Abstract

This essay is a contribution to a symposium on Adam Kolber’s Punishment for the Greater Good. As the title suggests, the essay focuses on the issues of punishment and regret. Its main thrust is a critique of Kolber’s failure to acknowledge the salience of retrospective normativity. This failure divorces Kolber’s attempt to justify punishment from our actual current carceral practices, which are fundamentally backward-looking responses to past (actual or supposed) wronging. It also limits Kolber’s ability to account for the normative reasons we have to regret these practices: mistaking regret as solely a matter of feeling and human psychology, while ignoring its backward-looking normative force.

ISSN

1871-9791 (print) 1871-9805 (online)

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-025-09789-0

Keywords

Punishment, Incarceration, Regret, Retrospective Rationality, Normative force of backward-looking reasons, Consequentialism

Disciplines

Criminal Law | Law

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