Abstract

[From Normativism to Algorithmic Adjudication: Kafka and the Risk of Moral Vacuum in Justice] This paper offers a rereading of Franz Kafka’s In the Penal Colony as a moral tale that tests the claim that procedural neutrality suffices for adjudication. The machine that engraves the norm onto the condemned man’s body dramatizes a decisional formalism that reduces judgment to execution. Applied without a known charge, without adversarial proceedings, and without reasoned justification, the norm effaces the person as a responsible agent and suppresses the relational dimension within which guilt and punishment can be understood and contested. Read in dialogue with the legal-philosophical tradition that, from Itzcovich to Tucci and Benvenuti, has discussed the Kafkaesque machine, the allegory is here extended to current forms of algorithmic automation of criminal adjudication — risk assessment, decision support, machine-judge prospects — within the regulatory framework opened by the EU AI Act, the Council of Europe Framework Convention, and the CEPEJ Ethical Charter. The paper argues that neutrality, when understood as the absence of discretion and detached from context and interpretation, produces an irreducible gap between justice, as conformity to norm and procedure, and justness, as moral adequacy of adjudication as a responsible act. In this gap, a moral vacuum opens within the relation between punishment, agency, and culpability.