Comparative insight of Tadros and Husak

On October 29th, 2020 I wrote a criticism of Tadros’ argument. In summary, I criticize Tadros’ argument because I believe that much of his target audience would not think his premises are plausible, which means that his argument is not good. While my final paper focuses around revising these premises to increase the persuasive quality of Tadros’ argument, in this post I will propose another way that we can reach Tadros’ conclusion, which is that the state cannot hold the poor accountable for their crimes.

Tadros’ argument basically states that if the government is responsible for preventing criminogenic conditions and fails to do so, it shares responsibility in the crimes due to the persistence of these conditions. If the state shares responsibility for these crimes, then the state cannot rightfully hold the deserving criminal responsible through punishment because the state should be a codefendant in the trial, not the judge. I cast doubt onto this argument in my previously referenced post and will continue to do so in my final paper.

Now I will set aside the faults I find with Tadros’ argument to examine how Husak’s extra desert component referenced in “Why Punish the Deserving?”can lead us to the same conclusion Tadros attempts to persuade us of, that the poor shouldn’t be punished by the state.

The conclusion of Husak’s writing is that desert, the condition of being deserving, is not the only consideration when determining when to punish an individual. Husak references this “extra-desert” component which must be incorporated into the comprehensive justification of punishment. The extra desert component is the expectation that punishment will help reduce crime. We should impose punishment on deserving individuals when we have a reasonable expectation that it will help reduce crime.

Let’s take individual who commits a crime and thus is deserving of punishment. At first glace, it appears that the state has all the green lights necessary to impose punishment on this individual. However, in the investigation of the crime, it surfaces that the individual commited the crime because of a criminogenic condition, like poverty for example. This is a systemic and persistent condition that could be prevented or lessened in severity by actions of the government, as Tadros would likely advocate for.

According to Husak, we ought to determine if we have a reasonable expectation that the punishment will help reduce crime. Because the crime was a product of criminogenic conditions, at least in part, we do not have an expectation that the punishment will help reduce crime. The punishment of crimes committed by someone motivated by food insecurity or intense poverty does not address the underlying causes of the crime itself, which are those criminogenic conditions. Husak’s extra desert component in the justification of punishment would suggest vindication of Tadros’ conclusion that the state should not punish those who commit crimes as a reaction to criminogenic conditions. Even though those who commit crimes because of criminogenic conditions are deserving, the state should not punish them because we do not have a reasonable expectation that it will help reduce crime.

I am interested in incorportating Husak’s extra desert principle in my criticism and revision of Tadros’ argument in my final paper.

Husak, D. N. (1992). Why Punish the Deserving? Noûs, 26(4), 447. doi:10.2307/2216023

Tadros, V. (2009). Poverty and Criminal Responsibility. The Journal of Value Inquiry, 43(3), 391–413. doi:10.1007/s10790–009–9180-x