Punishment and the Failure of Moral Address:On the Semantic Opacity of Penal Communication

This paper argues that punishment operates through metaphorical substitution rather than genuine communication, and that the communicative theories of punishment developed by Duff, Bennett, Tadros, and others presuppose forms of communicative success that punishment’s structure cannot deliver. The relationship between an offence and its punishment is not natural or logical but semantic: a culturally constituted correspondence that carries the characteristic indeterminacy of metaphor. Drawing on recent work on standing to blame, the conditions of felicitous moral address, and the expressive dimensions of punishment, the paper shows that punishment’s metaphorical structure generates an opacity that prevents offenders from reliably receiving the moral messages communicative theories attribute to it. Restorative approaches to crime succeed communicatively where punishment fails, because they employ direct speech rather than metaphorical substitution and create dialogical conditions under which meaning can be iteratively refined.