This is made in philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warberton.

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Should we punish an innocent person if by so doing we could stop a riot and so save many lives?

Most people would say no.

Is it a good thing, positively a good thing for a guilty person to suffer?

I suspect people will have different intuitions about that.

What we need is a theory of punishment to help give consistent answers to such questions.

And Victor Tadros, a law professor from the University of Warwick, is the man to supply it.

Victor Tadros, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hello.

The topic we're going to focus on today is punishment.

Perhaps we could begin by just saying what we mean by punishment here.

So we're primarily focused on state punishment, that is punishment of criminal offenders

through the state criminal justice system.

We might also think about punishment in other contexts where there is no criminal justice system.

We're not primarily focusing though on the punishment of children for say paternalistic reasons.

Okay, so we're talking about the kind of thing that a criminal

comes face to face with through the courts of law and so on. What are the main

contenders philosophically for explaining justifying punishment.

Most people who work in the field, I think, identify two different main theories.

One of them is the consequentialist theory, which says that you should punish offenders because that does more good than harm.

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