[lbo-talk] Re: law/retributivism -- Morer Marxology

[andie nachgeborenen]

Jim, you seem to think that Marx is some sort of hard
determinist metaphysician enagged in philosophical
analysis, arguind that retributivism presupposes a
false metaphysical docreine of free will as opposed to
the true metaphysical doctrine of determinism, which
undermines attributions of responsinility That seems
to me so far from Marx's rejection of philosophy as to
be totally off base. Marx rejects philosophy as
ideology quite early; he never reasons like that, and
does not do so here. On the contrary, I thonk insofar
as he has a  metaphysics he finds the Hegelian one
"attractive," he says so,  but says that it is merely
abstract and that the defect in it is not that human
behavior is abstractly determined, but that in class
society, concretely speaking, the Hegelian docrtrine
ignoresd the extent to which the ruling class control
of the law ,makes it a mistake to talk about the
self-determination of will thjat would make the
imposition of punishment the criminal's own free act. 


> 
> It seems to me that Kant's defense of retributivism,
> like most
> philosophical defenses of retributivism that have
> appeared since
> his time, presuppose the existence of a
> contra-causal free will.
> Now, for Kant, that was no problem because in such
> works as
> *Critique of Practical Reason*, he argued that we
> had to posit
> the existence of free will, along with God, and
> personal immortality,
> as necessary postulates for the moral life.  And to
> rationalize this
> even further, he argued that reality can be divided
> up into a
> phenomenal realm, which is cognizable, through the
> senses,
> and a noumenal realm which consists of
> things-in-themselves,
> that exists, forever, beyond the scope of human
> cognition.  Kant
> located the existence of free will, God, and
> immortal souls in the
> noumenal realm of things-in-themselves.  Thus, Kant
> admitted
> that we could never know for certain that God, free
> will, and
> immortality exist but that we could legitimately
> posit their existence
> as necessary presuppositions of the moral life.
> 
> Now, it seem to Marx that it would have been very
> problematical
> for Marx to buy into this defense of retributivism
> given the fact
> that he was a materialist.  The whole dualism
> between phenomena
> and noumena would have been inadmissible for him nor
> could
> he accept the notion of a contra-causal free will. 
> But without these
> presuppositions the defense of retributivism would
> necessarily collapse.
> And that seems to be just what he was saying in the
> New York Herald
> Tribune article attacking capital punishment.
> 

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