PHIL Colloquium Series - Jason Byas
Title: Retributive Failure, Abstract: Expressive retributivists offer a compelling moral purpose for criminal justice: providing a system of moral accountability by which criminal wrongdoing can be condemned and victims vindicated, thereby correcting damage to the victim's dignity. Rather than discussing expressive retributivism as a justificatory rationale for criminal punishment, I consider how it might help us to understand pathologies with real world systems of criminal punishment.
I outline two types of retributive failure, by which I mean ways in which a particular system of accountability ends up undermining the aims behind having a system of accountability, even without any instances of retributive error (punishing the innocent, punishing beyond proportionality, or failing to punish the guilty). The first is when a system of accountability can create moral injury of the same kind it is meant to rectify, and the second is when it diminishes its expressive power by overuse.
I then argue that both…
Event Categories: Lectures. Campus Locations: Tanner Irish Humanities Building - Carolyn (CTIHB). Contact Name: K'mwe Paw. Contact Phone: 801-581-8161. Contact Email: kmwe.paw@utah.edu. Campus Wide Event: Yes.
Friday, April 3, 2026, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM.
Memorial Day
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Monday, May 25, 2026.
Juneteenth
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Monday, June 15, 2026.