Coverdale, HB;
(2020)
How Can the Ethic of Care Help Us to Understand, Define and Express the Limits of State Criminal Punishment?
In: Mahajan, B and Bagga, R, (eds.)
Reframing Punishment: Reflections of Culture, Literature and Morals.
(pp. 71-80).
Brill: Leiden, Netherlands.
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Abstract
This chapter forms part of the author’s wider work-in-progress, conceptualising state criminal punishment. There are moral obligations limiting how we may treat criminal offenders when we punish them as a part of our collective, state-delivered, community response to criminal offending, if we accept that: human beings have a fundamentally equal status or moral worth grounded in their human dignity, and as such ought to be treated as equals in Dworkin’s terms; and that criminal offenders do not cease to be human beings. Building on Benhabib’s argument that human dignity is grounded in the differences that make us individuals (our personal perspective contexts and situations, or narratives), attending to offenders’ narratives offers one way of acknowledging their status as equals whose personal perspectives matter, in criminal justice processes. Given the importance of contextual and narrative detail for the moral reasoning approach of the ethic of care, this suggests care as a strong candidate for developing normative guidelines for the processes of sentencing and application of punishment, which also meets this moral obligation. The author argues that the care perspective can provide us with what we normally expect from a theory of punishment (censuring and condemning criminal wrongs, and attempting to minimize future harms) in addition to being better able to provide guidelines and guiding values that appropriately respect the equal status of offenders as human beings.
| Type: | Book chapter |
|---|---|
| Title: | How Can the Ethic of Care Help Us to Understand, Define and Express the Limits of State Criminal Punishment? |
| ISBN-13: | 978-1-84888-201-0 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1163/9781848882010_008 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848882010_008 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions. |
| Keywords: | Punishment theory, limiting punishment, moral obligations, care ethics, sentencing guidelines |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Political Science |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10197632 |
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