Kant’s Theory of Criminal Punishment

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.

This essay was originally presented as a lecture at the Third International Kant Congress held at the University of Rochester in 1970 and was published in the proceedings of that Congress. It is an expansion of the discussion of Kant’s theory of punishment in my book Kant: The Philosophy of Right (London: Macmillan, 1970) and has been extensively revised for inclusion in the present volume. It still overlaps other essays in this volume more than I would like, but this could not be avoided without destroying its integrity as an independent essay. Kant’s theory of punishment is presented in his Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre (1797). Pagination cited in the present essay is from Volume VI of the edition of Kant’s works issued by the Royal Prussian Academy in Berlin. I have relied upon the English translation by John Ladd (Metaphysical Elements of Justice, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) which provides the Prussian Academy pagination in the margins.