Linda Radzik claims that rebukes can and often should be seen as informal social punishments. In this chapter, Christopher Bennett disagrees. However, because he does not want the dispute to be a merely verbal one, his aim in this response is to draw out what is at issue when we disagree over whether something should be classed as punishment. Having set out the key parts of Radzik’s position and registered some concerns that he has about it, Bennett sets out a taxonomy of things that we can do with blame or social punishment, aiming to show why we might have reason to put different kinds of responses into different categories. Which of these categories we decide to call ‘punishment’ does not matter too much as long as we are clear on the underlying differences between these types of response and the different types of challenge they set us in any attempt to justify or practice them.

This essay critically discusses Chapter 2 of Linda Radzik’s 2018 Descartes Lectures. Radzik’s topic in those lectures is social punishment – that is, the familiar practices of criticizing, reprimanding, and withdrawing by which we informally respond to those whom we take to have violated moral norms. Radzik’s aim in her second chapter is to justify social punishment by adapting and extending a prominent approach to legal punishment that combines retributive and consequentialist elements. However, unlike most retributivists, Radzik holds that what the relevant wrongdoers deserve is not any form of suffering but only the coercive violation of certain rights, while, unlike most consequentialists, she holds that the benefit that is crucial to punishment is not deterrence but the moral improvement of the wrongdoer. The current essay discusses some of the problems that are raised by these interesting new proposals.