Punishment for the Greater Good
Oxford University Press, May 2024

In Punishment for the Greater Good, Brooklyn Law School professor Adam Kolber argues for a consequentialist view of criminal punishment and incarceration, in contrast to most modern scholarship on punishment theory, which tends to favor retributivism. Kolber’s book examines the justification of punishment, recognizing that we are uncertain about matters of both fact and value. Retributivists believe offenders deserve punishment because of their wrongdoing. They treat deserved punishment as intrinsically valuable. Kolber argues that retributivism is too incomplete as a theory to address punishment today, and the popular notion of proportional punishment at its core is both elusive and often undesirable, he claims. Rather than seeking retribution, we should reduce suffering by deterring crime, incapacitating dangerous people, and rehabilitating them, he argues.

Praise: “In an era in which most criminal law theorists are retributivists, Kolber defends a consequentialist approach to crime and criminals. Even if one is ultimately unconvinced by Kolber’s defense and his attacks on retributivism and deontological morality, one will come away from the book with a clear idea of the arguments to which they must respond.” —Lawrence Alexander, Warren Distinguished Professor of Law, University of San Diego School of Law