Abstract

It is gratifying to me, though perhaps it will be disappointing to you, to discover that Neil Levy and I agree on much of what to say about the morality of punishment. His summary of the contents of The Immorality of Punishment is both generous and, for the most part, accurate, and the concerns that he raises are certainly reasonable. In what follows, I will address what I take to be the most significant of these concerns.IAs Levy notes, in the book I discuss alleged moral justifications of legal punishment that have been proposed both from a retributivist and from a non-retributivist perspective. What I take to be my two most significant arguments—the Argument from Ignorance and the Argument from Luck—concern the former perspective, but let me say something first about some of the reasons I gave for doubting that legal punishment can be morally justified on non-retributivist grounds. I considered three such grounds: rehabilitation, by either educative or non-educative means, of the pe ..