ABSTRACT
Philosophers’ attempts to justify punishment have focused on a wide range of features that paradigmatic cases of punishment possess. The most obvious such features are, of course, punishment’s (alleged) capacity for incapacitating wrongdoers and deterring future wrongdoing (Bentham 1907 [1780]; Tadros 2011); and its (alleged) ability to exact from an offender a deserved quantum of suffering (Kant 1996 [1797]). Others include its supposed capacity to handicap the endeavors of those who do not regard themselves as bound by the constraints which bind other members of society (Dagger 1993, 2008), the provision of opportunities for offenders to repent and achieve a measure of moral growth (Duff 1986, 2001), and the feature of punishment with which I shall be most concerned in this chapter, its capacity to, as they say, ‘send a message’ (Feinberg 1965; Hampton 1992; Duff 1986, 2001).
