Rethinking Criminal Justice: Punishment, Abolition and Moral Psychology

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Rethinking Criminal Justice: Punishment, Abolition and Moral Psychology

By Alan Norrie
Cambridge University Press July 2025

Specifications

ISBN-13
9781108478878
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication
July 2025
Format
Hardback
Jurisdiction
U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

For 200 years, the penal equation 'crime plus blame equals punishment' has led to painful repetition: more prisons, violence, damaged lives, a never-ending 'crime problem'. The retributive theory of punishment is central to this; yet fully developed philosophically, it becomes something fundamentally different. A moral psychology of violation distinguishes retributivism's primitive and mature forms. It explains both punishment's necessary failure and how guilt, forgiveness and reconciliation are possible. 'Atonement' means both punitive 'payback' and being morally 'at one' with self and others. Such reconciliation for the offender, victim and wider society takes us from punishment to its abolition. Grounding responses to violation in moral psychology, mature retributivism finds its roots in natural human powers. Speaking to scholars of law, philosophy and criminology, Alan Norrie shows how a psychologically developed moral philosophy guides critical thinking towards abolishing crime and punishment.

Table of Contents

1. Criminal justice and the metaphysical animal

Part I. Two Routes Beyond Political Theory:
2. Political theory and young Hegel's critique of punishment
3. Victims who victimise: guilt in political theory and moral psychology

Part II. Moral Psychology, Law and the Metaphysics of Forgiveness:
4. Love, guilt and forgiveness
5. Law and the metaphysics of forgiveness

Part III. The Animal that Thinks and Loves: On Guilt:
6. 'Feeling rotten': beyond philosophy's limit
7. Two accounts of guilt in Freud
8. Primitive and mature guilt: taking retributivism seriously

Part IV. Three Case Studies: Denial, Mourning, Freedom, Reconciliation:
9. Denying guilt, taking responsibility: on Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing
10.Violation, mourning and melancholia: on Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for The Light
11. Guilt, freedom and reconciliation: on Jimmy Boyle's A Sense of Freedom

Part V. Mature Retributivism as Abolition:
12. Mature retributivism as abolition
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