Moral Desert of Punishment

Chapter 4 discusses the moral desert of punishment. After establishing the force of desert claims—that the claim ‘S deserves punishment’ signals a pro tanto ground for punishment, as Feinberg maintains—and why Morris’s argument concerning the fair distribution of the basic benefits and burdens of non-interference cannot be used to explicate desert of punishment, a distinction is drawn between a communicative and non-communicative understanding of such desert. On the communicative understanding, desert of punishment derives from desert of negative moral reactive attitudes; punishment is a vehicle for communicating to wrongdoers the negative attitudes they deserve. According to the non-communicative understanding, it is non-derivatively just that moral wrongdoers deliberately be made to suffer a loss. The difficulty with the latter, it is argued, is that it is uncomfortably close to the traditional moral retributivist understanding (on which morally culpable wrongdoers deserve to suffer simpliciter) that many deem morally indefensible.