After surveying the many practical difficulties sentencing judges must confront in determining whether the offenders who appear before them are genuinely remorseful, recent dialogical accounts of remorse-based sentence reductions are examined. These accounts depend on a morally communicative approach to legal punishment’s justification and seem to confine such communication to offenders. They contend that, in order to respect remorseful offenders, sentencing judges must reduce their sentences. Why they should do so, by how much they should do so, and whether they should do so when the individuals being sentenced are recidivists, are among the questions discussed. Also examined is whether remorse should be a prominent mitigating factor in sentencing or only one among many aggravating or mitigating factors. In conclusion, it is suggested that existing sentencing practices might make more sense if we suppose judges to be looking for things other than genuine remorse in the individuals who appear before them.

在调查了量刑法官在确定出现在他们面前的罪犯是否真正悔罪时必须面临的许多实际困难之后，最近对基于悔恨减刑的对话叙述进行了研究。这些说明依赖于对合法惩罚的正当性进行道德交流的方法，并且似乎将这种交流仅限于罪犯。他们争辩说，为了尊重悔恨的罪犯，量刑法官必须减刑。为什么他们应该这样做，他们应该这样做多少，以及当被判刑的个人是惯犯时他们是否应该这样做，都是讨论的问题。还研究了悔恨是否应该是量刑中的一个突出的减刑因素，还是只是众多加重或减刑因素中的一个。综上所述，