Punishment for the Greater Good

Over ten million people are incarcerated throughout the world, even though punishment theorists have struggled for centuries to morally justify the practice. Theorists usually address criminal justice under abstract, idealized conditions that assume away real-world uncertainty. We don't have time, however, to wait for a perfect moral theory, and the history of philosophy suggests we will never find it. Punishment for the Greater Good examines the justification of punishment in the here and now, recognizing that we lack certainty about matters of both fact and value.

Retributivists believe offenders deserve punishment because of their wrongdoing. They treat deserved punishment as intrinsically valuable. Kolber argues that retributivism is too incomplete as a theory to address punishment at present, and the widely popular notion of proportional punishment at its core is both elusive and often undesirable.

Rather than seeking retribution, we should reduce total societal suffering by deterring crime, incapacitating dangerous people, and hopefully rehabilitating them. Though this consequentialist approach has fallen out of favor in recent decades, Kolber argues that it is better suited to addressing punishment in the here and now than the approach commonly taken by retributivists. If consequentialism successfully justifies punishment, then contrary to some carceral abolitionists, at least some incarceration under some conditions is justified today. While we will rarely know how to punish for the greatest good, we can, when necessary, seek to punish for the greater good.