This book builds upon previous work in the philosophy of punishment and criminal law to develop a critique of Kantian justice thinking. It casts a new light on recent debates about punishment and the criminal law in a period when traditional thinking has undergone opposition, crisis, and change. The retributive and ‘orthodox subjectivist’ approaches, which have driven the textbook tradition and law reform for forty years, are challenged. A revisionist critique opposes their Kantian insistence on formal individual autonomy from both a communitarian position on punishment and a morally substanti ... More

This book builds upon previous work in the philosophy of punishment and criminal law to develop a critique of Kantian justice thinking. It casts a new light on recent debates about punishment and the criminal law in a period when traditional thinking has undergone opposition, crisis, and change. The retributive and ‘orthodox subjectivist’ approaches, which have driven the textbook tradition and law reform for forty years, are challenged. A revisionist critique opposes their Kantian insistence on formal individual autonomy from both a communitarian position on punishment and a morally substantive view of responsibility. A postmodern critique opposes orthodoxy for its failure to see how the Kantian subject is constructed in relations of power and domination. Against both orthodox subjectivist and revisionist views, this book develops a relational or dialectical critique to argue that they in fact both work in the same Kantian problematic. It establishes the concept of a ‘blaming relation’ as the basis for a critique of both, and to challenge the standard analytical account of criminal justice thinking. Moving from the legal theory of Andrew Ashworth, Antony Duff, George Fletcher, Michael Moore, and others to the jurisprudence of the courts, this book analyses the seemingly irresolvable problems of punishment, responsibility, and justice in the criminal law from a relational point of view. Against the postmodern approach, the book argues for the need to retain what remains of moral value in Kantianism by seeking ‘a non-Kantian answer to the Kantian question’ of individual justice.