge University Press, 1986).Google Scholar

4 Moc. cit., p. 380.Google Scholar

5 A.Flew, ‘The Justification of Punishment’ in Philosophy, 1954, 29, 3.Google Scholar

6 H. L. A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).Google Scholar

7 But unlike Nozick Hart makes it clear that in non-standard cases it may be inflicted for breaches of non-legal rules—even family rules (not that Herbert Hart himself was a retributive disciplinarian).

8 This does not figure in Nozick′s list, and Hart would of course omit it in the case of (e.g.) family punishment.

9 See, for example, Michael Moore′s article ‘The Moral Worth of retribution’ in Responsibility, Character and the Emotions (ed. F., Schoeman, Cambridge University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

10 See Immanuel Kant′s Rechtslehre (1796–1797, tr. W. Hastie as Philosophy of Law Clark, Edinburgh, 1887).Google Scholar

11 loc. cit., p. 378Google Scholar