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I'll hazard to say that world-views about values of justice play a significant role here. If you are a retributivist, then you usually weigh injustice on a grand scale (think Kant) where libertarian-style choice places evil on the back of particular choices at particular times against the justice of the universe weighing good against evil on some equally universal basis. Thus retribution focused on individuals makes sense in balancing the universal scale of justice. But if you are a determinist compatibilist, then there is (usually) no grand-scale weighing of justice. There is instead fine-grained focus on what can be said to be evil (on some more limited social scale of evaluation of good and evil) and correctable with the right causal means.

So I think retributivism and deterrence views are conceptually articulated by world views about what constitutes justice. And theism probably plays a major practical role in who adheres to which.

To be clear: I am not (though once was very strongly) a theist. I saw the light.

When I find myself losing my grip on how a thoroughgoing consequentialist account of punishment is supposed to work, it usually has something to do with proportionality and targeting. So, Thomas, you say:

"when retributivists make determinations of moral desert, which in turn fixes the amount of deserved punishment, they look at precisely the features of the offender and of the crime that consequentialists similarly take into consideration." And then you ask:

"So, what’s the essential difference between retributivism and consequentiualism given their overlapping focus on desert-relevant considerations?"

I don't think I have an especially crisp or illuminating answer here but in the spirit of "what y'all think?", I am tempted to make a point of the internal limits on punishments established by basic desert. So, I take (and like) your point about the overly narrow assessment of consequentialism as attending only to forward-looking considerations. But what backward-looking (but consequentialist) considerations could impose a strict boundary against punishing the innocent or torturing to death those who break the speed limit?

(These are sincere questions, btw. I don't mean them to be deflationary).


That's an interesting point. I do, however, want to make a simple observation--namely, that balancing the scales of justice happens not to be a backward looking consideration. The unbalancing has already occurred in the past as the result of the offender's act. If I am to balance the scales, so to speak, by punishing the offender, presumably this is going to happen during the course of the punishment. In the event of a lengthy incarceration, for instance, the rebalancing could take a life time. If this is right, then it speaks to my original suggestion--which is that that the forward vs. backward looking distinction is not up to the task of distinguishing between retributivism and consequentialism about punishment. Before, I was focusing on backward looking distinctions that are important to consequentialists. You've provided a forward looking consideration that's important to retributivists.


I take it the easiest way to address your question is to draw a further distinction between the different kinds of consequentialism about punishment. Most of the objections you mention--e.g., punishing the innocent or instituting disproportionate punishments--have focused on deterrence models. After all, one can always imagine a situation, however fanciful, where punishing an innocent or executing a jay walker will deter the crime in question--i.e., when the benefits of punishment, however unjust or extreme, will outweigh the moral costs. However, I don't think other versions of consequentialism are similarly subject to the these well-trodden worries. For instance, if I am a preventive or rehabilitative theorist, it's harder to see how punishing the innocent or torturing the jay walker would make any sense. My main goal in both cases is to look to the past to get a sense of what will be required moving forward to prevent the offender from engaging in similar behavior in the future. So, punishing the innocent people won't make any sense on these views since they need to neither be prevented from repeating offenses nor do they need to be rehabilitated. Similarly, I can't imagine a circumstance where torturing someone would be the only means of keeping him from jaywalking in the future, so it simply won't be necessary on a preventive/rehabilitative model. But notice, too, that this kind of model will be even more concerned with backward looking considerations than deterrence-based consequentialist models since the primary focus of these latter views is deterring more generally--i.e., they focus exclusively on the general welfare whereas preventive/rehabilitative views focus nearly exclusively on the individual offender.

Super helpful, Thomas.

Now I'm wondering if there are resources within consequentialism itself that can explain a preference for the preventive/rehabilitative applied principally to individuals over a preference for deterrence applied more generally.


For me, I prefer preventive/rehabilitative models partly because they have the desired consequence of helping me to avoid some of the more common objections to consequentialist theories of punishment--e.g., the problem of punishing the innocent. However, it is unclear that they allay critics' worries about proportionality in other contexts. For instance, if a retributivist thinks that an offender deserves ten years in prison for his offense--that is, ten years in prison represents the deserved amount of suffering--but it turns out that rehabilitating the offender could take either much less time or much more time, then the rehabilitative theorist is going to be committed to giving the offender less/more suffering than he deserves, at least as desert is defined by the retributivist. Of course, the same can be said about parole, but that is a story for another day.

The same issue will arise for the preventive theorist I think. So, while I do think that the rehabilitative/preventive models are the most plausible consequentialist theories of punishment, they don't avoid all of the retributivists' objections. They do, however, avoid the infamous "problem of punishing the innocent"--which is often used as the go to objection to consequentialist theories of punishment more generally. I have more to say on this front, but it will have to wait till later as I am out the door for now. In the meantime, thanks for your helpful questions!

Sorry about this, Thomas. It feels like you are being forced to give me a little primer on punishment theory here, but I really do hope my questions can help. So I'll keep going.

I took your initial question to be "what justificatory work does desert really do for the retributivist that the consequentialist can't get from appropriate backward looking reasons?" I'm worried (and as you note, this is a boiler plate worry) that the consequentially grounded backward looking reasons can't block counterintuitive targeting and lack of proportionality. Your appeal to the distinction between deterrence theories on the one hand and rehabilitative/preventive theories on the other is helpful here, I think. But can't this distinction only be as helpful as the ground the consequentialist has for preferring the second to the first? In your last comment I understand you to be saying that your own preference for the rehab/prevention model comes from a desire to avoid the innocence objection. But will that work? In order to vindicate the consequentialist account of punishment more generally, your reasons for preferring one model over the other would have to be justifiable in consequentialist terms, I'm imagining. That's what I can't see is provided by your argument so far. In addition, you grant that proportionality is still a problem, even under a rehab/prevention models.

So, I suppose I'm just re-asserting my original answer to your initial question about what work desert is doing in retributivist theories that can't be done by backward-looking consequentialist considerations. It does the work of grounding our intuitive judgments about targeting and proportionality-- grounding them, as it were, in the deeper metaethical commitments of the theory itself.

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