Criminology as a Demoralized Discipline

• In Event: Theoretical Perspectives in Critical Criminology

Abstract

Whereas the Classical School prioritized the normative and philosophical dimensions of criminal justice, criminological traditions thereafter downgraded the status and consequently limited the practice of moral inquiry. Criminology has been demoralized both in the sense that we’ve been disincentivized to articulate directly or scrutinize fully the inescapable moral content of our work, and in a diminishing of morale amounting to a disciplinary identity confusion if not quite crisis. Moral assumptions continue to animate criminological research, including etiological and quantitative work, but they are not always acknowledged, or their truth content is considered self-evident and therefore not treated as existing within the contestable space of moral theorizing. This presentation addresses some of the factors that have contributed to this process, including anxieties around maintaining the discipline’s “scientific” status, an understandable squeamishness surrounding moral inquiry given its assumed synonymity with moralism, the issue of value pluralism, reasonable concerns about the value/fact distinction, and the temptation to slip into obscure abstraction. This paper also surveys appreciatively the increasing body of recent scholarship that attempts in some way to ‘re-moralize’ the discipline, including by (a) mapping the relationship between moral philosophy and criminology, and (b) empirically studying discrete criminological phenomena using a moral-philosophical lens.

Author

• Jessica Bird, University of Illinois Chicago