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Abstract:
Expressivist justifications for criminal punishment claim that punishment is necessary in order to express respect for the victim in the face of criminal wrongdoing. I distinguish two versions of this argument. The retributivist version claims that punishment is a necessary and sufficient part of expressing respect for the victim. The conventionalist version claims that punishment is factually the best means of convincingly expressing respect for the victim. In this chapter, I argue that both versions of the expressivist’s argument fail to justify criminal punishment. The retributivist version fails to show the intrinsic connection between punishment and expressing respect for the victim. The conventionalist argument fails on empirical grounds: recent research in social psychology and victimology does not support the claim that punishment best expresses respect for victims. Instead, I argue that the most plausible version of expressivism justifies imposing corrective sanctions on offenders, such as restitution orders, and using restorative approaches to criminal procedure where these are feasible.
