Rejecting Retributivism

Gregg D. Caruso is Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University. He is also the Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network (JWRN) at the University of Aberdeen School of Law. His research interests include free will, agency, and responsibility, as well as philosophy of mind, cognitive science, neuroethics, moral psychology, criminal law, punishment, and public policy. His books include Just Deserts: Debating Free Will (with Daniel C. Dennett, 2021), Free Will and Consciousness: A Determinist Account of the Illusion of Free Will (2012), ​Exploring the Illusion of Free Will and Moral Responsibility (2013), Science and Religion: 5 Questions (2014), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience ​(co-edited with Owen Flanagan), and Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society (co-edited with Elizabeth Shaw and Derk Pereboom).

'Caruso mounts a series of robust challenges not just to retributivism (his main target) but also to other recent attempts to provide justifying rationalisations of the institution of criminal punishment: the most striking and original of these are the metaphysical and epistemological challenges that he grounds in scepticism about free will and desert. He then develops, in impressive and empirically informed detail, an alternative, 'public health-quarantine' model of crime prevention, grounded in part on the right of self-defence. This aims not only to provide more humanely effective ways of preventing crime, but also to serve the aims of social justice, and to ensure a proper respect for the interests and the dignity of offenders. Those who want to defend the practice of criminal punishment will need to meet Caruso's challenges, while those who wonder whether and how we could do without this practice will find imaginative food for thought in his proposals.' Antony Duff, University of Minnesota

• Acknowledgments; 1. Free will, legal punishment, and retributivism; 2. Free will skepticism: hard incompatibilism and hard luck; 3. The epistemic argument against retributivism; 4. Additional reasons for rejecting retributivism; 5. Consequentialist, educational, and mixed theories of punishment; 6. Public health-quarantine model I: a non-retributive approach to criminal behavior; 7. Public health-quarantine model II: the social determinants of health & criminal behavior; 8. Public health-quarantine model iii: human dignity, victims' rights, rehabilitation, and preemptive incapacitation; 9. Public health-quarantine model IV: funishment, deterrence, evidentiary standards, and indefinite detention; References; Index.