Censure Theory and Intuitions about Punishment

Abstract

Many philosophers and laypeople have the following twointuitions about legal punishment: the state has a protanto moral reason to punish all those guilty ofbreaking a just law and to do so in proportion totheir guilt. Accepting that there can be overridingconsiderations not to punish all the guilty inproportion to their guilt, many philosophers stillconsider it a strike against any theory if it does notimply that there is always a supportive moral reasonto do so. In this paper, I demonstrate that censuretheory accounts for these intuitions much better thanany other theory, including forms of retributivismsuch as desert theory and fairness theory, and explainwhy censure theory is able to do so.