Punishment As Expression: Who? What? To Whom?

Abstract

In Chapter 2, I argued that we have good reasons for adopting an account of punishment on which it is essential to something’s constituting punishment that it be harsh treatment with an expressive dimension. However, this characterization of punishment raises a number of important questions. Two seem particularly obvious: an expressive account of punishment should tell us what punishment is supposed to express and who it is supposed to express it to. As we saw in Chapter 2, advocates of different versions of expressivism have answered this second question in a number of different ways: some have supposed that the primary audience for the messages that punishment involves are offenders, and others have supposed that it is society at large.