Retributivism holds that punishment is justified for the sake of restoring an order of fairness, particularly in respect of the distribution of the benefits (including liberty) and burdens (including sacrifices of liberty) of common life, when this order of fairness has been disturbed by criminal wrongdoing. For example, a criminal may justly be deprived of liberty commensurate with the liberty he wrongfully seized in breaking the law. The retributivist wishes the law to maintain a state of affairs in which a law-abiding individual, looking back over a period of time, will have no reason to consider himself to have been a sucker for obeying the law when others were disregarding it with abandon. Retributivism thus considers (just) punishment to instantiate—immediately and in itself—the good of justice because it restores the order of fairness.
(Robert P. George, "Moralistic Liberalism and Legal Moralism," review of Harmless Wrongdoing: The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, by Joel Feinberg, Michigan Law Review 88 [May 1990]: 1415-29, at 1426)
