This paper argues that Immanuel Kant’s practical philosophy contains a coherent, albeit implicit, defense of the legitimacy of capital punishment, one that refutes the most important objections leveled against it. I first show that Kant is consistent in his application of the ius talionis. I then explain how Kant can respond to the claim that death penalty violates the inviolable right to life. To address the most significant objection – the claim that execution violates human dignity – I argue that (...) motives of honor, as Kant conceives it, require a rational person to will her own execution, were she to commit murder. (shrink)

From the article's conclusion: "This article does not challenge the coherence of retributive theory nor does it challenge the consistency of a retributive theorist who supports the death penalty. I have only argued that one cannot justify the death penalty simply by establishing the claim that wrongdoers deserve punishment which fits the crime. Unless one is willing to condone all sorts of barbaric punishments, then one must appeal to additional ethical considerations to establish which equivalent (or roughly equivalent or proportional) (...) punishments are morally acceptable.". (shrink)

Capital punishment—the legally authorized killing of a criminal offender by an agent of the state for the commission of a crime—stands in special need of moral justification. This is because execution is a particularly severe punishment. Execution is different in kind from monetary and custodial penalties in an obvious way: execution causes the death of an offender. While fines and incarceration set back some of one’s interests, death eliminates the possibility of setting and pursuing ends. While fines and incarceration narrow (...) one’s routes to happiness, death eliminates its possibility. Not surprisingly, there is much debate about the moral permissibility of capital punishment. This entry maps the terrain of this debate. The first section discusses justifications of the death penalty as they appear in major theories of punishment. The second section surveys moral objections to execution that apply to most justifications. The third addresses procedural criticisms, which do not target the morality of execution so much as the justice of its implementation. (shrink)

Proponents and opponents of the death penalty both typically assume that punishment, in some form or other, is justified, somehow or other, and that just punishment must in some sense be proportionate to the crime. These shared assumptions turn out to embarrass both parties. Proponents have to explain why certain prima facie proportionate punishments, such as torture, are off the table, while death remains, so to speak, on it. Opponents have to explain why their favored alternatives to capital punishment, such (...) as life without parole, are both proportionate to the worst crimes and not as bad as death. The commitment to proportionality makes trouble for both sides of the issue, and its resolution is unlikely until there is a satisfactory general account of proportionality in punishing. Such an account is nowhere in sight. (shrink)

Among those who reject the Epicurean claim that death is not bad for the one who dies, it is popularly held that death is bad for the one who dies, when it is bad for the one who dies, because it deprives the one who dies of the good things that otherwise would have fallen into her life. This view is known as the deprivation account of the value of death, and Fred Feldman is one of its most prominent defenders. (...) In this paper, I explain why I believe that Feldman’s argument for the occasional badness of death fails. While staying within an Epicurean framework, I offer an alternative that adequately accounts for a significant range of widely held intuitions about prudential value. My account implies that death is almost always good for the one who dies, yet often less good than not dying. Finally, I discuss some puzzles that remain for my account and hint at possible ways to address them. (shrink)

In the United States, convicted offenders frequently lose the right to vote, at least temporarily. Drawing on the common observation that citizens of color lose democratic rights at disproportionately high rates, this chapter argues that this punishment is problematic in non-ideal societies because of the way in which it diminishes the political power of marginalized groups and threatens to reproduce patterns of domination and subordination, when they occur. This chapter then uses the case of penal disenfranchisement to illustrate how idealized (...) discussions of deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution often ignore the relationship between punishment and social/political power, and thus systematically obscure morally significant aspects of our broader penal practices. (shrink)