The chapter starts with an impasse in criminal justice theory between liberal normative and critical historical accounts to consider a new way of developing critique. This is based on the idea of human beings as metaphysical animals, that is, animals capable of thought and love. Starting with Bernard Williams’s account of the ‘peculiar’ nature of modern ethics, a moral psychology based on a naturalistic understanding of what human beings are would be a better way of thinking about what it means to violate or be violated by another. Basing our understanding of violation on what it means to be human takes us to ontology and to ontological critique as a pivotal moment in a sequence of four critiques, moving from immanent to explanatory to ontological and then to emancipatory. This provides the possibility of a further ethically real/ institutionally critical (ERIC) position which brings together ontological naturalism, ethical realism and institutional critique. How love was identified as the immanent starting point for the argument is explained. The upshot of this fivefold form of critique is a move in the course of the book away from punishment and towards what I call a deep or tendential abolitionist position.