Abstract
In this essay I aim to clarify, and critically discuss, Winch’s thinking about punishment. Winch approached the philosophy of punishment in two essays. In “Ethical Reward and Punishment” (1970) he discussed a remark in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which he interpreted as marking a sharp distinction between punishment in an ethical and a legal sense, a view which he endorsed. Against this, I argue that the two concepts of punishment are interdependent. In fact, in “‘He’s to Blame!’” (1989) Winch foregoes this sharp distinction. There he discusses the traditional philosophical concern with seeking for a justification of punishment. This quest is misconceived, he argues, because the practice of punishment is itself partly constituted by what justificatory concerns are relevant to it. If the justification of those concerns is taken to be an open question, the object of our inquiry is dissolved. I attempt to clarify this argument, partly by reference to the distinction between punishment and revenge. I end by discussing a problematic remark of Winch’s in which he seems once more to open up the possibility of asking for a wholesale justification of punishment.
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Notes
- 1.
Wittgenstein’s self-criticism is summed up in § 65:
Instead of pointing out something common to all that we call language, I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all – but there are many different kinds of affinity between them. And on account of this affinity, or these affinities, we call them all “languages”. (Wittgenstein 1953/2009)
(I am here quoting from the revised translation by Hacker and Schulte, rather than the Anscombe translation used by Rhees. This should make no difference to the content of the remark).
- 2.
We should note that even forward-looking motives do not necessarily presuppose an instrumental connection between one’s acts and the future envisaged, as in the case of someone who volunteers to visit with old people in the hope that someone will visit him when he himself is old and lonely. We might not call such a motive rational, but neither is it irrational.
- 3.
We may note that there is no similar concession in his 1992 Lecture Notes, which in many respects appears to be an elaboration of the thoughts in “He’s to blame!”
- 4.
Another way of reading the remark about the possibility of raising questions about the justification of punishment was suggested to me by David Cockburn in discussion. On his proposal, we could imagine the case of someone who accepted the idea of desert but who favoured other ways of meting out retribution, and to whom we were trying to show the superiority of a penal system.
- 5.
I wish to thank Michael Campbell, David Cockburn and Merete Mazzarella for helpful comments on previous drafts of this essay.
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Hertzberg, L. (2020). “What Justifies the Justifications?” Winch on Punishment and Justice. In: Campbell, M., Reid, L. (eds) Ethics, Society and Politics: Themes from the Philosophy of Peter Winch. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40742-1_4
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