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Punishment as Language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Igor Primoratz
Igor Primoratz
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Extract

A number of philosophers and legal scholars have pointed out a fact about punishment that had not been sufficiently appreciated by many traditional accounts, utilitarian, retributive, or ‘mixed’: that evil inflicted on the person punished is not an evil simpliciter, but rather the expression of an important social message—that punishment is a kind of language. The message which it is seen to communicate can broadly be described as condemnation by society of the crime committed. In what is still the only attempt at a general and critical discussion— Anthony Skillen's ‘How to say Things with Walls’—this way of understanding punishment is termed ‘expressionism’. In this paper I propose to sort out the main varieties of expressionism in the philosophy of punishment, and to discuss some of their pros and cons.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 64 , Issue 248 , April 1989 , pp. 187 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1989

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References

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3 Ibid., 100.

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15 In this section and at the beginning of the next I draw on section VI of my ‘The Middle Way in the Philosophy of Punishment’, Gavison, R. (ed.), Issues in Contemporary Legal Philosophy: The Influence of H. L. A. Hart (Oxford University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

16 Hart, H. L. A., Law, Liberty and Morality (Oxford University Press, 1963), 65 (emphasis added).Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 66.

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25 An earlier, much shorter version of this paper was read at the 12th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, in August 1987.