Volume 17, Number 1
March 2020
ARTICLE

Judicial Corporal Punishment

Volume 17, Number 1, March 2020, Pages 27–47
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v17i1.469
PDFPDF

Abstract

Most of us think that states are justified in incarcerating criminals, sometimes for decades. In this paper I suggest that if states are justified in this, they are also justified in inflicting certain forms of corporal punishment. Many forms of corporal punishment are less burdensome than long-term incarceration, and arguably, they are also cheaper, fairer, more deterring, and less destructive of the social and economic networks that convicts often depend on for future reintegration into society. After presenting a pro tanto case for corporal punishment, I consider a number of objections. I conclude that although there are genuine downsides to corporal punishment that must be taken very seriously, the case for the judicial use of this punishment method is much stronger than what is commonly assumed.
Copyright © 2020 Ole Martin Moen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

What Relational Egalitarians Should (Not) Believe

Andreas Bengtson and Lauritz Aastrup Munch

Agnosticism and Pluralism About Justice

Adam Gjesdal

Promises, Commitments, and the Nature of Obligation

Crescente Molina

In Search of a Stable Consensus: Rawls’s Model of Public Reason and Its Critics

Cyril Hédoin

The Stability of the Just Society: Why Fixed Point Theorems Are Beside the Point

Sean Ingham and David Wiens

Children, Partiality, and Equality

David O'Brien

Constrained Fairness in Distribution

Daniel M. Hausman

Law and Violence

Alexander Guerrero

Freedom to Roam

Matthias Brinkmann

Do We Have Reasons to Obey the Law?

Edmund Tweedy Flanigan

Social Reform in a Complex World

Jacob Barrett

Risk and the Unfairness of Some Being Better Off at the Expense of Others

Thomas Rowe

Portico