Unit introduction

Administering criminal justice is one of the most coercive things a state can do to its own citizens. Lawmakers determine what counts as criminal; police determine who to arrest, detain, and in some cases even shoot; and judges decide how long the state can imprison a person, or sometimes even whether it can execute them. Even after the official administration of punishment to a convicted offender is over, that person faces lifelong social consequences for their previous act. In liberal and democratic societies, the state claims to do all of this in our interest and with our consent. What are the assumptions about justice and the morality of punishment underlying the practices of administering criminal justice, and are those assumptions sound?

Barry Lam, Chair and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College and producer of the Hi-Phi Nation podcast, examines the philosophical assumptions underlying different stages of the criminal justice system, from beginning to end.

In the beginning is the need for lawmakers to decide what acts and what states of mind to criminalize. The first series of videos in this unit looks at the variety of reasons for these decisions, from dangers to the public and the need to solve messy social problems, to the demands of the public itself. We examine what kinds of reasons are legitimate, and what kinds of reasons are illegitimate, when determining laws of criminalization.

In the second series of videos, we look at the relationship between moral responsibility and criminal responsibility. In everyday moral life, we know intuitively when to blame and when to excuse people who wrong us. How many of those practices carry over to how we punish criminal wrongdoers, and how many of them should carry over? We will look at the importance of intention, knowledge, and other states of mind in determining moral responsibility, and examine the ways in which the law does, and does not, excuse criminal wrongdoers in the ways we excuse moral wrongdoers.

In our final series of videos, we will look at questions about why we should punish, how much, and who gets to decide these questions. We will examine views that say we should punish because it is good for the perpetrator, that we should punish because it is good for society, and that we should punish because perpetrators simply deserve it. We will look at theories that purport to tell us how much punishment a person deserves, and for how long, and we will look at the justice of giving judges, rather than the public or lawmakers, all of the power in determining lengths of punishment.

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

Dr. Barry Lam is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Vassar College, where he teaches about knowledge, rationality, the philosophy of language, life, death, and justice. He is also host and executive producer of Slate’s Hi-Phi Nation podcast, a show that blends philosophy with stories from everyday life, science, politics, the arts, and law. Season 4 of the show is dedicated to the philosophy of crime and punishment, taking the listener through the philosophical issues in criminal justice, from criminalization to policing, imprisonment, and reintegration.