7 - Institutional blame and apology
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
In the last chapter I put forward a theory of punishment that I call the Apology Ritual. According to this theory the main purpose of punishment is condemnation of the offender for a ‘public wrong’. And I have argued that the most symbolically adequate way for such condemnation to be expressed is through requiring the offender to undertake proportional amends for her crime – that is, to do the sort of thing that she would be motivated to do spontaneously were she appropriately sorry for her offence. In this chapter I explore and try to defend some of the ramifications of this claim.
applying the account of the cycle of blame and apology
The task of this chapter begins with a simple question. While I take my claim about the symbolism of punishment to have some intuitive plausibility, the reader might ask for a better explanation of why the performance of amends is the right sort of symbol. Why is a crime something for which it would be appropriate for the offender to say sorry in this public way? The answer to this question ties the Apology Ritual account more tightly and more explicitly to the argument of previous chapters of the book. The claim is that the reactions of blame and penitent making of amends are appropriate reactions to crimes. Let me explain the significance of this claim in more detail.
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- The Apology RitualA Philosophical Theory of Punishment, pp. 152 - 174Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008