This book argues that legal punishment is almost never morally justified. Many criminal law theorists think that this view is deeply at odds with common sense and that it’s subject to decisive objections. Against these theorists, the book argues that the standard objections to this view fail and that commonsense judgments support it. Along the way, the book stakes out and defends novel positions in some longstanding debates in criminal law theory and ethics, including debates about the nature of punishment, the relevance of intentions to ethics, the significance of moral desert, and the implications that moral risk has for the criminal law. The book provides an accessible and thoroughly researched defense of a rarely defended position in the philosophy of punishment, making the book of interest to both established researchers in this area as well as students who are looking for an introduction to the topic.
