Legal and Ethical Retributivism

This book explores a foundational philosophical tension in contemporary retributivism, revealing ambiguities in its approach to punishment between two conflicting conceptions of restoration: legal justice and ethical love. Through an analysis of the three parties involved in a crime – the victim, the offender and the state – it argues that neo-retributivism has not sufficiently incorporated the ethical face of punishment into its theoretical framework. The pull of legal justice is often so stron