Is punishment necessary? Abolitionism, restitution, and the dispensability of punishment.

Seminar with Francesco Testini (INCET, UJ)

Is punishment necessary? Abolitionism, restitution, and the dispensability of punishment.

The seminar will be a hybrid meeting. It will be held in room 110 on Bracka 12 (Pałac Larischa), Kraków and Teams on March 21, 2023 (Tuesday, 17:30 CET).

Abstract:

The ancient Greeks did not think of slavery as just or natural, but as necessary. They could not imagine a social world to exist without it. When it comes to the institution of punishment today, our situation is discomfortingly like that of the ancient Greeks. It is hard to imagine a world without punishment, yet this difficulty might be a culpable lack of imagination. Is punishment really necessary? This is the question I address in this paper, and addressing it requires two things. First, it requires taking penal abolitionism seriously - something that analytical philosophers rarely did, even in the face of the mounting abolitionist demands coming from various social justice movements. Second, it requires an interdisciplinary perspective, as the question has both normative and empirical dimensions. In this presentation, drawing on insights from the social sciences, I sketch a partially positive answer.