Abstract

At the end of the first part of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel outlines a retributivist theory of criminal punishment. According to this view, crime is an infringement of right, a negation which itself must be negated in order to establish the actuality of right. Crime is superseded through punishment, which inflicts on the criminal an injury that is equal in magnitude or “value” to the injury inflicted by the crime itself. Nothing in this account appears to foreclose the possibility that an appropriate penalty for some crimes may be death. Indeed, some passages in the Philosophy of Right strongly imply an acceptance of the legitimacy of capital punishment for certain crimes, such as murder.