The Utilitarian Justification of Prepunishment

Abstract

According to Christopher New, prepunishment is punishment for an offence before the offence is committed. I will first analyze New's argument, along with the epistemic conditions for practicing prepunishment. I will then deal with an important conceptual objection, according to which prepunishment is not a genuine kind of 'punishment'. After that, I will consider retributivism and present conclusive reasons for the claim that it cannot justify prepunishment without leading to paradoxical results. I shall then seek to establish that from the utilitarian point of view it is possible to provide a plausible justification of this practice. Finally, I shall attempt to defend the claim that the fact that utilitarianism can justify prepunishment in a satisfactory way is clearly a favourable characteristic of this ethical position.

The consequentialist problem with prepunishment

“…However, for the purposes of this paper, I stipulate that the prepunishment threat is known to be credible, so that our focus is on determining whether the credible threat to prepunish deters (our target question), and not on the question of how a justice system might make its threats seem credible. 4 This paper focuses on preventative prepunishment because consequentialist punishment justifications tend to favor prevention when available, and especially so when a crime inflicts harm (see Milevski, 2014). (Prepunishment implies that we know ahead of time that a person would commit a crime, in which case there is the opportunity to prevent harm).…”