Penal Coercion and the Apology Ritual

Abstract

In a comment on Christopher Bennett's The Apology Ritual, I sketch an alternative route to an account of criminal punishment very like Bennett's, though drawing more on a political conception of a polity and its citizens than on a moral conception of our social relations as individuals, and placing more importance than he does on the criminal trial; but I suggest that we need to revise certain important aspects of his account to explain how punishment can be justly imposed on an unwilling offender — in line with the kind of account for which I have argued, and which he criticises.