Capital punishment is practiced in many nation-states, secular and religious alike. It is also historically a feature of some Buddhist polities, even though it defies the first Buddhist precept (pāṇatipātā) prohibiting lethal harm. This essay considers a neo-Kantian theorization of capital punishment (Sorell) and examines the reasons underwriting its claims (with their roots in Bentham and Mill) with respect to the prevention of and retribution for crime. The contextualization of this argument with Buddhist-metaphysical and epistemological concerns around the normativization of value, demonstrates that such a retributivist conception of capital punishment constitutively undermines its own rational and normative discourse. With this conclusion the paper upholds and justifies the first Buddhist precept prohibiting lethal action in the case of capital punishment.
目次
Abstract 63 Part I: Punishment as Prevention and as Retribution and Its Neo-Kantian Defense 64 I.A. Punishment as Prevention 64 I.A.1. “REFORMATIVE” AND “OBSTRUCTIVE” PREVENTION 65 I.A.2. PREVENTION AS DETERRENCE 67 I.B. Lethal Punishment as Retribution 69 I.B.2. LETHAL RETRIBUTIVISM (LR) AND AXIOLOGICAL CONTRADICTION 74 Part II: A Buddhist Contextualization 77 II.A.1. PERSONS AND INTENTION (CETANĀ) 77 II.A.2. THE BODY OF THE PERSON AND ITS ACTUALIZATION AS VALUE 79 II.B.1. ONTOLOGY AND THE METAPHYSICAL STATUS OF VALUE 80 II.B.2. BUDDHIST-EPISTEMOLOGICAL CONTEXTUALIZATION: ĀKĀRA AND THE PRAMĀṆAVĀDA 82 II.C. LR as the cognition of the ākāra of value 87 Conclusion 92 Works Cited 94
