An Integrative Notion of Punishment in Traditional Yoruba Culture: an Hermeneutics Discourse

Punishment constitutes a means of maintaining social order. But the traditional justification of punishment,utilitarian and retributive, is challenged by proportional gravitation and the aversion to punishing the innocent, among others. Thus this book addresses these problems, through the aid of hermeneutic interpretive theories of Gadamer and Habermas, within the Yoruba culture. The integrative notion of punishment in traditional Yoruba culture provides for a coherent interconnection among social structure, law and belief system; it reconciles the victim, offender and the society at large; it constructively addresses the dispensation of justice in the quickest manner possible rather than the delay, cost,complexity and absence of truth- telling experienced in the formal adjudicatory procedure, which remains cold in nature. This is a book of applied philosophy and inter-disciplinary study meant to restore social order through its incorporation into the adjudication in contemporary penal practice.