Abstract
In Winch’s papers on punishment, I distinguish three lines of thought: his grappling with the question of the justification of punishment, his concern to rescue the intelligibility of a cluster of concepts loosely characterized as retributive concepts, and his characterization that an important philosophical problem—or set of problems—about punishment arise from what I call the intensionality of punishment—what it is for punishment to be “for” a crime. I have considerable reservations about the first line of thought (following David Cockburn’s 2013 criticism of Winch on justifications and primitive reactions) and about the second (raising the question whether he is rescuing their intelligibility or promoting their acceptance—and more deeply raising the possibility, which Winch often acknowledges, that diverse and critical perspectives on “the function” of punishment are part of our moral and political lives with these concepts). I believe the third line of thought is more promising, and we can start to explore it by taking up Winch’s reading of the aspect-seeing discussions of Part II Investigations in his late paper “The Expression of Belief” (1996/2001).
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Notes
- 1.
We do not know whether the criticisms of this paper were known to Winch prior to the publication of “‘He’s to Blame!’.” He doesn’t engage them directly. Rhees poses an exegetical challenge—did he get Wittgenstein in the Tractatus right?—and a methodological challenge—is Winch’s discussion coloured by drawing on a limited diet of examples? Would one say one say what Winch does about the first and third person in punishment if one thought not of retributive practices of incarceration but of exile (the example is the export of prisoners to Australia)?
- 2.
The reader might be ready with a quick way to dispel worries on this account: surely Winch as a particularist would reject these qua theory. There is something right in this objection, but also something very wrong. Winch rejected philosophical shortcuts: some general and over-reaching claims are distorting; some are illuminating; many are both. To diagnose distortion and benefit from illumination, we need patient discussion, not a label that we use to justify dismissing philosophical work.
- 3.
This characterization of sociology in broad—if not dismissive—strokes is one that Winch had no sympathy for later in his career. Different sociologists take different kinds of interest in the relationship between social structure and individual agency, and the sociological investigation of such questions is by no means less conceptually rich than philosophical work in the area. When he presented his material on punishment in his lectures on philosophy of law and the state, he identified the view of punishment as external deterrence with a positivist account of punishment and the law. It is however notable that he does not use that term for his foil in his published papers.
- 4.
Winch says that the collection of ideas he is trying to bring together are sharper in the case of punishment. It is notable that he is trying to say something that holds equally of both reward and punishment, and notable how much less there is to say on the reward side. It is problematic to force the two into the same pattern, but I don’t mean to dismiss the attempt as empty philosophical parallel-drawing. We have little social debate around awards and honours, but there is a range of reactions and principled views here that are little debated. Compare the inequality researchers Thomas Piketty and Sir Anthony Atkinson in their responses to the public honours offered them (Piketty rejecting them and Atkinson accepting). Naturally we feel it important to justify harming people but not so pressing to justify doing something nice for people, but this is also an important presupposition to examine particularly in the context of contemporary concern with inequality and privilege.
- 5.
It is notable that Winch discusses very uncharacteristically general and lightly-sketched—if not sentimental—examples of reward and punishment in these papers. When he turns to literature, he turns to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which does little to address the concerns of the reader who has moral doubts about his cluster of retributive concepts.
- 6.
In the Investigations, the logical anomaly to which he refers is Moore’s paradox—the difficulty about saying “I believe it is so, but it isn’t”. In the Tractatus, the logical anomaly is the way an account of belief can (like Russell’s) make it appear possible to believe something nonsensical. I leave for another time the specifics of how this constitutes a treatment of such logical anomalies.
- 7.
In many cases it might not be clear what we would describe as the actions a person takes to treat the picture one way or another. Where do they file the picture—in the duck drawer or the rabbit drawer? But they do not actually file pictures in drawers very often at all. In the associations they form? But how do we keep that from collapsing into an associative mental account of meaning? I don’t mean by these questions to reject the offered answers, but to show that the offered answers have to take their place among many more potential observations of what would count as taking the picture one way or the other.
- 8.
Cockburn locates some connection between justification questions that arise in an area of philosophy and the philosophical importance of attending to the richness of our lives with the concepts in question here.
- 9.
Winch liked to treat this passage as saying that the apparent contradiction between the picture and its use was part of what made language expressive of the psychical, though he disavowed any claim that Wittgenstein meant this (personal communication).
- 10.
Consider as an example in another context Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels as an extended study of two women coming of age and coming each to her own sense of justice (distributive and retributive) in a society with its own characteristic Venn diagram of state power, institutional corruption, non-state interpersonal violence (usually gender-based), historical legacy of fascism and complicity with the Nazis, and class domination (Ferrante 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015).
- 11.
Thanks to Michael Campbell for his stimulating and helpful comments on this paper.
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Reid, L. (2020). Winch on Punishment: Contested Concepts, Justification, and Primitive Reactions. In: Campbell, M., Reid, L. (eds) Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40742-1_5
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