ABSTRACT
The many problems raised by the issue of punishment, and especially that of state punishment, have concerned and puzzled generations of philosophers, lawyers, politicians and others. Yet today, even in the face of the existence of extensive and ever-stronger institutions of punishment in almost every state, we are seemingly as far from any consensus about the fundamental question of what justifies the continued existence of those institutions as we have ever been. 1 Indeed, the only question on which anything approaching a consensus exists is that of the impossibility, impracticality or undesirability of abolishing these institutions about whose underlying rationale we are so unclear. And even this consensus is illusory, for there are as many different views about the reasons why the abolition of punishment would be difficult, dangerous or simply wrong as there are views about what justifies it in the first place.
