Beyond Kant and Bentham – On the Plurality of Punishment Motives and their Relevance for Theories of Punishment in Criminal Law

In the past, theorizing in criminal law was seen as a primarily philosophical and legal enterprise. Recently, scholars have begun trying to combine research from moral and social psychology, which investigate what drives people to impose punishment, with the normative literature on punishment theory. The normative discussion is often divided into two camps—broadly retributive and broadly utilitarian theories of punishment—and the empirical research has followed suit, investigating whether people are driven mostly by retributive or by deterrence concerns when they punish.
The possible landscape of punishment theories and motivations that drive people to punish is, of course, much more diverse than this. And in both theoretical and empirical research this diversity is more and more important to researchers. Punishment theories try to combine several attributes, such as desert, expressions of respect, communication of censure, deterrence, norm compliance, and so on, into one framework. Similarly, recent empirical research has placed more emphasis on the plurality of punishment motives and, in addition, the diversity of responses beyond punishment that are used in the context of wrongdoing, such as forgiveness and reparation. This project investigates the plurality of both punishment theories and punishment motives and tries to offer a pluralistic approach to punishment theories.