Retributivism may seem wholly uninterested in the fit between penal policy and
public opinion, but on one rendition of the theory, here called ‘popular retributivism,’
deserved punishments are constituted by the penal conventions of the community. This
paper makes two claims against this view. First, the intuitive appeal of popular retributivism
is undermined once we distinguish between context sensitivity and convention
sensitivity about desert. Retributivism in general can freely accept context sensitivity
without being committed to the stronger notion of convention sensitivity. Second, it is not
obviously a merit of popular retributivism that it admits a gradual lowering of punishments
by softening public opinion. Retributivists have reason to be skeptical of softening public
opinion if it comes at the price of undermining the extent to which offenders are thought to
deserve censure. In sum, in this paper, I argue that there are ways of making retributivism
sensitive to public opinion without arriving at the conclusion that popular penal conventions
should govern retributive justice itself.

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• Retributivism and Public Opinion: On the Context Sensitivity of Desert