ABSTRACT
The punishment of criminal offenders inflicts on them harms or losses that their moral rights normally prohibit. Warren Quinn and Rex Martin have raised what appear to be devastating objections to the right forfeiture account of the moral permissibility of legal punishment. Right forfeiture does not appear to allow one to properly discriminate between those who are permitted to impose harms or losses on offenders and those who are not. Christopher Morris and A. John Simmons have offered the most spirited defenses of the doctrine of right forfeiture, arguing that the doctrine has a crucial role to play in any adequate theory of legal punishment. One type of remedy to right violations available that is the legal punishment of right violators. The doctrine that criminal offenders forfeit rights is thought by some to be necessary if the people are to explain the permissibility of criminal sanctions that deprive individuals of their property, liberty, or lives.
