Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice, A Précis

Within criminal justice systems, one of the most prominent justifi cations for legal punishment, both historically and currently, is retributivism .The retributive justifi cation of legal punishment maintains that, absent any excusing conditions, wrongdoers are morally responsible for their actions and deserve to be punished in proportion to their wrongdoing.Unlike theories of punishment that aim at deterrence, rehabilitation, or incapacitation, retributivism grounds punishment in the blameworthiness and desert of off enders.It holds that punishing wrongdoers is intrinsically good.For the retributivist, wrongdoers deserve a punitive response proportional to their wrongdoing, even if their punishment serves no further purpose.This means that the retributivist position is not reducible to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished.The dual aims of Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (2021) are to argue against retributivism and to develop and defend a viable nonretributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that is both ethically defensible and practically workable.In the fi rst half of the book, I develop six distinct arguments for rejecting retributivism, not the least of which is that it's unclear that agents possess the kind of free will and moral responsibility needed to justify the claim, which retributivism relies upon, that off enders are blameworthy