Mature retributivism from Chapters 7 and 8 involves a metaphysics and metapsychology of the animal that thinks and loves. Its moral psychology underpins deep or tendential penal abolition around five claims. First, mature retributivism is preferrable to punishment. It offers individual and social change rather than repetitive violence by means of a punitive response which fails to change behaviour. Second, vindictive, vindicative and validatory forms of state action are distinguished. Abolition delinks law’s morally vindicative power from punitive vindictiveness, aligning it with a broader moral validation. This allows perpetrators, victims and a community to deal with violation through reconciliation. Third, abolition involves dispositional and relational responsibility allowing the violator to own acts in a social setting rather than simply be blamed and punished for them. Fourth, while this looks unrealistic in the face of the ‘adverse experience’ (Kant 1993: 246) available in modern society around crime and punishment, it involves a real utopian argument based on real human ontology. Its underlying realism challenges proponents and critics to take seriously moral change and violation. It also suggests that the slogan ‘Abolition now!’ must distinguish an immanent truth from an imminent demand. Fifth, the violative and asymmetric relation between ‘a doer’ and a ‘done-to’ remains central to the abolitionist position requiring reconciliatory change at both individual and social levels.

The chapter starts with an impasse in criminal justice theory between liberal normative and critical historical accounts to consider a new way of developing critique. This is based on the idea of human beings as metaphysical animals, that is, animals capable of thought and love. Starting with Bernard Williams’s account of the ‘peculiar’ nature of modern ethics, a moral psychology based on a naturalistic understanding of what human beings are would be a better way of thinking about what it means to violate or be violated by another. Basing our understanding of violation on what it means to be human takes us to ontology and to ontological critique as a pivotal moment in a sequence of four critiques, moving from immanent to explanatory to ontological and then to emancipatory. This provides the possibility of a further ethically real/ institutionally critical (ERIC) position which brings together ontological naturalism, ethical realism and institutional critique. How love was identified as the immanent starting point for the argument is explained. The upshot of this fivefold form of critique is a move in the course of the book away from punishment and towards what I call a deep or tendential abolitionist position.