The Proceedings of the Twenty-First World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 3, 2007

Human Rights

The "New Balance" Approach to Punishment and Its Utilitarian and Retributivist Rivals

This essay investigates the possibility of veering from an approach of doing bad to the offender as the primary response to crime to one of requiring the offender to do good. This approach, in effect, has us offset the evil which the offender has placed on the scales of justice with good which the offender is required to produce; hence the conception of New Balance. The specific focus here is to identify important deficiencies in the major approaches of retributivism and utilitarian-deterrence theory to pave the way for New Balance.