형벌의 정당성의 근거에 대하여

This paper attempts to re-found criminal injustice and punishment with Kant's philosophy of law. In a discussion of Kant's philosophy of law, it must also be remembered that Kant had been working on problems of the concept of law since the sixties of the 18th century, i.e. even before he began work on the "Critique of Pure Reason". One can therefore say with good reason that with the legal doctrine of the Metaphysics of Morals there is a work with which Kant was intellectually occupied for 30 years of his life. It is quite impossible to do justice to such a work with ad hoc interpretations. If one adds to this the fact that only in the seventies of the 20th century more intensive interpretative efforts around Kant's legal philosophy began, then it should at least be recognized that caution is called for in making too quick judgments. Kant's philosophy of law is the philosophy of human freedom. The freedom (selfhood) of man is not only the goal of law, but at the same time its reason. Against this background, the author justifies the punishment from the crime and an imperative of legal-practical reason to justly compensate the crime. Such a reasoning cannot hope for spontaneous approval in a time when already the concept of freedom is regarded by many as "metaphysical", admittedly in the pre-critical sense. Synthetic legal propositions a priori then easily run the risk of being dismissed as a "non-binding philosophical invention." But contemporary penological thinking, which sees itself as constitutional, should not be too quick to abandon the foundations on which it stands, if only in historical terms, and even more so in substance. A justification of the justice of human punishment without the level that Kant called (critically understood) metaphysics cannot succeed. A renunciation of it would mean nothing less than the renunciation of thinking at all.