Radzik - Justifying Social Punishment
Radzik - Justifying Social Punishment
Radzik - Justifying Social Punishment
1 introduction
The goals of the last chapter were to clarify what social punishment is, to
draw attention to the fact that it is a phenomenon in everyday life, and to
suggest that it merits the attention of philosophers. The goal of this
chapter is to ask whether social punishment – specifically, the informal
social punishment of moral wrongdoing – is justifiable. Is it ever permis-
sible for ordinary people to punish one another for their moral trans-
gressions? If so, why is this? What might be valuable or desirable about
such forms of punishment?
As we turn from a discussion of what informal social punishment is to
whether it can be justified, it will be helpful to have some examples at hand
where the harm being imposed is more obvious than in the cases of
rebuking friends or avoiding coworkers, which formed my main examples
in Chapter . So, let’s think of boycotts. Not all boycotts are punitive, but
paradigmatic consumer boycotts often are. Here, a group of private
individuals voluntarily commit themselves to not buying a particular
product in protest to some sort of transgression by that seller. Imagine
consumers boycotting a chain of coffee shops, Joe’s Coffee, because the
company engages in exploitative scheduling practices. They schedule and
reschedule workers at the last moment, not allowing them enough notice
to make proper childcare arrangements. They send workers who are paid
by the hour home when business is slow, despite the fact that the workers
Some passages in this chapter appear in previously published work, including “Moral Rebukes and
Social Avoidance,” Journal of Value Inquiry , no. (): –; and “Desert of What? On
Murphy’s Reluctant Retributivism,” Criminal Law and Philosophy , no. (): –.
See Linda Radzik, “Boycotts and the Social Enforcement of Justice,” Social Philosophy & Policy ,
no. (): –.
This is a fictionalized version of a real case. Since the real chain of coffee shops reportedly acted
promptly to improve conditions for their workers, it struck me as inappropriate to use their
name here.
24
The phrase is due to H. L. A. Hart, “Prolegomenon to the Principles of Punishment,” in Punishment
and Responsibility: Essays in the Philosophy of Law, nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
), –, at .
straddling a giant knife or being continually devoured and shat out again by a giant bird. My
husband and I giggled our way through the collection, but it is sobering to reflect that these festivals
of torture were believed to be a depiction of justice – justice on a pure retributivist model.
Jeffrie G. Murphy, Punishment and the Moral Emotions: Essays in Law, Morality, and Religion (New
York: Oxford University Press, ), .
Victor Tadros, The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law (New York: Oxford
University Press, ).
See also T. M. Scanlon, “Giving Desert Its Due,” Philosophical Explorations , no. ():
–; and Randolph Clarke, “Some Theses on Desert,” Philosophical Explorations , no.
(): –.
Owen McLeod, “Desert,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (), plato.
stanford.edu.
See, for example, Andrew von Hirsch, Censure and Sanctions (New York: Oxford University Press,
); and R. A. Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community (New York: Oxford
University Press, ).
Feinberg, “The Expressive Function of Punishment,” .
Ibid.
Another objection is: just because the message is appropriate, it does not follow that I am permitted
to deliver that message. This raises the issue of the authority to punish, which I take up in
Chapter .
Christopher Bennett, The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment (New York:
Cambridge University Press, ); and Zac Cogley, “Basic Desert of Reactive Emotions,”
Philosophical Explorations , no. (): –.
P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” Proceedings of the British Academy (): –,
at . See also Stephen Darwall, “Justice and Retaliation,” Philosophical Papers , no. ():
–.
Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (New York: Cambridge University
Press, ), –.
R. A. Duff, Trials and Punishments (New York: Cambridge University Press, ), ch. .
Ibid., –.
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
Ibid. See also Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community.
Duff, Trials and Punishments, .
Cf. Brenda M. Baker, “Penance as a Model for Punishment,” Social Theory and Practice , no.
(): –.
Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community, . See also Hampton, “Correcting Harms
versus Righting Wrongs,” and Bennett, The Apology Ritual.
Scanlon, “Giving Desert Its Due.”
Ibid., .
Ibid., .
The psychological effects of other people’s disapprobation are powerfully described by David
Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Oxford University Press, ), and Adam
Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Penguin, ).
I have in mind Robert Nozick’s account of coercion, helpfully summarized here by Scott Anderson:
“P coerces Q if and only if:
. P aims to keep Q from choosing to perform action A;
. P communicates a claim to Q;
. P’s claim indicates that if Q performs A, then P will bring about some consequence that would
make Q’s A-ing less desirable to Q than Q’s not A-ing;
. P’s claim is credible to Q;
. Q does not do A;
. Part of Q’s reason for not doing A is to lessen the likelihood that P will bring about the
consequence announced in ().”
Scott Anderson, “Coercion,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (), plato.
stanford.edu. However, I prefer dropping conditions () and (), which imply that an act counts as
coercion only if it succeeds in changing the target’s behavior. See also Joel Feinberg, Harm to Self: The
Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, vol. (New York: Oxford University Press, ), ch. .
John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. , ed. J. M. Robson
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), ch. V; and Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person
Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
), .
Mill, Utilitarianism, V..
Christopher Heath Wellman, “The Rights Forfeiture Theory of Punishment,” Ethics , no.
(): –; and A. John Simmons, “Locke and the Right to Punish,” Philosophy and Public
Affairs (): –.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Wayne (New York: Algora, ).
Joel Feinberg, “Justice and Personal Desert,” in Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of
Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), –, at .
William A. Edmundson, “Civility as Political Constraint,” Res Publica , no. (): –; and
J. R. Lucas, “Or Else,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (): –, at .
Cf. Hampton, “Correcting Harms versus Righting Wrongs”; Bennett, The Apology Ritual.
I defend the following account of the nature of making amends in Linda Radzik, Making Amends:
Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, ).
Ibid., –.
Radzik, “Moral Rebukes and Social Avoidance.”
The importance of sincerity is a point on which I disagree with Duff’s “penance” account of
punishment and especially his view of apology (Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community,
ff.). Also, Duff seems to suggest that the experience of suffering itself, and particularly the
suffering of remorse, helps satisfy the wrongdoer’s obligation to atone. In my view, the suffering of
remorse is only a side effect or symptom of the changes in attitudes that are required for atonement
(Radzik, Making Amends, –).
The moral pressure theory bears some resemblance to a moral education theory of punishment.
According to that sort of approach, the proper goal of punishment is the moral improvement of the
wrongdoer. See, for example, Jean Hampton, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,”
Philosophy and Public Affairs , no. (): –. However, Hampton, who was at one time a
leading proponent of this theory, came to reject it because she felt that it did not give proper
recognition to the victims of wrongdoing (Murphy and Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy, ).
Punishing a bully merely in order to improve the bully has benefits for her victim, if it works. But
Hampton argues that it does not send the sort of message of respect for the victim and caring about
his plight that morality requires. It does not put the harms to the victim in a central enough place.
In contrast, in pressuring the wrongdoer to make amends, punishment pressures the wrongdoer to
respond appropriately to the victim. In this way, third parties who engage in informal social
punishment show their own respect and caring for the victim.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. , ed. J. M. Robson
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), I..
This phenomenon is well illustrated by the use of boycotts on either side of the same-sex marriage
debate in the United States prior to its legalization in . Both sides called for boycotts against
businesses that supported what they considered to be the wrong side of the debate. The boycotted
businesses often found themselves receiving an influx of new customers or donations from people
who sympathized with their position. In some cases, business owners seemed to take pride in being
boycotted by people whose politics they despised.
Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community, .
Cf. Baker, “Penance as a Model of Punishment”; von Hirsch, Censure and Sanctions; and Matt
Matravers, “Duff on Hard Treatment,” in Crime, Punishment and Responsibility, ed. R. Cruft,
M. Kramer and M. Reiff (New York: Oxford University Press, ), –.
Claudia Mills, “Should We Boycott Boycotts?,” Journal of Social Philosophy , no. ():
–, at .
6 conclusion
In this chapter, I have argued that the general justifying aim of informal
social punishment is to morally pressure the wrongdoer to atone. Part of
the value of identifying an account of the justifying aim of punishment is
that it can help yield a set of restrictions on actual practices and acts of
punishment. For example, if I am correct in identifying the moral pressure
to atone as the aim of informal social punishment, then it will follow that
punishing acts that undermine wrongdoer’s ability to atone, or that pile on
wrongdoers who have already atoned, will be unjustified. Such limitations
on punishment will be the focus of Chapter .
In this chapter, I have followed a mixed strategy, a version of con-
strained instrumentalism, which uses a claim about the wrongdoer’s desert
to constrain the ways in which punishment can be used to pursue good
future outcomes. In acting wrongly, one comes to deserve both censure
and a loss of liberty. Only wrongdoers may be subjected to informal social
punishment, but negative desert is not a sufficient justification for pun-
ishment. A wrongdoer may be subjected to coercion only insofar as such
an action has a reasonable chance of motivating the wrongdoer to atone. In
Chapter , I inquire into what sorts of methods and practices tend to
support or else undermine the proper aims of punishment. I also – finally –
take on the question of who has the authority to impose informal social
punishment for what sorts of moral wrongs. What I have tried to do here is
address a quite general question: the question of what – if anything – could
count as a legitimate reason for engaging in informal social punishment.
I believe that the answer that I have provided makes it plausible that
punishments like rebukes and boycotts are at least potentially permissible
and even valuable in practice.
But let me also emphasize what I have not tried to do here. I have not
offered a justification of punishment in general. I have not recommended
the moral pressure to atone as the goal of criminal punishment. Law and
morality are not coextensive. The liberal state is properly neutral among
reasonable conceptions of the good, and properly restricts its use of force to
Things can get complicated, of course. Were Joe’s customers to manipulate the profit motive in
order to get the owners and managers to do something against their sincere and reasonable moral
consciences, then the boycotters may not be treating them with respect.