![handle is hein.journals/crimlpy11 and id is 1 raw text is: Crim Law and Philos (2017) 11:1-18 CrossMark
DOI 10.1007/s11572-014-9360-z
On the Matter of Suffering: Derek Parfit
and the Possibility of Deserved Punishment
Leo Zaibert
Published online: 11 November 2014
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
Abstract Derek Parfit has recently defended the view that no one can ever deserve to
suffer. Were this view correct, its implications for the thorny problem of the justification of
punishment would be extraordinary: age-old debates between consequentialists and retri-
butivists would simply vanish, as punishment would only-and simply-be justifiable
along Benthamite utilitarian lines. I here suggest that Parfit's view is linked to unchar-
acteristically weak arguments, and that it ought to be rejected.
Keywords Suffering - Punishment - Desert - Retributivism - Utilitarianism
Compatibilism - Free will - Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit's On What Matters has been one of the most highly anticipated, and then one
of the most enthusiastically celebrated philosophy books in decades.1 Perhaps the central
aim of the book is to argue for an unexpected convergence between Kantianism and
utilitarianism-views that have traditionally been seen as, if not downright irreconcilable,
at least very difficult to reconcile. Parfit is motivated by his beliefs that: Kant is the
greatest moral philosopher since the ancient Greeks and that Sidgwick's Methods [of
Ethics] is [...] the best book on ethics ever written (I, xxxiii). Parfit evocatively sees these
authors (and their followers) climbing the same mountain on different sides (I, 419).
Many of Parfit's commentators-including both the four whose responses are included
in On What Matters (Susan Wolf, Allen Wood, Barbara Herman, and T. M. Scanlon), and
Samuel Scheffler, whose useful Introduction opens On What Matters-harbor doubts
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011). (Further references to this book
will appear as parentheticals in the main body of the text). The enthusiasm transcended the confines of
academia: see Larissa MacFarquhar How to be Good, The New Yorker, (Sept 5 2011) 42-53.
L. Zaibert (E)
Union College, Schenectady, NY, USA
e-mail: lzaibert@gmail.com; zaibertl@union.edu
Springer](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/crimlpy11&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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