Merit
Merit: Why We Value It
Philosophy of Human Conduct PHI107
One popular justification of punishment is the just deserts rationale: A person deserves punishment proportionate to the moral wrong committed. A competing justification is the deterrence rationale: Punishing the offender reduces the frequency and likelihood of future offenses. In present day however, this is not proving to be the case. In fact there has been a 60 to 75% increase in repeat offenders according to R.O.P.E. a repeat offender prosecution project.
There are many situations in which a person may wish to punish another person. When a person is unjustly harmed through assault, or robbery, people experience a strong desire to punish the offender. In truth society has even agreed on why we are punishing these offenders, is it because we want to pay back the offenders for their crimes, or do we really want to prevent future crimes? One thinking is that when an individual harms society by violating its rules in some unallowable way, the scales of justice are out of balance and only punishment of some kind against the perpetrator will restore the balance. The punishment in the end is itself does not need any further justification. This is referred to as the just deserts or deservingness perspective.
An opposing perspective is that social harmony is best served by the prevention of further harm and that the justification for punishment lies in it ability minimize the likelihood of future transgressions. In other words, if we punish the offender, then hopefully we are reducing the crimes happening again. So the two specific motives are deserts and deterrence.
We need to ask “What is it that people in society seek to do when they punish actors who intentionally commit known wrong actions?” People have failed to realize that there is no research-based answers to this fundament question.
With the just deserts theory the punisher need not be concerned with future outcomes,...
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