Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

suffering may be justified as long as the over all amount of general happiness is increased?

Retribution, by contrast, might see no gain in happiness. There is however a case for claiming that there is a gain in happiness for those who are avenged.

Kant was a retributist. For him, if the guilty are not punished, then justice is not served. People should be punished because they have committed crimes and for no other reason. He saw rehabilitation of criminals as using people as a means to an end. Kant saw punishment of crimes as treating people as rational beings who are responsible for their actions. Thus, punishing them treats them as ends, not as means. Rehabilitation, meanwhile, attempts to mould people into what society thinks they should be rather than leaving them free to be their own person. Also Kant thought the punishment should be proportionate to the crime and therefore only the death penalty is appropriate for murder. The type of punishment inflicted refers back to Kant’s first formulation of the categorical imperative, ie., it makes the type of punishment something that should be adopted as a universal law. According to Kant, it is that part of us which resides in the noumenal world that has the freedom to make ethical choices and yet leave the strict cause and effect relationships within the phenomenal world intact. If criminals were not responsible for their actions then we would not be justified in objecting to their behaviour. Of course, we could ask: Does it really follow that trying to reform criminals is treating them as ‘means’ rather than ‘ends’?

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