Punishing Problems; Simple Solution

Abstract

Boonin’s The Problem of Punishment is an intriguing, systematic, and thoughtprovoking piece of philosophy. The central claim of the book is straightforward: punishment is unjustified, and so we should dispense with the practice. The structure of the book is also straightforward. Boonin begins by setting out why punishment is problematic, and goes on to address a number of possible solutions to the problem— variously, consequentialist, retributivist, and some more specific solutions. None of these is adequate. He then considers the appeal to necessity (‘punishment is a necessary evil’), and argues that it fails, because there is at least one viable alternative: ‘pure restitution’, according to which ‘the state should not punish people for breaking the law... and... should compel people who break the law to compensate their victims for the harms they have wrongfully caused them’ (218). His treatment of the various justificatory attempts is thorough, and offers some interesting responses to familiar proposals. For instance, in response to the Moorean attempt to justify retributivism with reference to our intuitions about cases, Boonin argues that ‘appealing to the fact that people already believe that punishment is justified in these cases cannot serve as a basis for solving the problem’ (89). And he does a persuasive job of explaining why it is that punishment is problematic, and why existing attempts to justify punishment are unsatisfactory. The first part of the book focuses on developing a definition of punishment. He argues that legal punishment should be defined as ‘authorized intentional reprobative retributive harm’ (26) that is, harm inflicted intentionally, by an authorized agent of the state acting in his or her official capacity, because the punishee has done a legally prohibited act, and where this harm expresses official disproval of the punishee for having done such an act. Punishment is problematic, he suggests, because it involves intentionally harming one group of people: those who have broken laws. We need to explain