Decriminalizing Crime: Accountability Without the Retributive Ritual

My dissertation argues (with retributivists) that there is something morally significant achieved in criminal punishment beyond its consequences, but (against retributivists) that this purpose is not necessarily tethered to criminal punishment. That purpose is socially-realizing people's value by condemning wrongdoing and vindicating victims. It is not necessarily tethered to criminal punishment, because alternatives (such as restorative justice or greatly expanded tort law) could in principle provide the same job, and pending substantive criminological inquiry, may be able to do so in practice. The first chapter against desert as a freestanding moral principle (both in the case of retribution and elsewhere), the second chapter provides an account of what it means to "socially realize" someone's value (which is that our norms are such that behavior contradicting their worth is taken as unacceptable), the third chapter gives guidance for how to make our shared expressions of moral judgments more fitting, and the final chapter is essentially a postscript that ties everything together and explains the upshots for punishment. See the end of my CV for a full abstract.