PRIMA FACIE RETRIBUTIVISM: ON THE OBLIGATION TO ADMINISTER JUSTICE

The justification of punishment is a difficult problem. The paper attempts to examine retributivism in the normative perspective and to penetrate the structure of the fundamental premises and theses of retributivism. Retributivism assumes that punishment is just, in the broad understanding of the term, while in reality punishment is not just; the model of retributive punishment is contrafactual, which is evident above all in the problem of punishing the innocent. A proper modification of retributivism's normative premises (i.e. how and why people ought to be punished, etc.) consists in seeing these premises not as unconditionally binding directives but as optimization rules, a kind of prima facie duty. These are mainly the ethical duties of the state considered from the point of view of criminal policy. In effect, it is possible to formulate a non-fundamentalist (non-idealistic) variant of retributivism - better corresponding to social reality. The core of the paper consists in outlining such a concept. The paper has been primarily inspired by the ideas of W.D. Ross and R. Alexy