Punishment Theory: Retribution, Deterrence, and Restoration

The philosophy of punishment asks what could justify the state's deliberate infliction of harm — imprisonment, fines, in some jurisdictions death — on those who violate the criminal law, and the major theories divide broadly into backward-looking (retributivist) and forward-looking (consequentialist) justifications. Retributivism holds that punishment is justified because, and only to the extent that, the offender deserves it in virtue of the wrong already committed — a purely backward-looking rationale that treats deterring future crime or reforming the offender as, at most, welcome side effects rather than the point of punishment itself. Immanuel Kant, in the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), gives retributivism its starkest classical statement, illustrated by his notorious "desert island" example: even a society about to dissolve entirely, with no future crimes left to deter, would still be obligated to execute its last convicted murderer first, since justice (as opposed to mere social utility) demands that guilt be answered with proportionate punishment as a matter of respecting the offender as a rational agent responsible for his own choices, rather than treating him merely as an instrument for social ends.