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BECCARIA The Proportionality of Punishment ————————————— Answers
Theft -- Chapter 22
However, since theft is
usually carried out by the poor, [Return]
Theft with Violence -- Chapter 22
[Return]
Attack on one’s Honor -- Chapter 23 Public disgrace. [Return]
The Social Parasite --
Chapter 24 Banishment from society. In chapter 25 of Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments, Beccaria further considers the question of whether or not a banished individual's property should be confiscated by the state. He concludes that goods ought to be proportionately confiscated depending on the severity of the crime. Banishment can also be seen as the withdrawal of the individual from the social contract, the "death" of the citizen. Beccaria describes the total banishment of the citizen as the "severing all ties between society and the malefactor. . . .the citizen dies and the man remains, and as far as the body politic is concerned, this should have the same effect as natural death." This distinction between the citizen and the person appears again as the ground for Beccaria's rejection of the death penalty in chapter 28: there, Beccaria draws a distinction between the natural rights of an individual and the amount of freedom that the state is authorized in touching: "Who has ever willingly given up to others the authority to kill him? How on earth can the minimum sacrifice of each individual’s freedom involve handing over the greatest of all goods, life itself?" Here we see how the notion that people are hedonistic and that the state is utilitarian acts to limits the power of the state, by placing a limit on the amount of freedom that individuals yield to others. [Return]
Adultery -- Chapter 31 Unpunishable! Beccaria writes that: "For every crime that by its very nature goes unpunished, punishment becomes an incentive. . . . difficulties -- so long as they are not insurmountable . . . fire the imagination and make the object appear still more desirable." In order for punishments to deter, the potential offender must know that the punishment is certain to follow from the crime; but as a "victimless" crime, adultery will most often escape detection! [Return]
Infanticide -- Chapter 31 Also unpunishable! Beccaria argues that ". . . infanticide results from the unavoidable conflict in which a woman is placed if she has given in to weakness or violence," a conflict caused by the public reaction to childbirth out of wedlock. He concludes that "Laws are better against the tyranny [of opinion] which exacerbates those vices which cannot cover themselves with the mantle of virtue." Beccaria's moral of the above two examples: "one cannot say that a punishment for a crime is exactly just (meaning necessary) until the law has instituted the best possible means in a given nation’s circumstances for preventing such a crime." [Return] |
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