Epistemic Courage is a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the ethics of belief, which shows why epistemology is no mere academic abstraction - the question of what to believe couldn't be more urgent. Jonathan Ichikawa argues that a skeptical, negative bias about belief is connected to a conservative bias that reinforces the status quo.

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)

Most philosophers of criminal law agree that between criminal offences and defences there is a significant, substantial difference. It is a difference, however, that has proved hard to pin down. In recent work, Duff and others have suggested that it mirrors the distinction between criminal answerability and liability to criminal punishment. Offence definitions, says Duff, are—and ought to be—those action-types ‘for which a defendant can properly be called to answer in a criminal court, on pain of conviction and condemnation if (...) she cannot offer an exculpatory answer’; and defences are ‘exculpatory answers’ that ‘block the transition from responsibility to liability’. I criticise this answerability-based account of the offence/defence divide. It is descriptively false, I claim, as well as normatively unappealing. (shrink)

This article examines the normative force of consent, explaining how consent works its “moral magic” in transforming the moral quality of conduct that would otherwise constitute a wrong against the consenting person. Dempsey offers an original account of the normative force of consent, according to which consent (when valid) creates an exclusionary permission . When this permission is taken up, the moral quality of the consented-to conduct is transformed, such that it no longer constitutes a wrong against the consenting person. (...) Building on this account of how consent works, Dempsey identifies two sets of cases in which consent fails to transform the moral quality of one’s conduct: cases in which one is consent-insensitive to the rational force of another’s consent, and cases in which one acts for sadistic reasons. (shrink)

After an initial discussion (§i) of what a theory of criminal law might amount to, I sketch (§ii) the proper aims of a liberal, republican criminal law, and discuss (§§iii–iv) two central features of such a criminal law: that it deals with public wrongs, and provides for those who perpetrate such wrongs to be called to public account. §v explains why a liberal republic should maintain such a system of criminal law, and §vi tackles the issue of criminalization—of how we (...) should determine the proper scope of the criminal law. (shrink)

This article aligns two complementary claims: that sexual penetration should be considered a wrong and that consent requires express words and conduct that manifest a person’s willingness or acquiescence towards the specific act. If sexual penetration is a wrong, it will only be justified if there are reasons that permit the action and if these were the ones that the defendant acted on. A person’s internal attitude of willingness or acquiescence towards the specific act can provide the necessary guiding reasons (...) to justify the wrong. However, words and conduct that manifest or express this internal attitude are also needed in order to provide the applicable explanatory reasons to justify the wrong. Alternatively, expressive consent can excuse the wrong by justifying the defendant’s mistake as to the applicable guiding reasons. Without the requirement of expressive consent, the criminal law is unable to capture the culpability of defendants whose deliberation over the use of force on another person did not include the other person’s expression of willingness to engage in a penetrative sexual act. (shrink)