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The Concept Of Evil In American And German Criminal Punishment, Joshua Kleinfeld
The Concept Of Evil In American And German Criminal Punishment, Joshua Kleinfeld
Joshua Kleinfeld
If we are adequately to explain the gap in harshness between American and German criminal punishment, we must lift the lid on a disquieting moral concept usually left under the surface of criminal theory—the concept of human evil. American criminal punishment represents a belief in the concept of human evil, while German criminal punishment represents a denial of that belief. This paper first takes up the concept of evil philosophically, locating in Hannah Arendt’s work a version of the concept that is both secular and intellectually nuanced. The paper then presents three lines of argument demonstrating the concept’s implicit role …
Victims And Victimizers: A Study Of The Normative Order Of Criminal Law, Joshua Kleinfeld
Victims And Victimizers: A Study Of The Normative Order Of Criminal Law, Joshua Kleinfeld
Joshua Kleinfeld
The theory of criminal law has little place for victims. Yet victims have a place in ordinary moral thought. We make a distinction, morally, between one gangster attacking another and a gangster attacking a bystander (though the assaults might be formally identical), or between selling drugs to an adult and selling them to a child (though the criminal code might treat the two as the same). That is, our intuitions take account of a concept this paper terms “victimization”—the idea that the moral status of a wrongful act turns in part on the degree to which the wrong’s victim is …