Question

In his seminal work on the expressive function of punishment, legal philosopher Joel Feinberg argued that state-sanctioned punishment is distinguished from mere penalties—such as parking tickets or licensing fees—by its symbolic significance. For Feinberg, punishment is essentially a communicative act; it expresses the state's and, by extension, society's profound moral condemnation of an offense. In recent years, proponents of restorative justice have challenged the necessity of traditional punitive measures, suggesting that community-oriented alternatives, such as mediated restitution and reintegrative shaming, can fulfill this expressive function without resorting to the deliberate infliction of suffering. These reformers contend that the symbolic disavowal of criminal conduct can be decoupled from the harsh penal treatments that characterize modern carceral systems.

However, the claim that non-punitive sanctions can adequately replace traditional punishment while preserving its communicative power rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of how legal condemnation operates in practice. The expressive force of traditional punishment does not merely accompany the deprivation of liberty; rather, it is inextricably bound to the intentional imposition of hard treatment. When the state deliberately inflicts hardship on an offender, it signals a disruption of the offender’s social standing that corresponds to the severity of the transgression.

Advocates of restorative alternatives argue that requiring an offender to face their victims and provide material restitution communicates a powerful message of accountability. Yet, while such measures may indeed foster personal reconciliation and compensate the victim, they fundamentally alter the state's message. By substituting mediation for hard treatment, the state treats the offense primarily as a private conflict between individuals rather than a public wrong committed against the moral order of the community. Because restorative alternatives eschew the deliberate imposition of suffering, they ultimately reduce the criminal act to a civil liability. Consequently, if the preservation of the law's expressive function requires society to unequivocally declare certain acts as intolerable transgressions against the community itself, then substituting restorative alternatives for traditional punitive measures will inevitably fail to achieve this objective. The communicative power of legal condemnation cannot survive the eradication of the very mechanism through which its gravity is measured.

Which one of the following is an assumption required by the author’s argument in the final paragraph?