from Introduction to Part V: From Moral Psychology to Penal Abolition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2025
Mature retributivism from Chapters 7 and 8 involves a metaphysics and metapsychology of the animal that thinks and loves. Its moral psychology underpins deep or tendential penal abolition around five claims. First, mature retributivism is preferrable to punishment. It offers individual and social change rather than repetitive violence by means of a punitive response which fails to change behaviour. Second, vindictive, vindicative and validatory forms of state action are distinguished. Abolition delinks law’s morally vindicative power from punitive vindictiveness, aligning it with a broader moral validation. This allows perpetrators, victims and a community to deal with violation through reconciliation. Third, abolition involves dispositional and relational responsibility allowing the violator to own acts in a social setting rather than simply be blamed and punished for them. Fourth, while this looks unrealistic in the face of the ‘adverse experience’ (Kant 1993: 246) available in modern society around crime and punishment, it involves a real utopian argument based on real human ontology. Its underlying realism challenges proponents and critics to take seriously moral change and violation. It also suggests that the slogan ‘Abolition now!’ must distinguish an immanent truth from an imminent demand. Fifth, the violative and asymmetric relation between ‘a doer’ and a ‘done-to’ remains central to the abolitionist position requiring reconciliatory change at both individual and social levels.
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