Edited by Elizabeth T. Gershoff and Shawna J. Lee

The government of Sweden was the first to institute a ban on all physical punishment of children, including by parents, in 1979. Many countries have truly universal legal prohibitions of physical punishment that apply to all parents, caregivers, and teachers. The majority of countries have limited legal prohibitions on physical punishment in certain settings (e.g., child-care centers, schools, juvenile detention centers); however, the current chapter does not consider such partial bans and instead focuses on complete bans on physical punishment. To date, no country has reversed a complete ban on physical punishment.

American Psychological Association, 2020, 12p.

By Ole Martin Moen & Aksel Braanen Sterri

Corporal punishment is punishment by means of infliction of bodily pain. In this chapter we discuss the ethical permissibility of corporal punishment, focusing on the method of judicial caning as this is carried out in Singapore. We compare the overall effects of this type of corporal punishment to incarceration in three domains: the welfare of individual convicts (Section 1), fairness between different categories of convicts (Section 2), and the welfare of society at large (Section 3). We conclude that although there are downsides to corporal punishment that should be taken very seriously, this method of punishment also has a number of upsides. We are mistaken, moreover, if we assume that it is more humane to inflict psychological pain over long stretches of time (as in the case of incarceration) than to inflict intense bodily pain over a very short period of time (as in the case of corporal punishment).

The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Punishment, 2024, 25p.