Kantian Ethics In Criminal Justice

“An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” otherwise known as the law of retaliation is the idea that when someone does something wrong to us we are allowed to retaliate in a similar degree to even the wrong done. The use of the death penalty in the United States as a form of legal punishment reflects this very concept. More frequent than not, when the death penalty is being sought within a criminal trial it is paired with a murder charge. This desire to inflict an essentially “even” punish for murder, effectively sentencing a person to death yourself because of the choice to take a life, reflects the very essence of the law of retaliation. While the law of retaliation has no limitations and in theory is something we may always put into practice, the death penalty is not such a thing and is instead a highly regulated form of punishment or “retaliation”.
Instead, the acts punishable are those we as a society deem especially morally wrong. The death penalty is also limited in its scope of whom it is potentially imposed about on, sane persons only, and requires a due process trial with the option for later appeals. In this paper I will be examining the moral permissibility of the death penalty under the Kantian ethics decision-making process. The rule to be evaluated is this, “pursuing the death penalty, for an especially horrendous crime, under a due process is a morally permissible form of punishment.” Through the evaluation of the categorical imperatives I will prove that this rule is one that is not morally permissible, not wrong but not required, because it cannot be universalized, fails to respect every human being as rationale, and breaks perfect duties for imperfect