The first Buddhist precept prohibits the intentional, even sanctioned, taking of life. However, capital punishment remains legal, and even increasingly applied, in some culturally Buddhist polities and beyond them. The classical Buddhist norm of unconditional compassion as a counterforce to such punishment thus appears insufficient to oppose it. This paper engages classical Buddhist and Western argument for and against capital punishment, locating a Buddhist refutation of deterrent and Kantian retributivist grounds for it not only in Nāgārjunian appeals to compassion, but also the metaphysical and moral constitution of the agent of lethal crime, and thereby the object of its moral consequences.
目次
1. Introduction 56 1.1. The legal sanction of state execution 58 1.2. Punishment as prevention: “reformative” and “obstructive” 60 1.3. Prevention as deterrence 61 2. Lethal Punishment as Retribution: The Neo-Kantian Defence 64 3. A Buddhist Contextualization of Lethal Retributivism 69 3.1. Returning suffering for suffering: the contravention of PD 69 3.1.1 SURFEIT AND CONSEQUENCES 69 3.1.2. QUALITATIVE CONSIDERATIONS 72 3.2. That suffering ought to be returned: the contravention of PK 75 3.2.1. ASSUMING THE MORAL WORK OF KAMMA 75 3.2.2. MORAL-PSYCHOLOGICAL PRECONDITIONS FOR JUST REQUITAL 78 3.3. The Kantian division of the person 81 3.4. Lethal intention and the infliction of harm 85 4. Civilising Norms: Restorative Justice and Aretaic Cultivation 88 Works Cited 90
