We have the pleasure to invite you to another research seminar in the ‘BIOUNCERTAINTY’ research project. This week Francesco Testini a new post-doctoral researcher at INCET will give a talk: "Why do we punish?". The seminar will take place on Thursday 10th of November at 5:30 p.m. in the room 25 on Grodzka Street and via MS Teams.

Abstract

‘Why do we punish?’ is a question that scholars tackled from a variety of angles. Philosophers have addressed it from a justificatory perspective, debating what (if anything) justifies punishment. Social scientists, on the other hand, tackled the question from an explanatory perspective, investigating what causes human beings to adopt such a practice. Although some scholars have lamented how unreceptive philosophers can be towards the work of social scientists, they failed to compellingly spell out the terms in which empirical insights could claim any relevance for philosophers. So far, such a failure has been far from surprising. After all, there is a commonsensical point justifying philosophers’ lack of interest in the empirics of the issue: the space of causes and the space of reasons are apparently insulated from one another and any attempt to make inferences from the former to the latter is at best misleading and at worst fallacious. However, several authors recently mounted formidable attacks to this piece of philosophical common sense, showing that causes can bear upon the space of normative reasons in a variety of ways. This change of perspective turns the gap between empirical and normative discourse about punishment into an uncharted territory for productive dialogue. The general goal of this project is to fill this gap by examining how the best explanations of why we punish bear upon the normative status of the practice of punishment. To pursue this goal, this project resorts to pragmatic genealogy: a specific version of the genealogical method pioneered by Edward Craig, Bernard Williams and Miranda Fricker. How I plan to apply the method to the issue of punishment and what I expect to find by doing so are the crucial questions I will address in the presentation.

 

Link to MS Teams meeting