Kant's theory of criminal punishment

Murphy

pp. 434-441

in: Lewis White Beck (ed), Proceedings of the Third international Kant congress, Berlin, Springer, 1972

Abstract

Kant maintains that guilt is a necessary condition for the legitimate infliction of punishment. Punishment of the innocent is a conceptual and moral pathology. It is largely to avoid such punishment that Kant inveighs against private revenge, vigilante activities, war, and any other activity which allows a disputant to judge his own case and punish according to his own biased decision. Criminal punishment is coercive social power in its most brutal domestic form, and thus it is absolutely essential (in order to preserve freedom) that it be administered only under those procedures of due process found in a just Rule of Law. Such procedures, by securing fairness to the individual, interfere with the utilitarian goals of crime control and criminal rehabilitation. But this, Kant argues, is the price we must pay for liberty and justice.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel