Honor and Revenge: A Theory of Punishment [electronic resource] / by Whitley R.P. Kaufman.

Chapter One: The Problem of Punishment.- Chapter Two: Punishment as Crime Prevention.- Chapter Three:  Can Retributive Punishment Be Justified? -- Chapter Four: The Mixed Theory of Punishment -- Chapter Five:  Retribution and Revenge -- Chapter Six: What Is The Purpose of Retribution? -- Chapter Seven: Making Sense of Honor.- Chapter Eight: Is Punishment Justified? -- Index.

This book addresses the problem of justifying the institution of criminal punishment.   It examines the “paradox of retribution”: the fact that we cannot seem to reject the intuition that punishment is morally required, and yet we cannot (even after two thousand years of philosophical debate) find a morally legitimate basis for inflicting harm on wrongdoers.  The book comes at a time when a new “abolitionist” movement has arisen, a movement that argues that we should give up the search for justification and accept that punishment is morally unjustifiable and should be discontinued immediately.  This book, however, proposes a new approach to the retributive theory of punishment, arguing that it should be understood in its traditional formulation that has been long forgotten or dismissed: that punishment is essentially a defense of the honor of the victim.  Properly understood, this can give us the possibility of a legitimate moral justification for the institution of punishment.