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PROFESSOR: So we have two basic
agenda items today.
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The first is to finish up
briefly our discussion of
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punishment from last lecture.
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And the second is to start with
the third unit of the
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course, that is the unit that's
concerned not with our
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status as individuals trying
to cultivate a kind of
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internal harmony, nor with our
status as individuals in local
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relations with others of a moral
or immoral sort, but
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rather with our status as
members of a community.
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And you'll remember from Plato's
Republic, the text
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with which we begin and with
which we'll end the course,
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that Plato sees there being a
direct parallel between the
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individual and the community,
between what's mandated for
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the harmonious soul on the one
hand, and what's required for
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a community to stay stable
on the other.
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And one of the tacit themes
that will underlie our
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discussion in this final unit of
the course are the ways in
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which that parallel
is manifest.
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Now to some extent our
discussion of punishment
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provided a microcosm
of this transition.
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You'll recall that in the first
lecture on punishment we
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looked at three questions.
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We tried to articulate in a
fairly precise sense what we
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meant by the notion of
civil punishment.
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And then we looked at two
families of justification for
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civil punishment.
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A family of deontological or
desert oriented theories on
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theories that look at what
somebody deserves.
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And on the other hand,
we looked at some
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consequentialist theories--
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theories that try to justify
punishment on the basis of its
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And for each of those theories,
we asked ourselves
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how reasonable the
justifications are that they
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offer and what source
of behaviors do
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they seem to mandate.
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And here we had the same sort
of structure that we have
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found throughout the course.
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On the one hand, an articulation
of a principled
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framework for understanding
a large segment of human
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behavior that tries to lay
down rules and guiding
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principles by which we ought
to structure behavior.
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And on the other, we
had intuitions
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about particular cases.
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And we found that here, as
elsewhere, for many of you at
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least, certainly for the
students in my section and for
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the students in the sections
of the TAs that I've spoken
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to, that there was a challenge
reconciling on the one hand,
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the philosophical framework that
seemed truly compelling
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