The introduction situates Against Capital Punishment within larger philosophical debates about punishment. It begins by reminding readers why punishment needs to be justified at all, emphasizing punishment’s normative significance in liberal polities, where any coercive state action must survive rigorous scrutiny. Moving to capital punishment, it explains why it is most philosophically profitable to focus on the retributive slice of the debate and exclude communicative, restitutive, and consequentialist competitors: restitutive and communicative theories are fundamentally incompatible with execution, and deterrence theories stand or fall with social scientific research, which fails to establish execution’s preventative effect. The introduction also lays out the dialectical strategy of the book, which is to present the strongest possible case for the retentionist program, then develop an abolitionism that defeats this view. retributivism, capital punishment, death penalty, punishment, abolitionism Introduction Worries about procedural injustice have recently taken center stage in the movement to abolish the death penalty, finding vigorous expression in Supreme Court dissents, newspaper editorials, and scholarly articles. Procedural abolitionism, as I will call it, comprises a family of arguments that scrutinize the mechanisms by which capital punishment is meted out. From the proceduralist perspective, the death penalty is repugnant not (or not only) because a murderer dies at the hand of the state but (or also) because it compromises the legal mechanisms that determine which murderers C0 C0.P1