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Giving Desert Its Due pp 221–258Cite as

Punishment and the Theory of Justice

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Part of the book series: Law and Philosophy Library ((LAPS,volume 2))

Abstract

The general scheme of thinking of justice as equilibrium is applicable not only to a distribution of goods which are sought by men in a society but also to distribution of punishments. There is no reason to think that these two fields of application of justice should be governed by completely different sets of moral principles. If the balance of benefits and burdens is to constitute an essential theoretical framework for social justice, it can be applied both to a distribution of advantages (in order to balance the increased amount of burdens) and of punishments (to balance undeserved benefits gained by the criminal). In both cases, the acts of social justice are responses to those facts and actions which may be described as benefits and burdens. Both fields of social justice can be considered as the proportional relations between inputs and outputs: in the case of distributive justice, the inputs are deserts and needs; in the case of retributive justice, the inputs are crimes.

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Notes

  1. John Rawls,A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), pp. 314–315.

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  2. Ibid, p. 314.

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  3. For the opposite view, see Michael D. Bayles, `Character, Purpose, and Criminal Responsibility’, Law and Philosophy 1 (1982), pp. 5–20. Bayles argues that blame and punishment are not directly for acts but for character traits.

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  4. Brian Barry, `Reflections on “Justice as Fairness”’, in Hugo A. Bedau, ed., Justice and Equality (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 110.

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  5. For the findings of a survey which support this assertion, see ibid, pp. 112–113.

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  39. See Chapter 1, Section 1.

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  53. This argument is made implicite by Benjamin M. Quigg, Comment, Michigan Law Review 42 (1944), p. 1106.

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  1. Department of Jurisprudence, University of Sydney, Australia

    Wojciech Sadurski

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Sadurski, W. (1985). Punishment and the Theory of Justice. In: Giving Desert Its Due. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7706-9_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-7706-9_9

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