 Two crucial lines of objection face any such justification of punishment as a communicative enterprise. The first line of critique holds that, whether the primary intended audience is the offender or the community generally, condemnation of a crime can be communicated through a formal conviction in a criminal court; or it could be communicated by some further formal denunciation issued by a judge or some other representative of the legal community, or by a system of purely symbolic punishments which were burdensome only in virtue of their censorial meaning. It can, of course, also be communicated by ‘hard treatment’ punishments of the kinds imposed by our courts — by imprisonment, by compulsory community service, by fines and the like, which are burdensome independently of their censorial meaning (on ‘hard treatment’, see Feinberg 1970): but why should we choose such methods of communication, rather than methods that do not involve hard treatment (see Christie 1981: 98–105; Boonin 2008: 176–79; Hanna 2008; Königs 2013; Tadros 2011: 103)? Is it because they will make the communication more effective (see Falls 1987; Primoratz 1989; Kleinig 1991)? But one might think that an account that relies on punishment’s contingent effectiveness in communicating the desired message begins to look more like the sort of consequentialist account of which retributivists are critical (but see Glasgow 2015: 611–20). And anyway, one might worry that the hard treatment will conceal, rather than highlight, the moral censure it should communicate (see Mathiesen 1990: 58–73).