utilitarianism

    Over the next few weeks, we’re looking into various accounts of what justifies punishment. The four basic families of views we’ll discuss are: Utilitarianism Retributivism “Mixed” Views The Moral Education View Each of these views has implications for how we should punish people. Your goal is to try to bring out some of these implications by discussing and critiquing our current practices. You should: Identify some current feature of our criminal justice system (the use of private prisons, 3-strikes laws, parole boards, mandatory minimum sentencing, etc). State what would Bentham think of this punishment. Give a analysis of the practice from the perspective of one of the four views listed above.