Review the article: Immanuel Kant -The Right to Punish Retributivism
Then,Response to the following:
1. Does Kant's version of retributivism seem too harsh? Does it lack a notion of mercy? Explain your answers.
2. Try to formulate Kant's argument that crime
causes the scale of justice to be imbalanced and punishment restores the balance? What prob-lems, if any, do you see with the argument?
3. How much weight does Kant place on the notion of free will and responsibility? Does he exaggerate our freedom? That is, are there not crimes partly due to deterministic factors over which we have no control or very little control? Explain.
4. Consider George Orwell's description of a hanging:
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness. of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we are alive. All the organs of his body were working-bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissue forming-all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be grow¬ing when he stood on the drop, mien he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned, even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone-one mind less, one world less. ("A Hanging," Adeiphi, 1931, quoted in Jonathan Glover's Causing Death and Saving Lives, Har¬mondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1977)
How would Kant or a retributivist respond to these sentiments? Does Orwell point to an un-necessary evil in capital punishment?Explain.