ABSTRACT
We turn, then, to the enterprise of reconstructing a set of justifying arguments for punishment. In the light of what has gone before, this enterprise must be located firmly within a general moral and political framework, and the claims which it generates will be dependent on a particular background social context. However, as the title of this chapter suggests, I shall allow myself to engage to some extent in utopian thinking—to imagine what punishment could be in a world somewhat different from our own in certain specified respects. As explained in the preceding chapter, my aim is to preserve the strengths of liberal theory in the context of criminal justice, whilst transcending its weaknesses by moving away from some of its central tenets in important ways. Of course, the tendency towards ideal thought in theorising about punishment is hardly new: almost any conceivable theory, as we have seen, makes background assumptions about the fairness of the laws or the system which punishment sanctions. Moreover, we have also seen that the problem of justifying punishment in a (fundamentally or partially) unjust society is bound to be complex for any theory except one which insulates the problem of punishment from the rest of moral and political reasoning in an unacceptable way. But it may well be thought that in moving away from certain liberal assumptions—assumptions which are at the moment in some way embedded in social consciousness in ‘western’ societies—I am moving towards a theory which is more radically utopian than are the traditional theories as defended in modern political thought.
