What Punishment Expresses

Craig Reeves

It is much easier to show that punishment has a symbolic significance than to say exactly what it is that punishment expresses...1. Expressivism – Philosophical and Psychosocial The philosophical view that punishment should be understood as an essentially expressive practice and evaluated as such has been influential in both the normative philosophy of punishment and in psychosocial penal theory,2 though about this view, as about many issues, there has been relatively little communication between those two traditions. Philosophical and psychosocial expressivist accounts of punishment have developed more or less independently, as if they had little to do with one another.

(Feinberg, 1965: 402)