Comments on: Bentham gets pwned by Kant – or is it the other way around?

By: M&M

M&M — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 16:23:48 +0000

Your post and comment (response to my questions) move very quickly through a number of complex issues, and it won’t make sense to try to untangle all of the various problems with your statements.

But let’s start with an easy one – my first question: where do you get your statements like:

“fairly brutal to most of the theoretical work that has been done to date.”

“Most of criminal legal theory doesn’t take this into account”

I just don’t understand what you are talking about when you say things like this.

By: Paul Gowder

Paul Gowder — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 07:55:18 +0000

“There simply is no way, outside of inquiry into social meaning, that one can discern what is just and what is not.” Uh, that premise isn’t established. There are universalistic conceptions of justice… and a Kantian can say that people really want to express those. And the fact (if true) that people want to express those doesn’t mean that Bentham pwns (as it were) Kant: it’s perfectly possible for a deontological moral truth to *also* provide utility for some actor. (Indeed, on some persuasive readings of Kant’s ethical theory, it’s necessary that actors be in fact motivated by the moral law, i.e. that it brings them pleasure in some sense [arguably, insert disclaimers here] from complying with it.)

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:51:18 +0000

I’m a bit unclear about what you say about Kantian conceptions of justice. Do you just mean that much of what Kant himself says about punishment seems wrong to us now? That’s certainly true, but of course Kant, as I’m sure he’d agree, isn’t the final word on what actually follows from his view, even if the view itself is right.

By: Donald Braman

Donald Braman — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:31:11 +0000

I am pretty much an expressivist at heart, so yes I have read Hampton and Feinberg, and I pretty much agree with them. That will be the core of my next post along these lines.

On the other point – about maximizing – I’ll both agree and disagree. If you think in terms of expressivism or social meaning, it doesn’t matter whether you talk about maximizing or not. There is still some objective that people seek in the law. Economists would endogenize that objective into a utility function. But once you’ve done that, many of the benefits of economics – that you can just assume away variance of satisfactions – become problematic.

Here’s a question: do you think that Jean Hampton and Joel Feinberg’s approach is incompatible with the notion that people are maximizers who include expressive satisfaction in their utility functions? Or is it that you think (and here I would agree) that it is just an odd way to talk about what people do?

By: M&M

M&M — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 19:17:18 +0000

“Most of criminal legal theory doesn’t take this into account”

???

Have you read Joel Feinberg? Jean Hampton? Both are canonical – and have theories centered on “expressive dimension”. I don’t understand where you are coming up with your statements. The difference between you and them is that they are not interested in maximizing anything, whereas you seem to assume that that’s the only way to think about any of this. But that assumption hasn’t been defended.