Even when we grant that social punishment is permissible in principle, justifying particular practices of social punishment presents new difficulties. Many of the challenges to punishing justly that are familiar from the legal realm reappear in new ways in the social realm. These include guilt-determination, maintaining proportionality, and establishing the authority to punish. This chapter explores these problems by considering cases of naming and shaming in social media. It defends a set of norms for limiting the application social punishment.

What is the proper aim of socially punitive responses to wrongdoing? The usual contenders in the debates about the justification of criminal punishment – retributivist, utilitarian, expressivist, and communicative theories – all encounter problems as accounts of social punishment. This chapter argues that the general justifying aim of social punishment is to pressure wrongdoers to make amends for their own transgressions. The view combines both desert and instrumental conditions for punishment but develops distinctive accounts of each.

This chapter responds to the critiques of Linda Radzik’s account of social punishment offered by Christopher Bennett, George Sher, and Glen Pettigrove. In response to their objections, Radzik revises her definition of social punishment, draws a distinction between the justificandum and justificans of social punishment, and explores the problem of interpreting particular actions as punishments as opposed to protests.

Ethicists often approach our task by thinking about the norms that apply to act types. We ask, for example, what it means to punish, to make amends, or to forgive, and what conditions govern the appropriate performance of actions that fall within these types. However, actions often do not fall neatly into only one action type. This chapter discusses two cases that can be interpreted both as acts of protest and as acts of what Linda Radzik calls “informal social punishment.” Since the norms that govern these two types diverge, the fact that a particular action can be interpreted in either of these ways poses a challenge for anyone who might be seeking moral guidance from the type to which the action belongs. The cases highlight a theoretical gap that needs to be filled not only by accounts of social punishment or protest but also by ethicists who would use this approach to think about actions of other overlapping types.

The philosophical literature on punishment concentrates its attention almost exclusively on legal forms of punishment. Indeed, some writers suggest that our common methods for enforcing morality in everyday life (such as angry rebukes, social withdrawal, consumer boycotts, and public shaming) are not really punitive at all. This chapter argues that social punishment is a genuine phenomenon that is deserving of philosophical attention. It distinguishes between formal and informal social punishments and explains how these differ from nonpunitive responses to wrongdoing such as moral criticism and natural penalties.