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Placing blame: a theory of the criminal law

New York: Oxford University Press (1997)

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  1. (1 other version)Crime and the metaphysical animal.Alan Norrie - 2023 - Journal of Critical Realism 22 (5):904-921.
    This essay considers how we talk in moral terms about crime and punishment using a framework that comes from psychoanalysis. The idea of the human as a metaphysical animal, an animal that thinks and loves, is given a naturalistic explanation in Freudian metapsychology as it was developed by Melanie Klein and Hans Loewald. While the former helps us understand the desire to punish as the enjoyable return of pain for pain, the latter indicates how mature human beings seek to pursue (...)
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  • (1 other version)Consequentialist Theories of Punishment.Hsin-Wen Lee - 2022 - In Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment. Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 149-169.
    In this chapter, I consider contemporary consequentialist theories of punishment. Consequentialist theories of punishment look to the consequences of punishment to justify the institution of punishment. Two types of theories fall into this category—teleology and aggregationism. I argue that teleology is implausible as it is based on a problematic assumption about the fundamental value of criminal punishment, and that aggregationism provides a more reasonable alternative. Aggregationism holds that punishment is morally justified because it is an institution that helps society to (...)
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  • Is Justification Just in the Head?Clayton Littlejohn - 2024 - In Blake Roeber, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup & John Turri (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, 3rd edition. Wiley-Blackwell.
    I argue that justification isn't just in the head. The argument is simple. We should be guided by our beliefs. We shouldn't be guided by anything to do what we shouldn't do. So, we shouldn't believe in ways that would guide us to do the things that we shouldn't. Among the various things we should do is discharge our duties (e.g., to fulfil our promissory obligations) and respect the rights of others (e.g., rights not to be harmed or killed by (...)
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  • Michael S. Moore: Mechanical Choices. The Responsibility of the Human Machine: New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. E-book (ISBN 9780190864019). 589 pages.1 hardback (ISBN: 9780190863999) 64 £. 616 pages. [REVIEW]Sofia M. I. Jeppsson - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (3):499-502.
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  • A Coherent and Comprehensible Interpretation of Saul Smilansky’s Dualism.Sofia M. I. Jeppsson - 2015 - Filosofiska Notiser 2 (1):39-45.
    Saul Smilansky’s theory of free will and moral responsibility consists of two parts; dualism and illusionism. Dualism is the thesis that both compatibilism and hard determinism are partly true, and has puzzled many philosophers. I argue that Smilansky’s dualism can be given an unquestionably coherent and comprehensible interpretation if we reformulate it in terms of pro tanto reasons. Dualism so understood is the thesis that respect for persons gives us pro tanto reasons to blame wrongdoers, and also pro tanto reasons (...)
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  • (1 other version)Retributivism, Free Will, and the Public Health-Quarantine Model.Gregg D. Caruso - 2022 - In Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment. Palgrave-Macmillan.
    This chapter outlines six distinct reasons for rejecting retributivism, not the least of which is that it’s unclear that agents possess the kind of free will and moral responsibility needed to justify it. It then sketches a novel non-retributive alternative called the public health-quarantine model. The core idea of the model is that the right to harm in self-defense and defense of others justifies incapacitating the criminally dangerous with the minimum harm required for adequate protection. The model also draws on (...)
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  • A justification for excuses: Brown’s discussion of the knowledge view of justification and the excuse manoeuvre.Clayton Littlejohn - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179 (8):2683-2696.
    In Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge, Jessica Brown identifies a number of problems for the so-called knowledge view of justification. According to this view, we cannot justifiably believe what we do not know. Most epistemologists reject this view on the grounds that false beliefs can be justified if, say, supported by the evidence or produced by reliable processes. We think this is a mistake and that many epistemologists are classifying beliefs as justified because they have properties that indicate that something should (...)
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  • How Is Criminal Punishment Forward-Looking?Katrina L. Sifferd - 2021 - The Monist 104 (4):540-553.
    Forward-looking aims tend to play a much less significant role than retribution in justifying criminal punishment, especially in common law systems. In this paper I attempt to reinvigorate the idea that there are important forward-looking justifications for criminal law and punishment by looking to social theories of responsibility. I argue that the criminal law may be justified at the institutional level because it is a part of larger responsibility practices that have the effect of bolstering our reasons-responsiveness by making us (...)
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  • Being Sympathetic to Bad-History Wrongdoers.Craig K. Agule - 2021 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (1):147-169.
    For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...)
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  • Retributivism, Justification and Credence: The Epistemic Argument Revisited.Sofia M. I. Jeppsson - 2021 - Neuroethics 14 (2):177-190.
    Harming other people is prima facie wrong. Unless we can be very certain that doing so is justified under the circumstances, we ought not to do it. In this paper, I argue that we ought to dismantle harsh retributivist criminal justice systems for this reason; we cannot be sufficiently certain that the harm is justified. Gregg Caruso, Ben Vilhauer and others have previously argued for the same conclusion; however, my own version sidesteps certain controversial premises of theirs. Harsh retributivist criminal (...)
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  • Justice Without Retribution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Stakeholder Views and Practical Implications.Farah Focquaert, Gregg Caruso, Elizabeth Shaw & Derk Pereboom - 2018 - Neuroethics 13 (1):1-3.
    Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible (...)
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  • Against the Character Solution to the Problem of Moral Luck.Robert J. Hartman - 2020 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 98 (1):105-118.
    One way to frame the problem of moral luck is as a contradiction in our ordinary ideas about moral responsibility. In the case of two identical reckless drivers where one kills a pedestrian and the other does not, we tend to intuit that they are and are not equally blameworthy. The Character Response sorts these intuitions in part by providing an account of moral responsibility: the drivers must be equally blameworthy, because they have identical character traits and people are originally (...)
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  • Deviant Causation and the Law.Sara Bernstein - 2021 - In Teresa Marques & Chiara Valentini (eds.), Collective Action, Philosophy and Law. London: Routledge.
    A gunman intends to shoot and kill Victim. He shoots and misses his target, but the gunshot startles a group of water buffalo, causing them to trample the victim to death. The gunman brings about the intended effect, Victim’s death, but in a “deviant” way rather than the one planned. This paper argues that such causal structures, deviant causal chains, pose serious problems for several key legal concepts. -/- I show that deviant causal chains pose problems for the legal distinction (...)
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  • (1 other version)Legal Luck.Ori Herstein - forthcoming - In Herstein Ori (ed.), Rutledge Companion to the Philosophy of Luck. Rutledge.
    Explaining the notion of legal luck and exploring its justification. Focusing on how legal luck relates to moral luck, legal causation and negligence, and to civil and criminal liability.
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  • In defense of non-reactive attitudes.Per-Erik Milam - 2017 - Philosophical Explorations 20 (3):294-307.
    Abolitionism is the view that if no one is responsible, then we ought to abandon the reactive attitudes. Proponents suggest that reactive attitudes can be replaced in our emotional repertoire by non-reactive analogues. In this paper, I dispute and reject a common challenge to abolitionism according to which the reactive attitudes are necessary for protesting unfairness and maintaining social harmony. While other abolitionists dispute the empirical basis of this objection, I focus on its implications. I argue that even if non-reactive (...)
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  • The Externalist’s Demon.Clayton Littlejohn - 2009 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (3):399-434.
    In this paper, I defend externalist accounts of justified belief from Cohen's new evil demon objection. While I think that Cohen might be right that the person is justified in believing what she does, I argue that this is because we can defend the person from criticism and that defending a person is a very different thing from defending a person's attitudes or actions. To defend a person's attitudes or actions, we need to show that they met standards or did (...)
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  • Accepting Moral Luck.Robert J. Hartman - 2019 - In Ian M. Church & Robert J. Hartman (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy and Psychology of Luck. New York: Routledge.
    I argue that certain kinds of luck can partially determine an agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. To make this view clearer, consider some examples. Two identical agents drive recklessly around a curb, and one but not the other kills a pedestrian. Two identical corrupt judges would freely take a bribe if one were offered. Only one judge is offered a bribe, and so only one judge takes a bribe. Put in terms of these examples, I argue that the killer driver and (...)
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  • The Limits of Moral Argument: Reason and Conviction in Tadros' Philosophy of Punishment.Eric Blumenson - 2015 - Law, Ethics and Philosophy 3:30.
    For generations, philosophers of punishment have sought to revise or combine established theories of punishment in a way that could reconcile the utilitarian aims of punishment with the demands of deontological justice. Victor Tadros’ recent work addresses the same problem, but answers it w it h an entirely original theory of punishment based on the duties criminals acquire by committing their crimes. The unexpected appearance of a new rationale for punishment has already inspired a robust dialogue between Tadros and his (...)
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  • Responsibility problems for criminal justice.Sofia M. I. Jeppsson - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5:93734.
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  • Difficulty and Degrees of Moral Praiseworthiness and Blameworthiness.Dana Kay Nelkin - 2016 - Noûs 50 (2):356-378.
    In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...)
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  • The Evolution of Retribution: Intuitions Undermined.Isaac Wiegman - 2017 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98 (2):490-510.
    Recent empirical work suggests that emotions are responsible for anti-consequentialist intuitions. For instance, anger places value on actions of revenge and retribution, value not derived from the consequences of these actions. As a result, it contributes to the development of retributive intuitions. I argue that if anger evolved to produce these retributive intuitions because of their biological consequences, then these intuitions are not a good indicator that punishment has value apart from its consequences. This severs the evidential connection between retributive (...)
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  • Excuses for Hume's Skepticism.Yuval Avnur - 2015 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 92 (2):264-306.
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  • A Plea for Epistemic Excuses.Clayton Littlejohn - forthcoming - In Julien Dutant Fabian Dorsch (ed.), The New Evil Demon Problem. Oxford University Press.
    The typical epistemology course begins with a discussion of the distinction between justification and knowledge and ends without any discussion of the distinction between justification and excuse. This is unfortunate. If we had a better understanding of the justification-excuse distinction, we would have a better understanding of the intuitions that shape the internalism-externalism debate. My aims in this paper are these. First, I will explain how the kinds of excuses that should interest epistemologists exculpate. Second, I will explain why the (...)
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  • There but for the Grace of My Orbitofrontal Cortex …. [REVIEW]Frej Klem Thomsen - 2014 - Criminal Justice Ethics 33 (3):220-235.
    The human brain, with its 100 billion neurons working in intricate collaborations to create the physical basis of the memories, perceptions, thoughts, and emotions that together make me the person...
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  • What is the Harm Principle For?John Stanton-Ife - 2016 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 10 (2):329-353.
    In their excellent monograph, Crimes, Harms and Wrongs, Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch argue for an account of legitimate criminalisation based on wrongfulness, the Harm Principle and the Offence Principle, while they reject an independent anti-paternalism principle. To put it at its simplest my aim in the present paper is to examine the relationship between ‘the harms’ and ‘the wrongs’ of the authors’ title. I begin by comparing the authors’ version of the Harm and Offence Principle with some other (...)
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  • Moral Luck.Dana K. Nelkin - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Belief Updating in Moral Dilemmas.Zachary Horne, Derek Powell & Joseph Spino - 2013 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 4 (4):705-714.
    Moral psychologists have shown that people’s past moral experiences can affect their subsequent moral decisions. One prominent finding in this line of research is that when people make a judgment about the Trolley dilemma after considering the Footbridge dilemma, they are significantly less likely to decide it is acceptable to redirect a train to save five people. Additionally, this ordering effect is asymmetrical, as making a judgment about the Trolley dilemma has little to no effect on people’s judgments about the (...)
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  • The uses and abuses of the personal/subpersonal distinction.Zoe Drayson - 2012 - Philosophical Perspectives 26 (1):1-18.
    In this paper, I claim that the personal/subpersonal distinction is first and foremost a distinction between two kinds of psychological theory or explanation: it is only in this form that we can understand why the distinction was first introduced, and how it continues to earn its keep. I go on to examine the different ontological commitments that might lead us from the primary distinction between personal and subpersonal explanations to a derivative distinction between personal and subpersonal states. I argue that (...)
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  • Iconoclasts? Who, Us? A Reply to Dolinko.Larry Alexander & Kimberly Kessler Ferzan - 2012 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (2):281-287.
    Iconoclasts? Who, Us? A Reply to Dolinko Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-7 DOI 10.1007/s11572-012-9143-3 Authors Larry Alexander, San Diego, CA, USA Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, Camden, NJ, USA Journal Criminal Law and Philosophy Online ISSN 1871-9805 Print ISSN 1871-9791.
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  • Review of “Crime and Culpability: A Theory of Criminal Law”. [REVIEW]David Dolinko - 2012 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (1):93-102.
    This is a review of the challenging book in which Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan propose sweeping revisions to the structure of substantive criminal law.
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  • (2 other versions)Punishing the Awkward, the Stupid, the Weak, and the Selfish: The Culpability of Negligence.Michael S. Moore & Heidi M. Hurd - 2011 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 5 (2):147-198.
    Negligence is a problematic basis for being morally blamed and punished for having caused some harm, because in such cases there is no choice to cause or allow—or risk causing or allowing—such harm to occur. The standard theories as to why inadvertent risk creation can be blameworthy despite the lack of culpable choice are that in such cases there is blame for: (1) an unexercised capacity to have adverted to the risk; (2) a defect in character explaining why one did (...)
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  • Negligence, Belief, Blame and Criminal Liability: The Special Case of Forgetting.Douglas Husak - 2011 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 5 (2):199-218.
    Commentators seemingly agree about what negligence is—and how it is contrasted from recklessness. They also appear to concur about whether particular examples (both real and hypothetical) portray negligence. I am less confident about each of these matters. I explore the distinction between recklessness and negligence by examining a type of case that has generated a good deal of critical discussion: those in which a defendant forgets that he has created a substantial and unjustifiable risk of harm. Even in this limited (...)
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  • Moore’s Moral Facts and the Gap in the Retributive Theory.Brian Rosebury - 2011 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 5 (3):361-376.
    The purely retributive moral justification of punishment has a gap at its centre. It fails to explain why the offender should not be protected from punishment by the intuitively powerful moral idea that afflicting another person (other than to avoid a greater harm) is always wrong. Attempts to close the gap have taken several different forms, and only one is discussed in this paper. This is the attempt to push aside the ‘protecting’ intuition, using some more powerful intuition specially invoked (...)
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  • Some Meta-Theoretical Questions for Restorative Justice.Theo Gavrielides - 2005 - Ratio Juris 18 (1):84-106.
    Unquestionably, Restorative Justice (hereafter RJ) has finally gathered some real momentum. It has become a sine qua non topic in many national and international policy and statutory agendas. However, as the restorative practice expands to deal with crimes, ages and situations it has never addressed before (at least in its contemporary version), and as its application starts to make sense not only to national but also to regional and international bodies and fora, new theoretical problems are posed. In the fast-growing (...)
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  • Towards a theory of criminal law?R. A. Duff - 2010 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1):1-28.
    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 (...)
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  • Retributive Justice in the Breivik Case: Exploring the Rationale for Punitive Restraint in Response to the Worst Crimes.David Chelsom Vogt - 2024 - Retfaerd - Nordic Journal of Law and Justice 1:25-43.
    The article discusses retributive justice and punitive restraint in response to the worst types of crime. I take the Breivik Case as a starting point. Anders Behring Breivik was sentenced to 21 years of preventive detention for killing 69 people, mainly youths, at Utøya and 8 people in Oslo on July 22nd, 2011. Retributivist theories as well as commonly held retributive intuitions suggest that much harsher punishment is required for such crimes. According to some retributivist theories, most notably on the (...)
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  • Prueba legítima y verdad en el proceso penal I: la independencia metafísica de la verdad.Gabriel Pérez Barberá - 2020 - Isonomía. Revista de Teoría y Filosofía Del Derecho 52:5-29.
    En el presente trabajo intento demostrar que, dadas ciertas condiciones, puede haber una relación de necesidad epistémica entre prueba y verdad. Esa es la tesis principal, desarrollada en la segunda parte de la investigación y publicada también en este volumen. Pero tiene apoyo en algunas tesis secundarias, que son expuestas y fundamentadas aquí, en esta primera parte. Las más relevantes son: no es correcto interpretar la fórmula de Tarski como una definición sofisticada de la noción correspondentista de verdad; la verdad, (...)
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  • Minding Negligence.Craig K. Agule - 2022 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 16 (2):231-251.
    The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.
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  • Taking Responsibility for Negligence and Non-negligence.Garrath Williams - 2020 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 14 (1):113-134.
    Negligence reminds us that we often do and cause things unawares, occasionally with grave results. Given the lack of foresight and intention, some authors argue that people should not be judged culpable for negligence. This paper offers a contrasting view. It argues that gaining control is itself a fundamental responsibility, with both collective and individual elements. The paper underlines both sides, focussing on how they relate as we ascribe responsibility or culpability. Following the introduction, Section 2 argues that conscious awareness (...)
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  • Determinism, Moral Responsibility and Retribution.Elizabeth Shaw & Robert Blakey - 2019 - Neuroethics 13 (1):99-113.
    In this article, we will identify two issues that deserve greater attention from those researching lay people’s attitudes to moral responsibility and determinism. The first issue concerns whether people interpret the term “moral responsibility” in a retributive way and whether they are motivated to hold offenders responsible for pre-determined behaviour by considerations other than retributivism, e.g. the desires to condemn the action and to protect society. The second issue concerns whether explicitly rejecting moral responsibility and retributivism, after reading about determinism, (...)
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  • Bennett’s Expressive Justification of Punishment.Peter Chau - 2017 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (4):661-679.
    In this paper, I will critically assess the expressive justification of punishment recently offered by Christopher Bennett in The Apology Ritual and a number of papers. I will first draw a distinction between three conceptions of expression: communicative, motivational, and symbolic. After briefly demonstrating the difficulties of using the first two conceptions of expression to ground punishment and showing that Bennett does not ultimately rely on those two conceptions, I argue that Bennett’s account does not succeed because he fails to (...)
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  • Perpetrator Abhorrence: Disgust as a Stop Sign.Ditte Marie Munch-Jurišić - 2014 - Metaphilosophy 45 (2):270-287.
    Most contemporary research on disgust can be divided into “disgust advocates” and “disgust skeptics.” The so-called advocates argue that disgust can have a positive influence on our moral judgment; skeptics warn that it can mislead us toward prejudice and discrimination. This article compares this disagreement to a structurally similar debate in the field of genocide studies concerning the phenomenon of “perpetrator abhorrence.” While some soldiers report having felt strong disgust in the moment of committing or witnessing atrocity, scholars disagree on (...)
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  • Nagel y Williams acerca de la suerte moral.Sergi Rosell - 2006 - Revista de Filosofía (Madrid) 31 (1):143-165.
    Este artículo explora el llamado fenómeno de la suerte moral, centrándose en el planteamiento seminal de Thomas Nagel y Bernard Williams. Se pretende clarificar los diversos aspectos envueltos en la cuestión y remarcar las divergencias entre ambos. Asimismo, se caracterizan las diferentes cuestiones a las que han de dar razón tanto quienes mantienen que el fenómeno es ilusorio, como quines lo consideran real. La meta no es otra que alcanzar una comprensión crítica de la naturaleza de dicho fenómeno y de (...)
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  • Wrongfulness and Prohibitions.J. R. Edwards & A. P. Simester - 2014 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 8 (1):171-186.
    This paper responds to Antje du-Bois Pedain’s discussion of the wrongfulness constraint on the criminal law. Du-Bois Pedain argues that the constraint is best interpreted as stating that φing is legitimately criminalised only if φing is wrongful for other-regarding reasons. We take issue with du-Bois Pedain’s arguments. In our view, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of legitimate criminalisation that φing is wrongful in du-Bois Pedain’s sense. Rather, it is a necessary condition of legitimate criminalisation that φing is (...)
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  • In Defense of “Pure” Legal Moralism.Danny Scoccia - 2013 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 7 (3):513-530.
    In this paper I argue that Joel Feinberg was wrong to suppose that liberals must oppose any criminalization of “harmless immorality”. The problem with a theory that permits criminalization only on the basis of his harm and offense principles is that it is underinclusive, ruling out laws that most liberals believe are justified. One objection (Arthur Ripstein’s) is that Feinberg’s theory is unable to account for the criminalization of harmless personal grievances. Another (Larry Alexander’s and Robert George’s) is that it (...)
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  • Michael Moore on Torture, Morality, and Law.Matthew H. Kramer - 2012 - Ratio Juris 25 (4):472-495.
    During the past few decades, Michael Moore has written incisively on an array of matters concerning the relationships between law and morality. While reflecting on those relationships, he has plumbed the nature of morality itself in impressive depth. Among the topics which he has addressed, the problem of torture has been prominent and controversial. It is a problem, moreover, that has led to some of his most searching enquiries into the character of moral obligations. In the present essay I take (...)
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  • Vice is Nice But Incest is Best: The Problem of a Moral Taboo.Vera Bergelson - 2013 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 7 (1):43-59.
    Incest is a crime in most societies. In the United States, incest is punishable in almost every state with sentences going as far as 20 and 30 years in prison, and even a life sentence. Yet the reasons traditionally proffered in justification of criminalization of incest—respecting religion and universal tradition; avoiding genetic abnormalities; protecting the family unit; preventing sexual abuse and sexual imposition; and precluding immorality—at a close examination, reveal their under- and over-inclusiveness, inconsistency or outright inadequacy. It appears that (...)
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  • Why Punish Attempts at All? Yaffe on 'The Transfer Principle'.Douglas Husak - 2012 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (3):399-410.
    Gideon Yaffe is to be commended for beginning his exhaustive treatment by asking a surprisingly difficult question: Why punish attempts at all? He addresses this inquiry in the context of defending (what he calls) the transfer principle: “If a particular form of conduct is legitimately criminalized, then the attempt to engage in that form of conduct is also legitimately criminalized.” I begin by expressing a few reservations about the transfer principle itself. But my main point is that we are justified (...)
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  • Bentham on Presumed Offences.Frederick Schauer - 2011 - Utilitas 23 (4):363-379.
    In the Principles of the Penal Code, Jeremy Bentham described offences that he labelled presumed or evidentiary. The conduct penalized under such offences is punished not because it is intrinsically wrong, but because it probabilistically indicates the presence of an intrinsic wrong. Bentham was sceptical of the need to create offences, but grudgingly accepted their value in light of deficiencies in procedure and the judiciary. These days the scepticism is even greater, with courts and commentators in the United States, Canada, (...)
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  • New Legal Moralism: Some Strengths and Challenges.Thomas Søbirk Petersen - 2010 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 4 (2):215-232.
    The aim of this paper is to critically discuss the plausibility of legal moralism with an emphasis on some central and recent versions. First, this paper puts forward and defends the thesis that recently developed varieties of legal moralism promoted by Robert P. George, John Kekes and Michael Moore are more plausible than Lord Devlin's traditional account. The main argument for this thesis is that in its more modern versions legal moralism is immune to some of the forceful challenges made (...)
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