Beccaria of Milan was a member of a group of high-powered intellectuals, the self-styled ‘Academy of Fisticuffs’, headed by his patron and mentor Pietro Verri. Unlike the milieu of Pelli, his group was committed to the principles of the European Enlightenment. He admired and was strongly influenced by leading French philosophers, in particular, Montesquieu (the Persian Letters) and Helvétius. Of earlier authorities he was particularly drawn to Francis Bacon and Heineccius, and was influenced by preceding natural jurists including Hobbes. His attack on the death penalty begins with an individual interpretation of the social contract. His argumentation is multi-faceted. It involves, among other things, an in-depth analysis (after Helvétius) of human nature, and a forthright argument in favour of perpetual hard labour as the ultimate penalty, based on the claim that this (long-drawn-out) punishment would be a more effective deterrent than (quick) execution.

Pelli and Beccaria in the 1760s produced the first comprehensive critiques of the death penalty. They did not come from nowhere. For centuries, philosophers, jurists, and religious leaders produced ideas and arguments that would feed into the abolitionist cause, in a way unpredicted by their authors, none of whom were abolitionists. The starting point (ironically, as it became the standard-bearer of retributivism) was the Lex Talionis of the Code of Hammurabi, which aimed at controlling private vengeance, while advancing the principle of crime–punishment proportionality. Plato introduced the idea that punishment must be forward- rather than backward-looking, and dismissed the latter as vengeance. Jesus’s words and actions problematized the practice of capital punishment. Thomas More was the first to argue against the death penalty for a specific crime, namely, theft, while natural jurists such as Pufendorf ruled out Grotius’s assertion that capital punishment was permissible according to the law of nature. Beccaria combined social contract theory and proto-utilitarian considerations, the latter coming into play through the agency of Enlightenment philosophers, English, Scottish, and French. The advance of abolitionism was and is far from inevitable, as illustrated by the obstacles faced in England (for a time) and North America (perhaps lasting).

Plato was the initiator, in the philosophical literature, of the idea that punishment should look to the future, not to the past. It must be beneficial and serve some useful purpose. Beneficial to whom? The first part of Plato’s answer is striking: ‘to the offender’. Punishment should be directed at reforming offenders rather than simply penalizing them because they had offended. This idea was accepted by a succession of (non-abolitionist) thinkers. It is still with us today. Plato was presumably unaware that he was opening a loophole that could be exploited by later reformers who sought a reduction, and then finally abolition, of the death penalty: an offender sentenced to a programme of rehabilitation was not a prime candidate for execution. However, a further possible answer to Plato’s question might be: ‘(beneficial) not for the criminal but for society as a whole’. Plato also held that punishment might serve as a deterrent, and this opened the door to harsh treatment, including death, of some offenders, namely, those who were judged ‘incurable’. One might kill a murderer, or a disparager of the gods, to deter others.

Beccaria’s tract did not kill the death penalty but made its legitimacy and morality the subject of intense debate. In Britain and America the history of abolitionism is in some important respects individual. Britain sported a ‘Bloody Code’ that at its peak encompassed over 200 capital crimes. Romilly led the charge against the ‘Bloody Code’ (from 1808) and cited (correctly and with approval) Beccaria. Spokesmen in Parliament for the retentionist Paley (post mortem) were much more numerous. In North America, the influence of Beccaria was initially strong, but the United States is a federal republic, and criminal justice is with the individual states. In a way clearly related to slavery and race, hard-line attitudes to the death penalty have prevailed, especially in the South. The influence of Beccaria has inevitably waned; that punishments have lost their role and ‘appeal’ and deterrent value as a spectacle is one factor in this. Ironically, the hard labour that he advocated has been saddled with the name of ‘penal servitude’, and is the only form of slavery recognized by the US Constitution.

The Lex Talionis (‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth …’ ) was introduced by Hammurabi of Babylon, as a measure to control private vengeance and concentrate punishment in the hands of legitimate authority. It also carried the message that punishment should be proportionate to the crime, a principle that was pressed by progressive thinkers in later ages, such as Montesquieu. As the law was formulated, an offence committed merited an equivalent punishment: one eye for an eye, not two. Over time the Lex became the standard-bearer of backward-looking retributivism, which carries the idea that offenders deserve to be punished simply because of the offence they have committed. As such, it was an obstacle in the way of any burgeoning abolitionist thought, in particular because it prescribed ‘a life for a life’. The abolitionist Giuseppe Pelli attacked the Lex head-on. In doing so he drew on the diverse critiques of the Lex of a succession of earlier (non-abolitionist) thinkers. The Lex Talionis has staying power. It embodies a basic human conviction that retaliation is due for injuries suffered. As such, it is outside the law; it will coexist with, and survive, any legal environment.

The character of the State of Nature that humanity sought to escape divided natural philosophers. There was a sharp reaction against the pessimism of Hobbes’s Leviathan and Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. The end result of a long process was the development of the ethical theory of utilitarianism: ‘it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong’ (Bentham). The seed-bed of utilitarianism was the idea of utility; but utility is an empty vessel, with no fixed or clear definition. During the eighteenth century, happiness became its preferred content. The role of Hutcheson was key here: he coined the phrase (in 1725) that became the Benthamite slogan, and pioneered the application of mathematics to moral philosophy. Later thinkers, notably Helvétius, were less optimistic than Hutcheson, arguing that mankind was not by nature benevolent, but self-interested: it was thus incumbent on legislators to raise the sights of the citizenry to embrace the interests of the whole society. In this Beccaria followed the lead of Helvétius.

Christians faced the specific problem of reconciling capital punishment with the belief in the sanctity of human life. ‘God made man in his own image’ (Genesis). However the Church, from the time of Constantine, found it advantageous to ally itself with the State in order to forward and exploit its influence and authority. This alliance involved the Church in a cruel penal system: in fact, it introduced a new capital crime, heresy. Such disquiet as there was largely went underground. When dissent was expressed, Jesus was called up as an advocate for the cause, not as a missionary for penal reform (his Kingdom was not of this world), but because of his life, teaching, and vision of a New Age. Of our two Italian abolitionists, the devout Catholic Pelli repeatedly invoked the Christian God and the Sermon on the Mount. Earlier it was a Protestant, Sébastian Castellion, who caused a stir. Castellion campaigned fiercely against the criminalization of heresy, following the brutal execution of Michael Servetus, burned at the stake in 1553 in Calvin’s Geneva. Castellion, however, was striking a blow for freedom of belief rather than for the abolition of capital punishment as such.

Giuseppe Pelli never completed his dissertation against the death penalty, the first of its kind. He belonged to a small group of Catholics critical of their Church from within, but essentially conservative in their thinking and attitudes. Pelli’s research was heavily weighted toward the natural philosophers from Grotius on, and he exploited their knowledge of the ancient sources. Montesquieu apart, Pelli showed little interest in the Transalpine Enlightenment. He found in Montaigne a kindred spirit, a writer of conspicuous humanity who expressed his views without inhibition. As a loyal Catholic, Pelli’s basic argument against capital punishment was that it is inconsistent with Christianity. God is everywhere in Pelli’s work. Natural law is decisively God’s law, which could never have countenanced capital punishment imposed by human agencies. Pelli held back from direct attack on the powers-that-be, judicial and ecclesiastical. His diagnosis is Augustinian: the root of the problem is sin, to which the whole of humanity is susceptible. Pelli’s work is the best that devout, conservative Christianity could offer at this stage in history.

In the course of advocating forward-looking punishment, Plato opened up a specific line of attack on retributivism. He characterized backward-looking punishment as irrational, bestial, and motivated by revenge. This gave rise to a debate over the moral status of revenge and the closely associated emotion of anger, which drew in and divided philosophers from Aristotle to Camus and beyond. Of our two pioneer abolitionists, it was Pelli rather than Beccaria who attacked retributivism directly, following a line taken by the Stoic Seneca on vengeance and anger in succession to Plato. Pelli and later opponents of retributivism have been unable to deliver it a knock-out blow, for the reason that, like its standard-bearer the Lex Talionis, retributivism is grounded in the gut feeling, part rational, part emotional, that we are responsible for the evil that we do, that crime merits equivalent or proportionate punishment: that there is in effect a ‘good’ vengeance. This was, and is, reflected in public opinion and in the attitude and practice of judicial and political establishments, whatever some philosophers might argue.