Corporal Punishment: A Philosophical Assessment

Abstract

Patrick Lenta’s Corporal Punishment: A Philosophical Assessment provides a thorough, well-researched, accessible, and philosophically convincing examination of the normative status of the corporal punishment of children and a brief discussion of some implications of the main arguments on two related themes, namely the corporal punishment of animals and judicial corporal punishment of adults. Departing from the premise that all punishments need justification, Lenta first shows that, both on consequentialist and deontologist accounts, no convincing arguments have been provided in favor of the corporal punishment of children. On the contrary, investigating the available empirical evidence and relating it to the normative discussion, he concludes that the costs of corporal punishment of children clearly outweigh its benefits and that there are no convincing reasons to suggest that children are better off on balance because of corporal punishment (e.g., because it is necessary to form their moral character), let alone that they indeed deserve to be corporally punished (mainly because as children they do not possess full moral agency). Lenta then goes on to build his own account of why the corporal punishment of children is a moral wrong, based on different fundamental rights all human beings, including all children, possess: the right to security of the person and the rights to protection from degrading, cruel, or torturous punishment. While all corporal punishment violates the rights to security of the person and the rights to protection from degrading punishments, Lenta contents that the terms “cruel” and “torturous” should only be applied if a certain threshold of severity is overstepped. Subsequently, he assesses the question of how a state should regulate the (in his conclusion immoral) practice of corporal punishment. He is clear that the relevant rights of children have to be secured and that the corporal punishment of children has to be proscribed legally. Extending his arguments to the corporal punishment of animals and the judicial corporal punishment of adults and investigating analogies and disanalogies, Lenta comes to the conclusion that these practices ought to be eschewed as well. Philosophical Papers