According to a common view, criminal law should be structured in a way that allocates the conditions of criminal liability to different types of legal rules, given the content of the condition and the nature of the rule. This view classifies some conditions as elements of offenses and others as (part of) justificatory defenses or of excusatory defenses. While this view is attractive, I argue that it should be rejected, since it is incompatible with two plausible propositions about legal rules. (...) The first is that foundational reasons are not concerned with the structure of the law as such. The second is that legal rules should be constructed in a way that reflects (the balance of) all the applicable reasons and not just some of them. (shrink)

Whatever else liberalism involves, it involves the idea that it is objectionable, and often wrong, for the state, or anyone else, to intervene, in certain ways, in certain choices. This article aims to evaluate different possible sources of support for this core liberal idea. The result is a pluralistic view. It defends, but also stresses the limits of, some familiar elements: that some illiberal interventions impair valuable activities and that some violate rights against certain kinds of invasion. More speculatively, it (...) points to two further sources of support for liberalism, each of which represents a certain kind of social standing: a self-sovereignty compromised simply by being subject to certain kinds of commands and a relational equality compromised by the condemnation of choices with which one’s group is identified. (shrink)

Journal Name: SATS Issue: Ahead of print.

Gerald Dworkin’s overlooked defense of legal moralism attempts to undermine the traditional liberal case for a principled distinction between behavior that is immoral and criminal and behavior that is immoral but not criminal. According to Dworkin, his argument for legal moralism “depends upon a plausible idea of what making moral judgments involves.” The idea Dworkin has in mind here is a metaethical principle that many have connected to morality/reasons internalism. I agree with Dworkin that this is a plausible principle, but (...) I argue that some of the best reasons for accepting it actually work against his enforcement thesis. I propose a principled distinction between the immoral-and-criminal and the immoral-but-not-criminal, and argue that a principle at least very much like it must be correct if the metaethical principle Dworkin avows is correct. (shrink)

This paper argues that according to the influential version of legal moralism presented by Moore infidelity should all-things-considered be criminalized. This is interesting because criminalizing infidelity is bound to be highly controversial and because Moore’s legal moralism is a prime example of a self-consciously liberal legal moralism, which aims to yield legislative implications that are quite similar to liberalism, while maintaining that morality as such should be legally enforced. Moore tries to make his theory yield such implications, first by claiming (...) that the scope of our moral obligations is much more limited than legal moralists have traditionally claimed, and second by allowing for the possibility that the goodness of legally enforcing morality is often outweighed by the badness of limiting citizens’ morally valuable autonomy and spending scarce resources on enforcement. If Moore is successful in this, legal moralism is strengthened because it becomes immune to many of the most damaging liberal objections. By showing that despite making those moves Moore’s legal moralism is still committed to criminalizing infidelity, a manifestly illiberal implication for legislation, it is established that Moore is unsuccessful in creating a liberal legal moralism, and Moore’s failure in this regard raises questions about whether there can be such a thing as a liberal legal moralism. (shrink)