Introduction

Abstract

Abstract The introduction situates Against Capital Punishment within larger philosophical debates about punishment. It begins by reminding readers why punishment needs to be justified at all, emphasizing punishment’s normative significance in liberal polities, where any coercive state action must survive rigorous scrutiny. Moving to capital punishment, it explains why it is most philosophically profitable to focus on the retributive slice of the debate and exclude communicative, restitutive, and consequentialist competitors: restitutive and communicative theories are fundamentally incompatible with execution, and deterrence theories stand or fall with social scientific research, which fails to establish execution’s preventative effect. The introduction also lays out the dialectical strategy of the book, which is to present the strongest possible case for the retentionist program, then develop an abolitionism that defeats this view.