Retributive Desert as Fair Play

Abstract

The moral intuition that culpable wrongdoers deserve to suffer is so strong and pervasive that some advocates of retributivism, including Michael Moore, base their positions entirely upon it. Yet, given the enormity of state-imposed punishment, it is incumbent upon students of punishment to seek broader principles of justice by which such intuitions can be explained. The moral principle that I believe most plausibly explains and justifies criminal desert is Herbert Morris’s theory of unfair advantage. I argue that commentators have failed to address Morris theory in its strongest possible form and failed to examine critically the arguments against it. Morris’s theory not only supplies normative content to intuitions of desert, it also reveals that ‘paying back a debt’ -- the original meaning of the Latin retribution -- is not a “faded and dead metaphor,” as Michael Moore asserts, but an apt description of what it is to deserve suffering for culpable wrongdoing.

Keywords: criminal desert, fair play, retribution