Deterrence can instrumentalise offenders
Using punishment to influence others risks treating the punished person mainly as a means to public security.
Enlightenment philosophy · 1738–1794
Cesare Beccaria
Beccaria measures punishment by public necessity, demanding clear laws, proportionate penalties and the abolition of torture and unnecessary death.
Cesare Beccaria was an Italian Enlightenment thinker and legal reformer associated with the Milanese Academy of Fists. His short treatise On Crimes and Punishments attacked arbitrary justice, torture and capital punishment while grounding penal authority in law, prevention and the least necessary harm.
JusticeEthicsAgency
The question he enters
The question Cesare Beccaria enters
If punishment is justified by preventing harm, why should greater cruelty make it more legitimate?
The central move
Limit punishment to public necessity
Beccaria argues that citizens surrender only the minimum liberty needed for common security. Punishment must therefore be fixed by public law, proportionate to offences and directed towards prevention rather than vengeance. Certainty and promptness deter more effectively than spectacular severity.
Key ideas
Terms that carry the argument.
- Principle of legality
- Only publicly established laws, not discretionary moods of judges, should define crimes and penalties.
- Proportionality
- The severity of punishment should track the social harm of the offence and never exceed what prevention requires.
- Certainty over severity
- A predictable and prompt penalty deters more effectively than rare, arbitrary cruelty.
- Opposition to torture and death
- Torture is unreliable and unjust before conviction, while capital punishment is generally unnecessary and brutalising.
Where the view strains
Objections and limits.
Proportionality needs a measure
Social harm, culpability, need and unequal impact can point towards different rankings of offences and penalties.
Sources and routes
Read the work. Follow the argument.
Primary texts
Where to meet the position.
On this site