
Punishment II
Tamar Gendler, professor at Yale, continues her examination of the philosophy of punishment in this lecture from Philosophy and the Science of Human Nature (PHIL 181). She opens with the consequentialist justification for punishment, that it deters future crime, and reviews standard objections to that view before turning to John Rawls' two-level theory, which tries to combine consequentialist and deontological justifications. The lecture then shifts to empirical psychology, covering research on moral outrage and the Knobe effect and what these findings suggest about ordinary intuitions concerning blame and punishment. It closes with a discussion of moral luck and how chance outcomes shape judgments about how severely someone should be punished. The lecture runs about fifty minutes and is divided into four chapters, moving from classical ethical theory into experimental philosophy and back to a philosophical puzzle about fairness and fortune.