Why We Punish — A Pragmatic Genealogy

The 11th session of the EPLab Permanent Seminar will be led by Francesco Testini (IFILNOVA), who will talk about “Why We Punish — A Pragmatic Genealogy”. The session will take place on 25 September, at 10:30, in room SD at Colégio Almada Negreiros (Campolide Campus), with online transmission, and will be held in English.

Anyone interested in attending, either in person or online, should contact the organisers: Inês Pinheiro (ines.pinheiro@campus.fcsh.unl.pt) and Devon Cass (devoncass@fcsh.unl.pt).

Abstract

Crucial among the concerns of moral and political philosophy is the critical evaluation of norms, practices, and institutions. How can the history of how such things came into being, i.e., their genealogy, contribute to their evaluation? Here I defend and enrich the pragmatic account offered by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams, and Matthieu Queloz, according to which the point of genealogical inquiry is to grasp the functional value of its target practice, norm, or institution. I defend this account by elaborating on its undertheorized relationship with real history and the social sciences – a relationship often overshadowed by the ‘state of nature’ causal stories for which the pragmatic approach is mostly known. I show that once this relationship is properly arranged, it is possible to address three pressing objections to this approach: that it is evaluatively conservative, explanatorily inadequate, and overall redundant. I illustrate these points through a pragmatic genealogy of the practice of legal punishment, which supplies critical resources against the retributivist penal paradigm currently dominant in several liberal-democratic societies, the so-called ‘justice model’ of punishment.

Bio

Francesco Testini is a junior Research Fellow at IFILNOVA and Adjunct Professor of History of Political Theories at the University of Milan. He works on genealogy, punishment, and normativity.

More information on the EPLab Permanent Seminar here.