The Rationale Of Punishment

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1830 edition. Excerpt: ... RATIONALE OF PUNISHMENT. BOOK III. OF PRIVATIVE PUNISHMENTS, OR FORFEITURES. CHAPTER I, PUNISHMENT ANALYZED. We now come to the last of the two grand divisions of Punishments--Privative Punishments, or Forfeitures. The word forfeiture is never used but with reference to some possession.* * As all our ideas are derived ultimately from the senses, almost all the names we have for intellectual ideas, seem to be derived ultimately from the names of such objects as afford sensible ideas: that is, of objects that belong to one or other of the three classes of real entities. Insomuch that, whether we perceive it or no, we can scarce express ourselves on any occasion but in metaphors. A most important discovery this in the metaphysical part of grammar, for which we seem to be indebted to M. d'Alembert. -- See his Melanges, tom. '1, Disc. Prelim. fyc. The way in which the import of the word forfeiture is connected with sensible ideas seems to be as follows: the words to forfeit come either immediately, or through the medium of the old French, from the modern Latin word forisfacere. Forts means out of doors, or out of the house; facere, is to make or to cause to be. The conceit then is that, when any object is in a man's possession, it is as it were within doors; within his house; any act, therefore, which, in consequence of some opetion of the law, has the effect of causing the object to be no longer in his possession, has the effect of causing it, as it were, to be out of his doors, and no longer within his house. Possessions are either substantial or ideal-- substantial when it is the object of a real entity (as a house, a field) ideal, when it is the object of a fictitious entity (as an office, a dignity, a right.) The difficulty of dealing...

This book aims to answer the question: 'why, and by what right do some people punish others?' The author argues that the justification of punishment must be embedded in a substantive political and moral theory. Matravers questions why it is that recent theories of distributive justice have had so little to say about the punishment and retributive justice. His answer is that contemporary theories of justice cannot explain the relationship of justice and morality more broadly conceived. As this is also the relationship that a theory of punishment needs to explain, it is in examining the problem of punishment that the limitations of contemporary theories of justice are most starkly exposed. Moreover, the limitations are such as to undermine these accounts of justice. The claim is that it is through the discussion of punishment that the inadequacies of contemporary theories of justice is demonstrated and it is therefore through the discussion of punishment that those inadequacies can be rectified. Matravers argues for a genuinely constructivist account of morality-constructivist in that it rejects any idea of objective, mind-independent moral values, and seeks instead to construct morality from non-moral human concerns and human wills, and genuinely constructivist in that, in contrast to the faux constructivisim of Rawls and cognate approaches, it does not take as a premise the equal moral worth of persons. He argues that a genuine constructivism will show the need for and justification of punishment as intrinsic to morality itself.