How To Reconcile Liberal Politics with Retributive Punishment

There is a deep tension between liberalism and retributivism.On the face of it, one cannot coherently believe liberalismabout the fundamental purpose of the state and retributivismabout the basic end of legal punishment, given widely held andwell-motivated or what I call ‘standard’ conceptionsof these views. My aims in this article are to differentiatethe types of conflict between liberalism and retributivism,to identify the strongest and most problematic type of conflictbetween them, to demonstrate that existing strategies in theliterature that might be invoked to resolve this conflict fail,and to present a new, conclusive way to resolve it. The solutionlies in changing the standard conception of liberalism, whichchange, I argue, is warranted on independent grounds. Liberalism,up to now, has been conceived in a way that fails to best captureliberal intuitions. Upon improving our understanding of whatliberal purposes essentially are, it becomes clear that retributivepunishment is not merely logically consistent with them, butalso partially constitutive of them.