Abstract

Retributivism is often portrayed as a rights-respecting alternative to consequentialist justifications of punishment. However, I argue that the political legitimacy of retribution is doubtful precisely because retribution privileges a controversial conception of the good over citizens’ rights and more widely shared, publicly accessible interests. First, even if retribution is valuable, the best accounts of its value fail to show that it can override or partially nullify offenders’ rights to the fundamental forms of liberty of which criminal punishment paradigmatically deprives them. Second, the importance of publicly justifying basic forms of coercion on the basis of broadly shared values is a good reason to think that the state should not punish for retribution even those citizens whose actions have created a state interest in punishing them that overrides or partially nullifies their presumptive rights