The hard question for justice is what the political community owes when shared life breaks down: when someone harms another person, takes what isn't theirs, or refuses to recognize that the people around them are real participants in a common political life. The framework's recognition tradition reads justice as how the political community repairs failures of recognition when they occur and restores the conditions it needs in order to function, with property reframed as stewardship-within-community rather than as Lockean pre-political right, with restitution running partly to the community (not only to the individual victim) because the harm reaches collective-investment output, with upstream-justice investment dominating downstream-justice investment on every measurable margin, with the modally-compatibilist responsibility account grounding desert in the agent's contribution to causal history rather than in suffering-infliction, with for-profit / extraction occupation of justice-system functions structurally precluded, and with state-administered institutional backstop required for residual-extreme cases that restorative-only architectures cannot handle. Three contemporary traditions in punishment theory deny this framing at its premise from different directions.

The retributivist tradition (Kant, *Metaphysics of Morals* *Doctrine of Right* §49; Moore 1997; Duff 2001; the broader desert-theoretic literature through von Hirsch and others) presses the desert claim: punishment is intrinsically required by what the wrongdoer has done, not justified instrumentally by repair or upstream-prevention consequences. The framework's collapse of justice into restitution-plus-upstream-investment, on this reading, dissolves the constitutive moral relationship between the wrong and the punishment that desert grounds, and a justice architecture that fails to inflict proportionate suffering on the wrongdoer fails the constitutive moral demand the wrong itself makes.

The prison-abolitionist tradition (Davis 2003; Gilmore 2007; Kaba 2021; the abolitionist-organizing tradition of Critical Resistance) presses the institutional-form claim from the opposite direction: the framework's 'justice repairs failures' frame still presupposes a coercive sentencing-and-enforcement architecture that abolitionism contests at the institutional level. The racialized incarceration patterns, the institutional persistence of carceral extraction across reform cycles, and the empirical record on what prison budgets crowd out together support abolition of the carceral institution rather than refoundation on repair-plus-upstream. Refoundation will be captured by the same structural forces that captured every prior reform cycle.

The restorative-justice-maximalist tradition (Zehr 1990; Braithwaite 1989; Sullivan and Tifft 2001; the contemporary truth-and-reconciliation literature through Krog and others) presses the structural-form claim from a third direction: restoration is the structural form justice should take rather than a supplement to state-centered sentencing. The framework's continued grounding of justice in state-administered institutions (courts, sentences, restitution-enforcement) reproduces the form restoration was meant to replace; community-based mediation, victim-offender dialogue, and circle processes are the institutional architecture, not the supplementary technique.

The recognition tradition the section operates within reaches the repair-plus-upstream-with-state-backstop destination on multiple independent grounds. The [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) morality derivation supplies the recognition-failure-as-wrong analysis, with Will ([§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>)) supplying the will-attribution that makes an action belong to a participant and Feeling ([§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>)) supplying the feeling-of-consequence-landing-on-someone-in-particular that gives the wrong its moral weight. The [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) type/token distinction combined with the Chapter 8 opening's integrated self-modeling (the closure-plus-throughput account of [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) registered from inside) supplies the Modally Compatibilist Responsibility result (Frankfurt 1971 on hierarchical-mesh free will; Dennett 1984, 2003; Fischer and Ravizza 1998 on reasons-responsiveness).

> [!corollary]
> **Modally Compatibilist Responsibility** (Result). *Agency is the locus at which a self-model takes uptake of evidence and norms and integrates that uptake into action; responsibility tracks that locus rather than requiring libertarian could-have-done-otherwise. Follows from the type/token distinction of [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) (strict modal) together with the Chapter 8 opening's integrated self-modeling — the inside-aspect of the closure-plus-throughput account of [§7.8](<7.8 Life.md>) registered at sufficient recursive depth.*

The dispute the section frames is whether justice reduces to retributive infliction-of-suffering required by desert (retributivism), to abolition of the carceral institution altogether (prison-abolitionism), or to community-mediated restoration without state-administered backstop (restorative-maximalism) — theses pressed by Kant-through-Moore-and-Duff, by Davis-Gilmore-Kaba, and by Zehr-Braithwaite-Sullivan-Tifft — or whether justice is the political community's institutional architecture for repairing failures of recognition through restitution-incorporating sentencing, with property reframed as stewardship-within-community, with upstream-justice investment as load-bearing precondition rather than supplement, with modally-compatibilist responsibility grounding desert in the agent's contribution to causal history, with for-profit / extraction occupation of justice-system functions structurally precluded, and with state-administered institutional backstop required for residual-extreme cases, a thesis pressed by the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) / [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) / [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) / [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) derivations, the Frankfurt-Dennett-Fischer-Ravizza compatibilism lineage, the Tyler procedural-justice scholarship, the Sherman-Strang restorative-justice empirical record, the Krug / Glasgow public-health-to-violence tradition, the Hughes-Stevens / Greenwald drug-policy record, the Tsemberis Housing First record, the Putnam social-capital tradition, and the Etzioni-Sandel communitarian property reframing. The armed-civil-rights record registers as cross-pressure on private-armament design within the recognition tradition rather than as a competing destination. The dispute is determined at [§9.13.2](<9.13.2 What is Required.md>), where the structural-necessity derivation starts from the [§8.12](<8.12 Morality.md>) / [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) / [§8.2](<8.2 Feeling.md>) / [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) grounding to settle what justice must deliver to count as justice under a political community whose protective obligation against internal coercion runs alongside its recognition-failure-repair obligation toward both victims and offenders as participants. *Thus the question stands disputed.*


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← [9.13 Justice](<9.13 Justice.md>) | [9.13.2 What is Required](<9.13.2 What is Required.md>) →
