Giving Wrongdoers What They Deserve

Certain moral claims are said to support two types of ‘positive’ retributivist theory of state punishment. A positive retributivist theory states that desert is a reason to impose state punishment. The moral claims assert that we have a moral reason in general to give guilty wrongdoers what they deserve. I consider one well-known strategy for establishing the existence of such a moral reason: thought experiments like Kant’s ‘desert island’. These experiments have not been properly designed, since they give us no way of determining how strong the moral reason in question is. If they are properly designed we see that the moral reason is at best quite weak. This means that one of the two types of positive retributivist theory is false. The other type may also be false, but in any case it must largely rely on non-retributivist moral considerations. Moral intuition, properly focused, does not support positive retributivism