In this paper, I will critically assess the expressive justification of punishment
recently offered by Christopher Bennett in The Apology Ritual and a number of papers. I
will first draw a distinction between three conceptions of expression: communicative,
motivational, and symbolic. After briefly demonstrating the difficulties of using the first
two conceptions of expression to ground punishment and showing that Bennett does not
ultimately rely on those two conceptions, I argue that Bennett’s account does not succeed
because he fails to establish the following claims: (1) punishment is the only symbolically
adequate response to a wrongdoing; and (2) punishment is permissible if it is the only
symbolically adequate response to a wrongdoing.

EB00000003485K

Available

• Bennett’s Expressive Justification of Punishment