Criminal Punishment as Private Morality: Victor Tadros’s The Ends of Harm [Book Review]

IntroductionAll states routinely inflict punishment, often quite harsh punishment, for criminal offences committed by persons who are subject to their laws; but it is remarkably difficult to provide a satisfactory normative justification for this practice.This paper is a review essay of Tadros . References to the book will be by way of parentheses in the text. Non-consequentialist accounts, such as retributivism, can readily explain why some kinds of wrongs are punishable, but find it difficult to accommodate the intuition that deterrence can justify punishment. Consequentialist theories can easily explain why harmful conduct is punishable, but struggle to account for the intuition that only the factually guilty should be punished or for the criminal jurist’s obsession with questions of fault and responsibility. Theories that combine elements of retributivism and consequentialism are therefore quite attractive. In The Ends of Harm, Victor Tadros offers such a hybrid account. Acco ..