In this chapter I outline what I take to be a solution to a problem about free will denial and the justification of punishment pointed out by Saul Smilansky. Smilansky argues that free will deniers must acknowledge that some institution of punishment is necessary to maintain law and order, but since criminals do not deserve to be punished, it is unjust to punish them, and we therefore have a duty to compensate them. Since this is a great injustice, we must compensate them very heavily, in fact so heavily that the institution of punishment will cease to deter and will instead become an incentive to commit crime. Previous responses to Smilansky’s “practical reductio” argument by Neil Levy, Derk Pereboom, and Gregg Caruso have emphasized consequentialist moral reasons. I advocate a deontological social contract approach to punishment that draws on Kantian and Rawlsian notions of treating criminals as ends by respecting their rational consent to punishment.

The free will skeptic aims to articulate a theory for treatment of criminals that rejects retributivism, since this justification for punishment is inconsistent with the skeptic’s outlook, but nevertheless actually works in the real world. In past versions of such an account I’ve emphasized the quarantine analogy for incapacitation together with the value of rehabilitation and reintegration (Pereboom 2001, 2014), and I’ve endorsed Gregg Caruso’s embedding of the view within a public health model (Caruso 2016, 2017; Pereboom and Caruso 2018). Recently I’ve paid special attention to the permissibility and the limits of special and general deterrence (Pereboom 2017b, 2019). Here I set out this view and develop it in certain key respects in response to the latest objections raised against it.