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The Intrinsic Good of Justice
Author(s) -
Rosebury Brian
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
ratio juris
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1467-9337
pISSN - 0952-1917
DOI - 10.1111/raju.12238
Subject(s) - punishment (psychology) , economic justice , meaning (existential) , value (mathematics) , deadlock , law and economics , sociology , core (optical fiber) , epistemology , variety (cybernetics) , law , philosophy , political science , psychology , social psychology , computer science , distributed computing , telecommunications , machine learning , artificial intelligence
Abstract Some retributivists claim that when we punish wrongdoers we achieve a good: justice. The paper argues that the idea of justice, though rhetorically freighted with positive value, contains only a small core of universally agreed meaning; and its development in a variety of competing conceptions simply recapitulates, without resolving, debates within the theory of punishment. If, to break this deadlock, we stipulate an expressly retributivist conception of justice, then we should concede that punishment which is just (in the stipulated sense) may be morally wrong.