Abstract
The aim of the work is to critically reflect on retributionism as the end of punishment in the constitutional state of law. Taking German idealism (Kant and Hegel) as a starting point, the most recent reformulations of this apparently outdated current of thought are analyzed. A first approach to the methodological distinction between the term’s retribution, reprobation, and revenge is proposed to defend a secularized theory of punishment.
This work is part of the Research Project Crisis of the Criminal Law of the Rule of Law: Manifestations and Trends (SBPLY/17/18501/000223) granted by the Junta de Comunidades de Castilla - La Mancha and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), under the direction of Prof. Drs. Eduardo Demetrio Crespo, Alfonso J. García Figueroa and Gema Mª Marcilla Córdoba [https://blog.uclm.es/proyectocresta/].
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Pérez del Valle (2020).
- 3.
Mañalich (2015).
- 4.
Klug (1968), pp. 36 et seq.
- 5.
- 6.
Hruschka (2010), pp. 493 et seq.
- 7.
Klug (2002), pp. 31 et seq.
- 8.
Ibíd., p. 32.
- 9.
It is worth reproducing them here (Kant 1989, pp. 165 et):
Criminal law is the right which the sovereign has, with respect to him who is subject to him, to impose a penalty for his crime. (…) The judicial penalty (poena forensis), distinct from the natural penalty (poena naturalis), by which the vice punishes itself and which the legislator does not take into account at all, can never serve simply as a means to promote another good, either for the offender himself or for civil society, but must be imposed on him only because he has committed a crime (…). Before any thought can be given to deriving any benefit from this penalty for himself or for his fellow citizens, he must have been judged worthy of punishment. The criminal law is a categorical imperative and woe betide him who crawls through the sinuosities of the doctrine of happiness to find something that will exempt him from punishment, or even only from a degree of it, for the advantage it promises, following the Pharisaic motto “it is better that one man die than that the whole people perish”. For if justice perishes, it is of no value that men should live on Earth. (…).
But what is the type and degree of punishment that public justice adopts as a principle and as a pattern? None other than the principle of equality (in the position of the faithfulness) of the scales of justice): not to lean more to one side than to the other. Therefore, whatever undeserved harm you inflict on another in a town, you do to yourself (…). Only the law of talion (ius talionis) can safely offer the quality and quantity of punishment, but well understood that in the bosom of the tribunal (not in your private trial); all others fluctuate from one side to the other and cannot be adequate to the opinion of pure and strict justice, because other considerations intrude (…). But if he has committed murder, he must die (…).
This equality of penalties, which is only possible by the sentence of death by the judge, according to the strict law of talion, is manifested in the fact that only in this way the death sentence is pronounced on all in proportion to the internal wickedness of the criminals (even if it was not a murder, but another crime of State that only death can erase).
- 10.
Klug (2002), p. 34.
Also (Hegel 1968, pp. 107 et seq.):
In the positive legal science of modern times, the theory of punishment is one of the subjects that has been the worst delved into, since in it the intellect is not sufficient, since it is essentially about the concept.
If crime and its overcoming, as what is subsequently determined as punishment, is generally considered only as evil, it can certainly be judged as irrational to want an evil merely because another evil already exists.
In the various theories of punishment, this superficial character of evil is presupposed as the main element: the theory of prevention, intimidation, punishment, correction, etc., and what, on the contrary, must result as good, is determined precisely in a superficial way. (…).
In this discussion what is of interest is only that the crime must be denied not as the production of an evil, but as the violation of Law as Law, and then, what is the existence that the crime has, and what must be annulled; that is the true evil that must be uprooted and the essential point is where this existence is. As long as the concepts on this point are not strictly recognized, disorder must dominate in the consideration of punishment.
The violation that affects the offender is not only just in itself - as just is, at the same time, his will, which is in itself and the existence of his freedom, the Right - but it is also a Right imposed on the offender himself, that is, in his existing will, in his action. Because in his action, as the action of a rational entity, a universal is implicit: (…)
The overcoming of crime is punishment, because according to the concept it is the violation of the violation and according to the existence, crime has a qualitatively and quantitatively determined extension; therefore, its negation, as existence, has another existence. However, this identity that is based on the concept is not equality in the specific, external nature of the violation, but in what it is in itself according to the value of the same.
- 11.
Klug (2002), pp. 34 et seq.
- 12.
Ibíd., p. 36.
- 13.
Hruschka (2010), pp. 494 et seq.
- 14.
Kant (1989), p. 165.
- 15.
Klug (1981), p. 150.
We deviate here slightly from the translation by which the article has been cited, which is why the passage is taken from the German version that appeared in 1981.
- 16.
Hruschka (2010), p. 495.
- 17.
Feijoo Sánchez (2014), pp. 110 et seq.
- 18.
Cf. Duff (2015), pp. 151 et seq. on the “communitarian dream or Macintyre’s nightmare.”
- 19.
Feijoo Sánchez (2014), p. 117.
- 20.
Feijoo Sánchez (2014), p. 118.
- 21.
Pawlik (2016), pp. 33 et seq.
- 22.
Ibíd., p. 43.
- 23.
Ibíd., p. 46.
- 24.
Ibíd., p. 50.
- 25.
Ibíd., p. 51.
- 26.
Ibíd., p. 52.
- 27.
Ibíd., pp. 56–57.
- 28.
Ibíd., p. 57.
- 29.
Demko (2017), pp. 227 et seq.
- 30.
Hörnle (2015), pp. 33 et seq.
- 31.
Pérez Barberá (2014), p. 3.
- 32.
- 33.
Pérez Barberá (2014), p. 6.
- 34.
Ibíd., p. 6.
Cf., among other references, Robinson (2012), pp. 40–41 on the terms “deontological deservedness” and “empirical deservedness”; von Hirsch (1998), pp. 31 et seq. on the relationship between “censorship and proportionality”; and Sánchez Lázaro (2016), pp. 48 et seq. on the “normative structure of proportionality.”
- 35.
- 36.
Pérez Barberá (2014), p. 10.
- 37.
Walter (2016), pp. 7 et seq.
- 38.
Ibíd., pp. 8 et seq.
- 39.
In detail, as a scientific and ideological problem, see Demetrio Crespo (1999), pp. 73 et seq. [2016, pp. 70 et seq.].
- 40.
In detail, as a scientific and ideological problem, Vid. Demetrio Crespo (1999), pp. 73 ff. [2016, pp. 70 et seq].
- 41.
On feelings and punishment, see, for example, Rodríguez Horcajo (2016), pp. 134 et seq.
- 42.
Walter (2016), p. 12.
- 43.
Vid. in this regard, with multiple references, Demetrio Crespo (1999), pp. 187 et seq.; 215 et seq. (2016), pp. 225 et seq., 273 et seq.
- 44.
Walter (2016), p. 12.
- 45.
Ibíd., p. 13.
- 46.
In this regard, with multiple references, Demetrio Crespo (2020), pp. 65 et seq.
- 47.
In this direction, e.g., Roxin/Greco: “Am deutlichsten werden diese Gefahren bei Walter: Geht es bei der Vergeltung um ein Urbedürfnis des Menschen, das deshalb, weil “die wenigsten die Kraft haben, ihren Drang nach Vergeltung aufzulösen (unterdrücken nützt nichts)”, von der Gesellschaft abgefangen und kontrolliert werden muss, gibt es keinen Grund, weshalb einen Schuldunfähigen in gewissen Sonderfällen von Strafe verschonen sollte” (Roxin and Greco 2020, pp. 133–134).
- 48.
Demetrio Crespo (2020), esp. pp. 109 et seq., 187 et seq.
- 49.
Greco (2009), pp. 303 et seq.
- 50.
- 51.
Schünemann (2019), p. 15.
- 52.
Roxin and Greco (2020), p. 128.
- 53.
Ibíd., pp. 21–22.
- 54.
Ibíd., pp. 22–23.
On the problem of the “defitional barrier” in the philosophical discussion according to which any pre-theoretical definition of the concept of punishment entails the risk of prejudging the spectrum of relevant justificatory theories, see Mañalich (2015), p. 8 and note 25.
- 55.
Roxin and Greco (2020), pp. 128–129.
- 56.
- 57.
Ferrajoli (1995), pp. 27, 354 et seq.
- 58.
Corcoy Bidasolo (2017), pp. 297 et seq.
- 59.
Frisch (2017), p. 580.
- 60.
See, for example, Rosanvallon, who explains that populism is a phenomenon that revolutionizes the politics of the twenty-first century, although we have not yet fully appreciated the transformation to which it has given rise and we do not have a theory of the phenomenon (Rosanvallon 2020, Introduction).
- 61.
Ferrajoli (1995), p. 225.
- 62.
Ibíd., p. 254.
Puig also explained in his famous Introduction to the Bases (published in 1976) the following: “The fact that absolute theories have not found a place in criminal law, and instead in Christian ethics, is perfectly appropriate to the different functions of both orders. Criminal law, like every sector of law, cannot claim to establish absolute justice on earth, and the contrary would be to confuse its boundaries with those of morality” (Mir Puig 2003, p. 52).
- 63.
Callies (1974), pp. 35 et seq.
- 64.
- 65.
Roxin (1976), pp. 12 et seq.
- 66.
On this, Demetrio Crespo (1999), pp. 61 et seq.
- 67.
Thus, e.g., Mañalich clarifies the following: “to that extent, the categorical character of the criminal law by virtue of whose application the penalty is judicially imposed determines that it must necessarily be executed, without this practical necessity being relativized by prudential considerations of utility” (Mañalich 2018, p. 512). In the same sense pronounce Byrd and Hruschka: “Kant accepts no utilitarian calculus when it comes to the criminal law as a categorial imperative” (Byrd and Hruschka 2010, p. 268).
- 68.
Pérez del Valle (2020), pp. 220 et seq.
- 69.
Ibíd., pp. 224 et seq.
- 70.
Demetrio Crespo (2017), pp. 19 et seq.
- 71.
Hörnle (2013), pp. 49 et seq.
- 72.
Demetrio Crespo (2011), pp. 694 et seq.
- 73.
Demetrio Crespo (2017), pp. 75 et seq.
- 74.
Ibíd., pp. 90–91.
- 75.
Ferrajoli (1995), pp. 257–258.
- 76.
García Amado (2018), pp. 323 et seq.
- 77.
Of “institutionalized revenge,” even if it is called “justice,” he speaks, e.g., Corcoy Bidasolo (2017), p. 285.
- 78.
- 79.
This argument, in the present text only sketched due to space limitations, should, however, be the subject of further development, due to the complexity of this type of theories, ranging from the so-called retributive theories of bonding, through the new approaches of the expressive theories mentioned above, to the preventive theories of bonding. (Vid. Roxin and Greco 2020, pp. 145–160).
- 80.
Vid. however, among many other references, Stratenwerth (1995), p. 20.
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Demetrio Crespo, E. (2023). Review on Retribution as Punishment Purpose. In: Demetrio Crespo, E., García Figueroa, A., Marcilla Córdoba, G. (eds) Crisis of the Criminal Law in the Democratic Constitutional State. Legal Studies in International, European and Comparative Criminal Law, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13413-5_2
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