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Expressive Theories of Punishment

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The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment

Part of the book series: Palgrave Handbooks in the Philosophy of Law ((PHPL))

Abstract

In this chapter, Wringe considers expressivist accounts of punishment with particular emphasis on the work of Joel Feinberg, Jean Hampton, and Antony Duff. After distinguishing between definitional and justificatory versions of expressivism and examining the case for definitional expressivism, Zaibert argues first that a recognition of the expressive functions of punishment does not require us to accept an expressive definition of punishment. He also argues that the best-known versions of justificatory expressivism are unsuccessful, while an alternative that places at its center what punishment communicates to society at large best resists the critique of punishment that originally motivated Feinberg’s arguments for understanding punishment in expressive terms.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    There is some controversy about whether hard treatment must merely be treatment, which is likely to burden the recipient, or whether it must be intended to harm the recipient (Wringe 2013, 2019; Hanna 2017, 2020). This will be important later.

  2. 2.

    One might here appeal to the distinction that philosophers of language draw between speaker meaning and utterance meaning, and suggest that when we are looking at what punishment expresses we should be looking at something analogous to utterance meaning rather than speaker meaning.

  3. 3.

    On some theories of the American constitution, facts about the intentions of legislators may cast a long shadow over subsequent interpretation of the law, but we should not assume that what is true in the U.S. is true everywhere in the world.

  4. 4.

    They may nonetheless succeed in showing that many instances of punishment and many existing penal institutions are unjustified. The question at issue here is whether there could be permissible instances of punishment.

  5. 5.

    I ignore a fifth function that Feinberg mentions—namely that of “condemnation”—since Feinberg’s argument for the claim that punishment serves this function seems to depend primarily on an appeal to the authority of other writers on American criminal law, and because what he says about it seems to constitute a restatement of the expressive view rather than an independent argument for it.

  6. 6.

    One might wonder whether, on this view, punishment could be said to express, in the natural meaning sense, that victims have value. But I do not think it could. The factivity of non-natural meaning seems to raise a problem here too. We could presumably punish someone who harmed something that does not have the kind of value that persons have, such as a statue. Punishing that individual could not mean (in the natural meaning sense) that the statue had this value, since it does not. So, it is not clear how punishing an individual who harms a victim—someone who does have this kind of value—could mean this either.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey

    Bill Wringe

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  1. Bill Wringe
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Correspondence to Bill Wringe .

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  1. Philosophy & Religious Studies, Central Washington University, ELLENSBURG, WA, USA

    Matthew C. Altman

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Wringe, B. (2023). Expressive Theories of Punishment. In: Altman, M.C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment. Palgrave Handbooks in the Philosophy of Law. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11874-6_11

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