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Questions in Punishment
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In The Stone column on the New York Times Site, there is an article about the issue of moral responsibility, in light of the notion that we are what we ...
July 24, 2010
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Is the death penalty a viable option under the premise that assuming we have apprehended the guilty party, the guilty party, when executed, will never be able to kill again ...
June 29, 2010
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I think that in cases of horrific crimes, the death penalty is acceptable, or even required by retributive justice. However, I think this only applies to cases where there is ...
January 4, 2010
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Does punishment serve any useful long term purpose? It always seems like punishments that are excessively harsh lead to civil unrest, and punishments that are not harsh enough are thereby ...
December 9, 2009
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Why do we consider the death penalty immoral in a situation where a sadist (a very immoral person) commits heinous crimes and is sentenced to life imprisonment where he is ...
November 26, 2009
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Why is it desirable to be judged by a jury of one's "peers"? We demand that our doctors, business executives and politicians be highly exceptional individuals. So why should we ...
July 7, 2009
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What should we make of the Dickson verdict? UK prisoner Kirk Dickson and his wife Lorraine made various appeals to achieve their right to found a family. Dickson is in ...
May 27, 2009
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I think that moralistic judgements and punishments are insidious: they make people do things out of shame, guilt and for the wrong reasons. It seems to me that they can ...
November 3, 2008
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American Protestant fundamentalists who are against abortion frequently say they are for a "culture of life." It seems that many of them also support the death penalty and have a ...
November 7, 2008
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I think that a lot of our common intuitions about punishment require that pure retribution be considered as one of the goals thereof. It is easy to conceive of scenarios ...
October 5, 2008
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Given your question, you may be interested in a discussion of Strawson's NYTimes article at the free will/moral responsibility blog, Flickers of Freedom, here.
There's also a discussion on retribution and punishment (and psychopaths) at the blog here.
You'll see in these discussions that there are plenty of philosophers (called compatibilists) who think that free will and moral responsibility are possible even if determinism is true, and who reject Strawson's argument against the possibility of freedom and responsibility. These compatibilists will generally say that retributive punishment is justified, though they might also think that punishing (or treating) criminals for consequentialist reasons (such as deterrence and rehabilitation) is also important.
My own view is that we can have free will and moral responsibility (determinism is irrelevant to this issue), but that we have less than we think (because the sciences of the mind are showing that we have less self-knowledge and conscious control than we think). So, I think retributive punishment can be justified, but usually criminals deserve less of this sort of punishment than our system doles out. We should put more emphasis on the forward-looking purposes of punishment (or, if you wish, call it quarantine and rehabilitation).