 The paradigmatic public use of coercion is judicially imposed punishment, capital or otherwise. At the core of Aquinas’s account of justified punishment is the notion that offenders are punishable because, in choosing to offend, they have excessively indulged their will and thereby (he implies) gained a kind of advantage over those who have retrained their own wills from such excess; a just relationship between themselves and their fellow citizens can fittingly be restored by proportionately imposing upon such offenders something contra voluntatem, contrary to and suppressive of their will: I-II q. 46 a. 6 ad 2. This restoration of a fair balance between offenders and the law-abiding is central to what Aquinas frequently calls the “medicinal” function of punishment, for the medicine of punishment is intended to heal not only offenders (by reforming them) or potential offenders (by deterring them), but also and more centrally the whole community by rectifying the disorder of injustice created by the offender’s self-preferential violation of justice. On capital punishment see 3.4.1 above.