Proportional retributivism

Proportional retributivism is the principle Kido uses to draw a boundary between punishment calibrated to a crime and retaliation driven by emotion. In a discussion of capital punishment, he presents proportionality not as a license for bodily vengeance but as a constraint on it: punishment should be commensurate with the harm while stopping short of reproducing that harm in the offender’s body.

The Principle of Proportionality

Kido distinguishes legally guaranteed rights from emotional responses to crime. He describes Japan’s approach to punishment as proportional rather than absolute retributivism: the penalty is meant to correspond to the severity of the offense, but that correspondence does not require the state to inflict the same injury in return.

He uses the example of a victim who has been blinded. The perpetrator is not blinded in turn; although the victim has lost access to the visual beauty of the world, the offender’s sight remains unrestricted. Instead, the punishment restricts the offender’s freedom in proportion to the crime. In Kido’s formulation, modern penology has replaced corporal retaliation with deprivation of liberty.

The Limit of Retaliation

Kido treats the familiar principle of an eye for an eye as a limit on vengeance, not a command to reproduce injury literally. Because retaliation can become excessively emotional, proportionality prevents it from extending beyond the degree of the original harm. The legal principle therefore does not simply mirror a victim’s suffering; it restrains the state from turning that suffering into an unrestricted mandate for retribution.

This distinction becomes especially sharp in the debate over execution. Kido argues that the death penalty falls completely outside the principle he has described. If proportional punishment restricts freedom, execution does not merely impose a corresponding restriction: it ends the condemned person’s capacity to think and feel. Kido presses the implication of his opponent’s argument by observing that, if the dead victim’s loss of freedom is the measure, death-row prisoners would have to be denied thought and feeling altogether.

The Debate’s Ethical Stakes

Kido’s argument is made in response to Kawamura, who says that condemned prisoners should be executed immediately and that every second they remain alive is an extravagant luxury compared with the lives of murdered victims. Kido acknowledges that he can understand the emotional force of this position, but refuses to let that emotion determine the scope of lawful punishment. The exchange exposes the conflict between grief and a legal standard intended to keep retaliation within bounds.

His position also extends to the condemned person’s ability to create art. Kido opposes treating the death penalty as an exception to the rejection of corporal punishment and regards artistic creation as one of the most basic activities of human life. He supports the condemned person’s right to make art while insisting that the question of capital punishment is one for society to resolve. He also calls attention to an absence in the abolition debate: the victims have not been mentioned. Kido says he would be deeply interested in an exhibition of work made by victims’ surviving family members, while placing the responsibility for organizing it on advocates for the victims and leaving citizens to consider both exhibitions for themselves.

Proportional retributivism thus functions in the debate both as a theory of legal restraint and as a test of whose suffering enters public argument. Kido does not dismiss the emotional claims of victims’ advocates; he questions whether emotion can justify punishment beyond the limits imposed by freedom and proportionality, and whether debate about the condemned can proceed without making room for the victims and their families.