This book offers original answers to the two toughest challenges facing the rejection of moral responsibility and retributive justice: If you reject moral responsibility, what do you do about punishment? And if you reject the moral responsibility system and retributive justice, what workable alternative system will replace them? Drawing on extensive psychological studies, Waller argues that although we cannot eliminate punishment in the foreseeable future, it is better to honestly acknowledge that all punishment is fundamentally unjust. That acknowledgment spurs us to seek effective means of reducing the need for punishment and minimizing the inevitable harm involved in punitive processes.

Bruce N. Waller is professor of philosophy at Youngstown State University. He is the author or editor of fourteen books, including Against Moral Responsibility (2011) and The Stubborn System of Moral Responsibility (2015), as well as numerous journal articles.

1. Beyond the Moral Responsibility System

2. The Unjust Necessity of Punishment

3. Tychonic Moral Responsibility

4. The Strike-Back Roots of Retributive Justice

5. A Just World, Moral Responsibility, and the Justice of Punishment

6. Does Denying Moral Responsibility Threaten Dignity, Rights, and Innocence?

7. Empirical Examination of Moral Responsibility

8. How Does Belief in Moral Responsibility Undermine Personal Dignity?

9. Efforts to Make Punishment Just

10. Is Therapy an Alternative?

11. The No-Blame Systems Model

12. No Limits on No-Blame

13. A Universal No-Blame System

14. Conclusion