Criminal Justice from Nietzsche's Point of view: The Discourse of the Will to Power Against the Criminal System
2025
This research offers a critical-philosophical exploration of the foundations of criminal justice through the lens of Friedrich Nietzsche’s thought. Rejecting metaphysical morality, Nietzsche redefines key concepts such as power, ethics, punishment, and law, ushering in a radical vision of justice not as a tool for retributive equality or moral condemnation, but as a dynamic field of force, differentiation, and creative will. Conventional criminal justice, grounded in retribution, individual responsibility, human dignity, and due process, reflects what Nietzsche calls the morality of slaves: reactive, suppressive, and anchored in passive order. In contrast, Nietzsche proposes a justice oriented toward power, a criminal justice of strength, built upon the will to power, noble ethics, and the ascent of the Übermensch. In this framework, the offender is not a moral subject but the convergence of contending forces; punishment is not penance but the restoration of power's balance; and law is not rational command or social contract, but the expression of dominion and value-creation. Such a view necessitates a fundamental rethinking of core legal principles. Fair trial, legality, and culpability are not discarded, but reinterpreted through a lens that favors hierarchy, creativity, and difference over uniformity and moral abstraction. The Übermensch assumes the role of legislator and creator—liberating the criminal justice system from moralism and inertia, transforming it into an artistic and generative order. Thus, criminal justice becomes not a terminal reaction, but a site of becoming—a domain where power replaces guilt, creativity supplants retribution, and justice emerges as a forward-driving force rooted in vitality, distinction, and the will to overcome.
