ABSTRACT
Legal punishment involves treating those who break the law in ways that it would be wrong to treat those who do not. Even if we assume that those who break the law are responsible for their actions and that the laws that they break are just and reasonable, this practice raises a moral problem. How can the fact that a person is responsible for having broken a just and reasonable law render it morally permissible for the state to treat that person in ways that it would otherwise be impermissible to treat them? How can the line between those who break such laws and those who do not be morally relevant in the way that the practice of punishment requires it to be? This is the problem of punishment. In my 2008 book, The Problem of Punishment, 1 I argued that there is no satisfactory solution to this problem and that it is morally impermissible for the state to punish people for breaking the law. Call this position abolitionism about punishment.
