Q&A: The Authority of the Court
The Authority of the Court
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask: where does a secular court derive its authority to impose a criminal punishment on a person, and not only a civil one?
For example, to punish a murderer who has no family, where in the end he causes no financial loss (and from their perspective, death is simply nonexistence).
Or not only to punish a thief by making him return the money, but also to put him in prison.
Especially given that the secular approach sometimes espouses relativistic morality.
Answer
First, the legal system is not necessarily based on morality (except perhaps for Aquinas’s natural law approach). A person can be a moral relativist and a legal positivist. According to many views, law is grounded in legislation and social agreement, not in morality.
The question of the authority to punish also depends on the nature of criminal punishment. Someone who sees it as deterrence or protection of society (putting a criminal in prison) holds that the authority to punish exists in order to protect society. Someone who sees punishment as institutionalized revenge holds that there is authority to take revenge in the name of society for what that person did to it. And so on with regard to other theories of punishment as well.