Law, Emotions and Cannibalism (final part)
April 2nd, 2007Phew. I just completed my discussion paper on the subject that’s been dominating my blogging for quite a few days. (See all posts here.)
I wrote it in German and I don’t dare put it online, but I’m happy to email it to anyone who wants it.
My conclusion is that a focus on emotions–especially that of disgust in cases of cannibalism–may convert the hitherto rather hollow ritual of interpreting statutes in Switzerland to a heuristics that leads to the essential normative question(s) at stake.
In our case, that question would be whether the public deserves special protection from particularly disgusting crimes by way of punishing the perpretrators of these crimes more severely. (You can either underlay deterrence or restitution as a theory of criminal justice to this question, it doesn’t seem to matter much.)
The bad news is that the questions uncovered by this “emotional” statutory interpretation are more difficult to answer than the initial ones and, a fortiori, more difficult to motivate in a convincing way.
June 22nd, 2009 at 5:49 pm
I think that the more disgusting crimes should be punished more severely. While it may do very little to deter crime, I believe it sends a symbolic message that we will not tolerate deranged crimes.