Kant Right Of Punishing

In his article “The Right of Punishing”, Kant states that Justice is best served retributively, either equally or proportionally. In the beginning Kant establishes that the right of executing a punishment belongs to the Sovereign only as it is the highest power to exact revenge against a criminal correctly. Kant separates crimes into two categories private crime (crimen) and public crime (crimen publicum). Kant explains that Private crimes are crimes done in front of the party who suffers and should be dealt with in a civil court, whereas Public Crimes are crimes which endanger the Commonwealth and should be dealt with by a criminal court.
Kant asserts that Juridical Punishment (paena forensis) should not be administered if the person receiving the punishment is not guilty of the crime even if punishing the subject will result in the …show more content…
He believes that retaliation is the most suitable form of equality and proportional justice as it can assign both the quality and quantity of a just penalty by taking the crime and implement it on the criminal. Equality and Proportional Justice differ in that Equality justice serves the exact punishment the criminal inflicted onto the victim back to the criminal herself, but in addition to the equality punishment Proportional Justice considers the status and situation of the criminal against that of the victim’s and gives an extra punishment to balance out the inequalities of the punishment. An example equality justice is, if you kill someone you should also be killed. An example of proportional justice is, if Donald trump steals a homeless man’s money he should give money back to the homeless man, but since there’s such a huge discrepancy in the amount of wealth Donald has versus the homeless man, Donald should also be starved for a week just to experience the pain that the homeless man suffers from lack of