The institution of criminal punishment is in a scandalous state, and what is worse, we largely refuse to acknowledge it. It is certainly true that there is constant debate over such issues as whether the death penalty should be eliminated, whether we punish too hardly, what constitutional rights prison inmates have, and whether sentencing policy is race-biased. Yet we ignore the far more fundamental problem, namely that we do not know whether punishment itself is morally justi fi ed. Even worse, we do not have any clear idea of just what the purpose of punishment is supposed to be. Is it to give wrongdoers their just deserts? To deter others? To prevent criminals from committing future crime? To reform them? Or some combination of some or all of these? Needless to say, if we do not know why we punish, we cannot even begin to ask the question whether punishment is morally justi fi ed. Even worse, as we will see, none of the proposed explanations for why we punish appear to provide a moral justi fi cation for punishment, a fact that has long been recognized by moral philosophers. Hence the current intolerable situation, in which we have no good basis for believing that punishment is morally justi fi ed and ample reason to suggest that it is not. Yet there is no evidence that this problem is the least concern for any but a small number of moral philosophers. It is precisely the purpose of this book to address the problem of punishment and raise the question as to how punishment might or might not be morally justi fi ed.