Public Reason and the Need to Identify State-Relevant Desert

Plausible retributivist justifications for punishment assert that the commission of a moral wrong creates a pro tanto reason to punish the person who committed it. Yet there are good case-based and theoretical reasons to believe that not all moral wrongs are the proper subjects of criminal law or that they are within the proper domain of the state. This article provides these reasons, which suggest that a plausible retributivist justification for punishment must make distinctions between state-relevant and non-state-relevant moral wrongs and (consequently) state-relevant and non-state-relevant desert. The article makes the case for Rawlsian public reason as a plausible method for making these distinctions.