Abstract
In this post, I want to explore how the presence of luck in one being the kind of person that one is affects the way we should think about criminal justice.
Retributive justice – the idea that justice requires wrongdoers receive their just deserts – looms large when thinking about criminal justice. However, I am interested in another kind of justice for the purposes of this post: distributive justice, understood broadly as the just distribution of political, social and economic goods.
There are many ways in which issues in criminal justice and distributive justice bear on each other. For example: one might argue that distributive injustices undermine the state’s authority to punish,[1] or that criminality is a legitimate basis for withholding certain political and social rights.[2] More empirically, one might also ask whether poverty and other kinds of social deprivations can contribute to criminal behaviour.
I shall argue, however, that in addition to these, there is a more fundamental role for distributive justice to play when thinking about criminal justice. More specifically, once we properly recognize the presence of luck in one being the kind of person that one is, then we should see criminality as a proper object of concern for distributive justice, just like natural disadvantages or contingent social circumstances in the economic and political domains.
This post will proceed as follows: First, I shall explain the luck that is involved in one being the kind of person that one is. I shall then discuss what distributive justice is generally concerned about and why that implies we should see criminality as a proper object of concern for distributive justice, alongside the other natural disadvantages and contingent social circumstances that are typically accepted as the proper objects of concern for distributive justice. In the last two sections, I shall address a possible criticism and end by briefly discussing the practical implications of my view.