Corrigendum

Abstract

“Works that explore whether offenders who have been wronged by the state deserve less punishment include Bazelon, “Morality of Criminal Law”; Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community, chap. 5; Holroyd, “Punishment and Justice”; Matravers, “ ‘Who’s Still Standing?’ ”; Tadros, “Poverty and Criminal Responsibility”; Chau, “Legitimacy of Punishment”; Delgado, “Wretched of the Earth,” 20. In a very recent paper, Christopher Lewis argues that the state’s standing to blame, and accordingly, to punish, an offender would be compromised if his disadvantage was caused by the state, even if the state has not wronged him (say, the disadvantage of the offender was justified under Rawls’ difference principle, which is assumed to be the correct principle of distributive justice): see Lewis, “Inequality,” 174–5. I want to make two points. First, even if Lewis’ argument is accepted, it cannot justify the conclusion that bad upbringing in itself affects deserved punishment because the bad upbringings of some BU offenders may not have been caused by the relevant state at all; as examples, consider an offender who was brought up terribly in one country but migrated to another country as an adult before committing his crime, or an offender who suffered abuse from his parents which the state could not have prevented even with its best efforts. (After submitting to the journal the first version of this article, which included the distinction between BU offenders and offenders who have been wronged by the state drawn at the end of the preceding paragraph, I had the benefit of reading a subsequently published paper that independently came up with a similar distinction, illustrated with examples similar to the two mentioned here. See Ewing, “Recent Work on Punishment and Criminogenic Disadvantage,” 52–53.) Second, I doubt whether Lewis’ argument is sound: while wrongful complicity in an act may, as Victor Tadros argues, compromise one’s standing to blame the principal wrongdoer for the act, it is unclear to me why causal contribution per se would compromise standing. A detailed assessment of Lewis’ argument must, however, await another occasion.”