Food for thought! Thanks to both of you for stirring up the debate. I find it hard to have a firm position on soft social sciences. Like you, I don't really believe in retributive punishment, but like @dantheman I thought about shunning as a form of punishment, just never thought about it in a decentralize way like he is proposing. Me too, I don't believe in such thing as definite good or evil (objective morality as you say) and that is why I love a good story where characters have to walk along the many thin lines of their consciousness' shades of grey (all drawn differently depending on each person's perspective) and where in the end necessity kind of acts like some sort of predestiny. I can't stand anymore Hollywood movies where the ''good guy'' who started with good intentions (non-aggression principle?) then ends up using any means necessary for some ''greater good'' or reparation. Maybe it's mostly the cliche aspect of it and that is been redone countless times... or maybe it's only the fact that it constantly brings up in our face the ideal of utopia (whether it's throught the means to achieve it or the outcome itself) which instinctively we must know is impossible. If we are to believe, as I do, in some kind of duality in our existence (not as polar opposites to each other but as infinite nuances) as what ables differentiation between one and the other, should we really hope to completely rid ourselves of bad things which ultimately is what define their good opposites? I don't know, I've been struggling with the idea of no governments at all versus a basic and very small one (for security purposes maybe?). But to say that full anarchists are mere idealists and that they espouse dangerous ideas equating to that of communist thinkers, I don't agree. One wants to be done with this artificial lever of power that is the construct of the state, the other one wants to pretend it's possible that every one can have it's hands on it without any kind of problem.