> I did some research over the weekend, not having really thought about justifications for
> retributivism before -- a terrible confession for a sometime moral philosopher, I know -- and > I think I can say that there is a plausible standard account that answers the most obvious
> objections to the doctrine in the classic formulations by Kant and Hegel. (Btw there is a
> paper by, i think, Jeff Murphie that argues that Marx is a retributivist -- have it, but didn't
> review it for this.) K & H have free-will based versions of the doctrine that end up holding
> that punishment is a "right" of the perpetrator, something which it would bea s wrong to deny > him as it would be to steal his property. Now, whatever one thinks of the existence of free
> will, it would nice if one's justification of punishment didn't depend on controversial
> metaphysics,
Maybe you can get a defense of retribution grounded in principles of distributive justice to go through (just like maybe one can get a defense of punishment grounded in consequentialist considerations to go through). But, like in the framed case (it seems as though it is wrong to punish someone who is innocent not because doing so will have bad consequences, though it may, but because the person is _innocent_), it seems as though our intuition that the guilty deserve punishment is most clearly rooted in our prior intuitions about responsibility (which gets us into the tricky metaphysical terrain you want to avoid) and not distributive justice.
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