Retributivism captures the widely shared sense that it is always or nearly always impermissible to inflict punishment on those who have done no wrong and to inflict disproportionately large punishments on those who have done some wrong.

Not only is retributivism in that way intuitively appealing, the primary alternative, consequentialist theories of punishment that focus on deterrence and incapacitation, seem to confront a deep problem. They have difficulty explaining a core and intuitively compelling feature of retributivism, namely the widely shared sense that it is always or nearly always impermissible both to inflict punishment on those who have done no wrong and to inflict disproportionately large punishments on those who have done some wrong. (Some respond to this point by adopting a mixed theory, according to which ret...