OVERVIEW

Legal punishment involves treating those who break the law in ways that it would be wrong to treat those who do not. Even if we assume that those who break the law are responsible for their actions and that the laws they break are just and reasonable, this practice raises a moral problem. How can the fact that a person has broken a just and reasonable law render it morally permissible for the state to treat him in ways that would otherwise be impermissible? How can the line between those who break such laws and those who do not be morally relevant in the way that the practice of punishment requires it to be? This is the problem of punishment.

The problem of punishment has generated a large and increasingly sophisticated literature with a wide variety of attempted solutions. This book contributes to that literature in two ways. First, it offers a comprehensive, up-to-date introduction to the contemporary literature by providing a detailed account of the nature of punishment and of the problem it poses, followed by a survey of the many solutions to the problem in the current literature. Second, it provides a critical evaluation of these solutions both as a means of introducing the reader to the various debates that these solutions have generated and as a way of defending a particular thesis about the problem that stands in stark contrast to the position taken in the vast majority of the literature on the subject.