Justice and Retaliation

Abstract

Punishment and Reparations are sometimes held to express retaliatory emotions whose object is to strike back against a victimizer. I begin by examining a version of this idea in Mill's writings about natural resentment and the sense of justice in Chapter V of Utilitarianism. Mill's view is that the ‘natural’ sentiment of resentment or ‘vengeance’ that is at the heart of the concept of justice is essentially retaliatory, therefore has ‘nothing moral in it,’ and so must be disciplined or moralized from without by the desire to promote the general welfare. I argue to the contrary that if ‘reactive attitudes’ like resentment and moral blame are understood as Strawson analyzed them, as essentially ‘interpersonal’ or ‘second personal’, they have a different content and function. They implicitly demand respect in a way that also expresses respect for the victimizer as a member of mutually accountable community of moral equals. Some implications of this idea are discussed for the ‘expressive theory of punishment’ and ‘civil recourse’ theories of torts.