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Punishment as retribution

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Abstract

The article is concerned with punishment as retribution. A number of reasonable assumptions concerning the punishment of criminals as well as the punishment of innocent individuals are made. These assumptions are consistent and from them a comprehensive ‘justice map’ is drawn. Several implications concerning justice are derived and there is an analysis as to where slack in the pursuit of justice is most likely to occur. It is then shown that all of the assumptions and consequently all the results can be derived from a simple utility maximization model. Throughout the paper, behavior consistent with the concept of retribution is presented and there is some comparison to other theories of punishment. More generally, the article can be seen as a building of a social welfare function. In contrast to other work on social welfare functions which begin with just methods of aggregating preferences, this article begins with just preferences.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA

    Donald Wittman

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  1. Donald Wittman
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Additional information

I would like to thank David Kaun and Richard Posner for their comments.

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Wittman, D. Punishment as retribution. Theor Decis 4, 209–237 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136647

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136647

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