Relational Morality at Conviction and Sentencing

Under various theories of punishment, the communicative dimensions of a criminal court’s judgment are especially important for the justified imposition of state punishment. But the idealized conceptions of penal communications on which these theories draw may be insufficiently attuned to relational demands that normatively govern actual occasions of conviction and sentencing. In this article, I address what these demands are and how they can be met. Analysing criminal justice in relational terms – through a close reading of GWF Hegel’s and Stephen Darwall’s works – brings home the inevitability for any judgment to involve the subjectivity of the judge. To the extent that judicial subjectivity poses a threat to the basis on which a defendant is normatively expected to accept a court’s judgment, the solution thus cannot lie in bypassing that subjectivity. Rather, it needs to secure the normative foundations for an acceptance of that subjectivity through judicial adherence to relational morality’s demands.