Justice and Punishment: Exploring Chasms and Connections

Justice and Punishment: Exploring Chasms and Connections

RC31 Political Philosophy, IPSA World Congress, July 24, 1pm, Montreal, Canada, Palais des Congrès, Room 513a

Contemporary theories of punishment and theories of justice largely belong to two distinct academic sub-fields. Apart from some notable exceptions, few theorists of punishment ever address the question of justice systematically and most theorists of justice concentrate exclusively on matters of distributive justice, thus leaving penal coercion to one side. This scholarly divide is unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons. Most particularly, it fails to capture some of the most salient aspects of the practice of state punishment. We currently speak of courts of justice, justice departments and about the correctional justice system. Moreover, claims or complaints about the criminal justice system are often expressed in terms of justice and injustice, while the normative import of these allegations remains relatively indistinct. 

Different conceptions of justice are in contention: retributive, restorative, distributive, corrective, procedural, and so on. Moreover, different legal traditions point to potentially incompatible means of legitimating punishment. There is need to reflect anew on possible ways of justly grounding state punishment. Contributions to this panel will raise two key questions. First, how apt is it to think about punishment in terms of justice at all? Second, how great a match or mismatch is there between broad concepts of justice and justifiable or objectionable forms of punishment?

convenor/chair

andrei poama (sciences po)

speakers

allan beever (university of south australia):

crime and commutative justice

vincent chiao (university of toronto):

two conceptions of the criminal law

ambrose lee (oxford university):

what do the punishments that offenders are said to deserve have anything to do with justice?

matt matravers (university of york):

justice and punishment revisited

tommie shelby (harvard university):

punishment, condemnation and social Injustice

 

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Andrei Poama PhD Candidate, Political Theory Ecole Doctorale, Sciences Po CERI-CNRS [email protected]  (0033)664 164 067