According to Thomas Pogge, rich people do not simply violate a positive duty of assistance to help the global poor; rather, they violate a negative duty not to harm them. They do so by imposing an unjust global economic structure on poor people. Assuming that these claims are correct, it follows that, ceteris paribus, wars waged by the poor against the rich to resist this imposition are morally equivalent to wars waged in self-defense against military aggression. Hence, if self-defense against (...) military aggression is just, then, ceteris paribus, so are defensive wars against the imposition of economic injustice. While I do not think Pogge’s analysis of the causes of global poverty is correct, I defend these inferences against various challenges. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus among political philosophers that state legitimacy involves something more than—or perhaps other than—political obligation. Yet the principle of fair play, which many take to be a promising basis for political obligation, has been largely absent from discussions of the revised conception of legitimacy. This paper shows how the principle of fair play can generate legitimate political authority by drawing on a neglected feature of the principle—its stipulation that members of a cooperative scheme must reciprocate specifically (...) by submitting to the scheme's rules. (shrink)

This thesis provides an ethical analysis of imprisonment as a mode of punishment. Consisting in an introduction and four papers the thesis addresses several important questions concerning imprisonment from a number of different perspectives and theoretical starting points. One overall conclusion of this thesis is that imprisonment, as a mode of punishment, deserves more attention from moral and legal philosophers. It is also concluded that a more complete ethical assessment of prison conditions and prison management requires a broader focus. It (...) must include an explicit discussion of both how imprisonment directly affects prison inmates and its negative side-effects on third parties. Another conclusion is that ethical discussions on prison conditions should not be too easily reduced to a question about how harsh or lenient is should be. Paper 1 argues that prisoners have a right to privacy. It is argued that respect for inmates’ privacy is related to respect for them as moral agents. Consequently, respect for inmates’ privacy is called for by different established philosophical theories about the justification of legal punishment. Practical implications of this argument are discussed and it is argued that invasion of privacy should be minimized to the greatest extent possible, without compromising other important values or the rights to safety and security. It is also proposed that respect for privacy should be part of the objective of creating and upholding a secure environment. Paper 2 discusses whether the collateral harm of imprisonment to the children and other close family members of prison inmates may give rise to special moral obligations towards them. Several collateral harms, including decreased psychological wellbeing, financial costs, loss of economic opportunities, and intrusion and control over their private lives, are identified. Two perspectives in moral philosophy, consequentialism and deontology, are then applied in order to assess whether these harms are permissible. It is argued that from either perspective it is hard to defend the claim that allowing for these harms are morally permissible. Consequently, imprisonment should be used only as a last resort. Where it is deemed necessary, it gives rise to special moral obligations. Using the notion of residual obligation, these obligations are then categorized and clarified. Paper 3 focuses on an argument that has figured in the philosophical debate on felon disenfranchisement. This argument states that as a matter of democratic self-determination, a legitimate democratic collective has the collective right to decide whether to disenfranchise felons as a way of defining their political identity. Yet, such a collective’s right to self-determination is limited, since the choice to disenfranchise anyone must be connected to normative considerations of political significance. This paper defends this argument against three charges that has been raised to it. In doing so it also explores under what circumstances felon disenfranchisement can be permissible. Paper 4 explores the question of whether prison inmates suffering from ADHD should be administered psychopharmacological intervention for their condition. The theoretical starting point for the discussion is the communicative theory of punishment, which understands criminal punishment as a form of secular penance. Viewed through the lens of the communicative theory it is argued that the provision of pharmacological treatment to offenders with ADHD need not necessarily be conceived of as an alternative to punishment, but as an aid to achieving the penological ends of secular penance. Thus, in this view offenders diagnosed with ADHD should have the option to undergo pharmacological treatment. (shrink)

The proposal that the criminal justice system should focus on rehabilitation – rather than retribution, deterrence, or expressive denunciation – is among the least popular ideas in legal philosophy. Foremost among rehabilitation’s alleged weaknesses is that it views criminals as blameless patients to be treated, rather than culpable moral agents to be held accountable. This article offers a new interpretation of the rehabilitative approach that is immune to this objection and that furnishes the moral foundation that this approach has lacked. (...) The view rests on the principle that moral agents owe it to one another to maintain the dependability of their moral capacities. Agents who culpably commit criminal wrongs, however, betray an unacceptable degree of moral unreliability. Punishment, on this theory, consists in the enforcement of the duties that offenders have to reduce their own likelihood of recidivism. (shrink)

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 (...) critics on many of the individual claims that, linked together, comprise his argument. This critique focuses instead on Tadros’ theory as a whole and the methodology he uses to support it. It proposes that Tadros’ argumentative strategy can’t justify his rationale by virtue of (1) the extent and complexity of the moral reasoning he invokes, (2) the counter-intuitive results his theory produces in an array of specific cases, and (3) the superiority of a negative-retributivist account in which moral reasoning and intuitive judgments, and the principles and applications that f low from each, are coherent and mutually supportive. Victor Tadros responds to these arguments in an essay following this critique. (shrink)

In this paper, I bring into conversation with each other two views about the justification of punishment: the rights forfeiture theory and the duty view. I argue that philosophers attracted to the former should instead accept the latter.

This paper discusses an argument in defense of felon disenfranchisement originally proposed by Andrew Altman, which states that as a matter of democratic self-determination, members of a legitimate democratic community have a collective right to decide whether to disenfranchise felons. Although this argument—which is here referred to as the argument from democratic self-determination—is held to justify policies that are significantly broader in scope than many critics of existing disenfranchisement practices would allow for, it has received little attention from philosophers and (...) political theorists. One exception is Claudio López-Guerra, who recently raised several objections to the argument. In this paper, I argue that the argument from democratic self-determination can avoid López-Guerra’s objections. In responding to these, I explicate how and when it can be permissible for a legitimate democratic community to disenfranchise felons. I propose that this is the case only if the disenfranchisement of felons is not intended as a punishment, but as a way to express the view about citizenship one endorses as a democratic collective. I also discuss the implications of the argument in terms of offender reintegration. (shrink)

Philosophical writing about the legal practice of punishment has traditionally focused on two central questions: what (if anything) justifies the practice of tr.

This paper considers the justifiability of removing the right to vote from those convicted of crimes. Firstly, I consider the claim that the removal of the right to vote from prisoners is necessary as a practical matter to protect the democratic process from those who have shown themselves to be untrustworthy. Secondly, I look at the claim that offenders have broken the social contract and forfeited rights to participate in making law. And thirdly, I look at the claim that the (...) voting ban is essential part of the justified punishment of serious offenders. These arguments have in common the feature that they attempt to articulate the sense in which rights imply responsibilities, particularly that voting rights should be conditional on one’s having met one’s civic responsibilities. I argue that the only interpretation of this view that could justify prisoner disenfranchisement is that which thinks of disenfranchisement as fair and deserved retributive punishment for crime. Against widespread opposition to, and confusion about, the importance of retributive punishment, I offer a brief defence. However, I conclude that even if legitimate retributive purposes could in principle justify prisoner disenfranchisement, the significance of disenfranchisement is such that it should be reserved for the most serious crimes. (shrink)

At criminal trial, we demand that those accused of criminal wrongdoing be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. What are the moral and/or political grounds of this demand? One popular and natural answer to this question focuses on the moral badness or wrongness of convicting and punishing innocent persons, which I call the direct moral grounding. In this essay, I suggest that this direct moral grounding, if accepted, may well have important ramifications for other areas of the (...) criminal justice process, and in particular those parts in which we (through our legislatures and judges) decide how much punishment to distribute to guilty persons. If, as the direct moral grounding suggests, we should prefer under-punishment to over-punishment under conditions of uncertainty, due to the moral seriousness of errors which inappropriately punish persons, then we should also prefer erring on the side of under-punishment when considering how much to punish those who may justly be punished. Some objections to this line of thinking are considered. (shrink)

Retributive theories of punishment argue that punishing a criminal for a crime she committed is sufficient reason for a justified and morally permissible punishment. But what about when the state gets lucky in its decision to punish? I argue that retributive theories of punishment are subject to “Gettier” style cases from epistemology. Such cases demonstrate that the state needs more than to just get lucky, and as these retributive theories of punishment stand, there is no anti-luck condition. I’ll argue that (...) Gettier-style cases demonstrate an impermissible instance of punishment, even though they meet the conditions of retributive theories of punishment. Retributive theories are, therefore, too weak. The safety condition from epistemology provides the anti-luck condition needed for permissible punishment. I argue that two forms of retributivism, rights-forfeiture and what I call standard retributivism, are both subject to Gettier-style cases. Unlike the literature on standards of proof, this paper argues that safety is a condition on punishment itself, i.e., in all nearby possible worlds, the accuser must correctly accuse the convicted for the crime they actually committed. (shrink)

Polarization often happens asymmetrically. One political actor radicalizes, and the results reverberate through the political system. This is how the deep divisions in contemporary American politics arose: the Republican Party radicalized. Republican officeholders began to use extreme legislative tactics. Republican voters became animated by contempt for their political rivals and by the defense of their own social superiority. The party as a whole launched a wide-ranging campaign of voter suppression and its members endorsed violence in the face of electoral defeat. (...) This paper is about how such asymmetric polarization affects everyone else’s obligations. My core claim is that two kinds of relationship – civic friendship and non-subordination – underpin critical democratic norms. Republican misbehavior has severed cross-partisan civic friendships. Their authoritarianism forfeits their claim to non-subordination. The former means that non-Republicans need not justify policy on public grounds. The latter undercuts Republicans’ claim to enjoy minority vetoes when out of power and it gives their rivals reason to disobey the laws that Republicans make when they are in power. More generally, when one political actor contravenes the proper norms of democratic politics, their opposition is not bound by those norms. (shrink)

I argue that legal punishment is morally wrong because it’s too morally risky. I first briefly explain how my argument differs from similar ones in the philosophical literature on legal punishment. Then I explain why legal punishment is morally risky, argue that it’s too morally risky, and discuss objections. In a nutshell, my argument goes as follows. Legal punishment is wrong because we can never sufficiently reduce the risk of doing wrong when we legally punish people. We can never sufficiently (...) reduce this risk because wrongful punishment is much worse than wrongful non-punishment and because punishment’s permissibility depends on the answers to a variety of difficult philosophical questions about which we’re fallible. (shrink)

Civil disobedience, despite its illegal nature, can sometimes be justified vis-à-vis the duty to obey the law, and, arguably, is thereby not liable to legal punishment. However, adhering to the demands of justice and refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience may lead to a highly problematic theoretical consequence: the debilitation of civil disobedience. This is because, according to the novel analysis I propose, civil disobedience primarily functions as a costly social signal. It is effective by being reliable, reliable by being (...) costly, and costly primarily by being punished. My analysis will highlight a distinctive feature of civil disobedience: civil disobedients leverage the punitive injustice they suffer to amplify their communicative force. This will lead to two paradoxical implications. First, the instability of the moral status of both civil disobedience and its punishment to the extent where the state may be left with no permissible course of action with regard to punishing civil disobedience. Second, by refraining from punishing justified civil disobedience, the state may render uncivil disobedience—illegal political activities that fall short of the standards of civil disobedience—potentially permissible. (shrink)

The piece returns to my earlier challenges of retributivism as the basis of contemporary criminal law, advancing my work on republican political justifications that make central the effect of punishment on citizenship. In short, the justification of punishment should eschew individual retributivist “desert” and focus primarily on the effects of punishment on the entire polity. In particular, this would mean that the effects of mass incarceration would be explicitly a part of justification of punishment. Concretized, members of communities where widespread (...) punishment (incarceration) has damaged collective civic health should explicitly receive discounts on otherwise “retributively justified” punishment. Most obviously, a regime focused on the effect of punishment on civic bonds would explicitly target the vast racial disparities in contemporary punishment regimes, grounding an explicit claim that an African-American or Hispanic defendant from overly punished communities should be punished less and requiring other state resources to secure the safety of the community. While critical, this regime is not solely aimed at racial disparities. This principle would equally address the concentration of punishment in poor, white communities often battered by punishment and policing. Thus, the policy shows a way of building allies across racial lines. (shrink)

Contrary to the widely accepted consensus, Christopher Heath Wellman argues that there are no pre-institutional judicial procedural rights. Thus commonly affirmed rights like the right to a fair trial cannot be assumed in the literature on punishment and legal philosophy as they usually are. Wellman canvasses and rejects a variety of grounds proposed for such rights. I answer his skepticism by proposing two novel grounds for procedural rights. First, a general right against unreasonable risk of punishment grounds rights to an (...) institutionalized system of punishment. Second, to complement and extend the first ground, I more controversially propose a right to provision of the robust good of security. People have a right to others' protecting for avoiding wrongfully harming them: when I take an action that is reasonably expected to threaten the protected interests of others, I must take appropriate care to avoid setting back those interests. Inflicting punishment on someone--intentionally harming them in response to a violation--is prima facie wrongful, so I can only count as taking appropriate care in punishing when I follow familiar procedures that reliably and redundantly test whether they are liable to such punishment, i.e. whether they have forfeited their right against punishment through a culpable act. (shrink)

In this paper, I propose a new self-defense theory of punishment, the rights-protection theory. By appealing to the interest theory of right, I show that what we call “the right of self-defense” is actually composed of the right to protect our basic rights. The right of self-defense is not a single, self-standing right but a group of derivative rights justified by their contribution to the protection of the core, basic rights. Thus, these rights of self-defense are both justified and constrained (...) by the basic rights they are supposed to protect. I then explain how this theory responds to a common objection. Opponents argue that, to exercise the right of self-defense, some threat must be present. However, in the context of punishment, the threat has already taken effect or is already gone. Thus, the right of self-defense becomes irrelevant when we punish an offender. I show that this objection is based on an implausibly narrow conception of self-defense. A reasonable conception would allow us to exercise our right of self-defense when there is a present definite threat, a future definite threat, or a potential threat. Thus, we may still exercise our right of self-defense in the context of punishment. (shrink)

An influential strain in the literature on state punishment analyzes the permissibility of punishment in exclusively deontological terms, whether in terms of an individual’s rights, the state’s obligation to vindicate the law, or both. I argue that we should reject a deontological theory of punishment because it cannot explain what is unjust about mass incarceration, although mass incarceration is widely considered—including by proponents of deontological theories—to be unjust. The failure of deontological theories suggests a minimum criterion of adequacy for a (...) theory of punishment: it must take aggregation sufficiently seriously that it returns plausible results when scaled up from individual cases to large public institutions. In this vein, I briefly sketch a prioritarian metric for evaluating the use of custodial sanctions as a means of creating and allocating social advantage. (shrink)

The United States carceral system, as currently designed and implemented, is widely considered to be an immoral and inhumane system of criminal punishment. There are a number of pressing issues related to this topic, but in this essay, I will focus upon the problem of prison violence. Inadequate supervision has resulted in unsafe prison conditions where inmates are regularly threatened with rape, assault, and other forms of physical violence. Such callous disregard and exposure to unreasonable risk constitutes a severe violation (...) of the rights of prisoners by the state. While there have been numerous legal, political, and activist efforts to draw attention to this issue—with the goal of reforming and making prisons safer—my goal is different. I argue that inmates who are victims of prison violence should have their sentences automatically reduced. Two distinct arguments are advanced in support of this claim. First, I argue that acts of prison violence are a sort of state-mediated harm which can thus be appropriately described as punishment-constituting. Second, and more straightforwardly, I argue that the compensation owed to prisoners who are victims of prison violence may naturally take the form of a reduced sentence. (shrink)

Should punishment be abated for offenders suffering from amnesia? Philosophers have largely overlooked this question. Extant views cluster around a straightforward answer: deserving punishment depends on remembering one’s crime. However, arguments for that view rely on implausible assumptions; the view also implies that offenders could manipulate how much punishment they deserve. Instead, uneasiness about punishing amnesiacs should be traced to distinctive grounds for showing mercy. Amnesiacs who cannot access their past motives are unable to fully comprehend their own role in (...) bringing punishment upon themselves and unable to situate their decisions within a satisfying narrative arc of their lives. (shrink)

According to a rights forfeiture theory of punishment, liability to punishment hinges upon the notion that criminals forfeit their rights against hard treatment. In this paper, I assume the success of rights forfeiture theory in establishing the permissibility of punishment but aim to develop the view by considering how forfeited rights might be reclaimed. Built into the very notion of proportionate punishment is the idea that forfeited rights can be recovered. The interesting question is whether punishment is the sole means (...) for reclaiming forfeited rights. I argue for a pluralistic theory of rights reclamation, according to which, there are multiple ways by which a wrongdoer can recapture her forfeited rights. In particular, I argue that offering remorseful compensation is a valid means by which a wrongdoer might partially, or fully, reclaim her right against punishment. (shrink)

In public discourse, activists are often criticized for directing their acts of political resistance against this or that specific target. Underlying these criticisms appears to be a strongly held, though underarticulated, intuitive moral judgment that some targets are legitimate whereas others are not. Little philosophical attention has been paid to this issue. My primary aim is to address this neglect. I specify a central part of this intuitive judgment – centering on persons and activities – and argue that there is (...) a principled way to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate targets. This specification relies on a novel conception of political resistance, which focuses on its defensive rather than communicative aspect. I then extend the idea of forfeiture to argue that acts of political resistance are correctly directed when they are aimed at those activities of liable persons that cause injustice. My discussion contributes to vindicating our intuitive judgments about several controversial cases of political resistance. (shrink)

One person treats another as a sexual being by responding to their actual or perceived sexual properties. I develop an account of sexualisation to examine this phenomenon, especially as it relates to wrongful treatment such as sexual harassment. On the account proposed here, one person sexualises another when they foreground that person’s sexual properties. Some property of a person is foregrounded when it is introduced to the score of the encounter, following David Lewis’s conception of a conversational score. Having developed (...) a concept of sexualisation, I argue that unwanted sexualisation is wrong because it contradicts a person’s self-presentation. Unwanted sexualisation is a particularly serious instance of this due to cultural norms surrounding sex and the practice of unwanted sexualisation. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that punishment is intentionally harmful and that this makes it especially hard to morally justify. Explanations for the latter intuition often say questionable things about the moral significance of the intent to harm. I argue that there’s a better way to explain this intuition.

This licentiate thesis consists of three essays which all concern the ethics of imprisonment and what constitutes an ethically defensible treatment of criminal offenders. Paper 1 defends the claim that prisoners have a right to privacy. I argue that the right to privacy is important because of its connection to moral agency. For that reasons is the protection of inmates’ right to privacy also warranted by different established philosophical theories about the justification of legal punishment. I discuss the practical implications (...) of this argument. Ultimately I argue the invasion of privacy should be minimized to the greatest extent possible without compromising other important values and rights to safety and security. In defending this position, I argue that respect for inmates’ privacy should be part of the objective of creating and upholding a secure environment to better effect in the long run. Paper 2 discusses whether the collateral harm of imprisonment to the close family members and children of prison inmates may give rise to special moral obligations towards them. Several collateral harms, including decreased psychological wellbeing, financial costs, loss of economic opportunities, and intrusion and control over their private lives, are identified. Two competing perspectives in moral philosophy are applied in order to assess whether the harms are permissible. The first is consequentialist and the second is deontological, and it is argued that both of them fails and therefore it is hard to defend the position that allowing for these harms would be morally permissible, even for the sake of the overall aims of incarceration. Instead, it is argued that these harms imply that imprisonment should only be used as a last resort. Where it is necessary, imprisonment should give rise to special moral obligations towards families of prisoners. Using the notion of residual obligation, these obligations are defended, categorized and clarified. Paper 3 evaluates electronic monitoring from an ethical perspective and discusses whether it could be a promising alternative to imprisonment as a criminal sanction for a series of criminal offenses. EM evaluated from an ethical perspective as six initial ethical challenges are addressed and discussed. It is argued that since EM is developing as a technology and a punitive means, it is urgent to discuss its ethical implications and incorporate moral values into its design and development. (shrink)

Boonin examines more than a dozen theories of punishment and offers perhaps the most systematic argument that the legal practice of punishment is probably unjustified. This provocative claim comes at a time when US prisons face unsustainable population growth and high recidivism rates. In place of punishment, Boonin offers an account of ‘compulsory victim restitution’. Responses to Boonin have focused on the merits of his theory of restitution or have defended a single particular theory of punishment from his objections. The (...) present paper offers a more comprehensive response, which finds a critical fault in the crux of Boonin’s argument: the ‘entailment test’. If the practice of punishment is unjustified, it is not for the reasons Boonin gives. (shrink)

Many criminal lawyers should expect that, were they to not defend a certain client, someone no less capable would do so. It is morally wrong for such attorneys to defend defendants who should be punished. This is true even if we grant that the defendant’s right to be defended outweighs any rights that might be infringed by the defense and that the benefits of defending are greater than the harm. Nor does this argument depend on any particular view of punishment. (...) The fact that the attorney expects to be replaced by someone equally capable has an asymmetric effect on the reasons for and against defending. The reasons that justify defending become extremely attenuated by this expectation, no matter what they are, while the reasons against defending are much less affected, no matter what they are. (shrink)

Neurointerventions—interventions that physically or chemically modulate brain states—are sometimes imposed on criminal offenders for the purposes of diminishing the risk that they will recidivate, or, more generally, of facilitating their rehabilitation. One objection to the nonconsensual implementation of such interventions holds that this expresses a disrespectful message, and is thus impermissible. In this paper, we respond to this objection, focusing on the most developed version of it—that presented by Elizabeth Shaw. We consider a variety of messages that might be expressed (...) by nonconsensual neurointerventions. Depending on the message, we argue either that such interventions do not invariably express this message, that expressing this message is not invariably disrespectful, or that the appeal to disrespect is redundant. (shrink)

In justifying punishment we sometimes appeal to the idea that the punished offender has, by his criminal action against others, forfeited his moral right (and therefore his legal right) against hard treatment by the state. The imposition of suffering, or deprivation of liberty, loses its prima facie morally objectionable character, and becomes morally permissible. Philosophers interrogating the forfeited right theory generally focus on whether the forfeiting of the right constitutes a necessary or a sufficient condition for punishment to be permissible; (...) rarely do they ask whether the idea of a right that can be forfeited is itself morally illuminating. The paper examines and criticizes various versions of this theory. It concludes that the forfeited right arguments add little other than rhetorical dignity to the existing repertoire of justifications for punishment. They can be most usefully understood as communicating the thought that the offender cannot reasonably complain about the violation of rights he himself has violated. But the incapacitation of the offender’s reasonable complaint does not entail that we are justified in punishing him. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that absent special circumstances, there are no moral, judicial procedural rights. I divide this essay into four main sections. First, I argue that there is no general moral right against double jeopardy. Next, I explain why punishing a criminal without first establishing her guilt via a fair trial does not necessarily violate her rights. In the third section, I respond to a number of possible objections. And finally, I consider the implications of my arguments for (...) the human right to due process. (shrink)

The individualist nature of much contemporary just war theory means that we often discuss cases with single attackers. But even if war is best understood in this individualist way, in war combatants often have to make decisions about how to distribute harms among a plurality of aggressors: they must decide whom and how many to harm, and how much to harm them. In this paper, I look at simultaneous multiple aggressor cases in which more than one distribution of harm among (...) aggressors is available. I show how such cases pose deep questions concerning the nature, role, and scope of the necessity principle, and its relationship to both liability and narrow proportionality. I argue that a hitherto unrecognised measure – ‘narrow proportionality shortfall’ – and its distribution is relevant in choosing how to distribute harms across aggressors. I then extend this analysis to show how this may help us with a puzzle concerning sequential attacks. (shrink)

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 (...) establish the following claims: punishment is the only symbolically adequate response to a wrongdoing; and punishment is permissible if it is the only symbolically adequate response to a wrongdoing. (shrink)

If one has a right merely in virtue of being a person, she cannot lose that right as long as she remained a person – or so I argue. After sketching out what I mean by “natural rights,” “inalienable rights,” and “nonforfeitable rights,” I give some reasons to think any instance of the first would also have to be an instance of the latter two. I then respond to critiques of inalienability by A. John Simmons and Andrew Jason Cohen. After (...) which, I apply the argument given for why natural rights would have to be inalienable as a reason to think they would also have to be nonforfeitable. Then I respond to the idea that the nonforfeitability of natural rights would conflict with self-defense by outlining an alternate account of self-defense. In closing, I consider some potential implications of the inalienability and nonforfeitability of natural rights, should such natural rights exist. (shrink)

In the United States, the identities of criminal offenders are matters of public record, accessible to prospective employers, the press, and ordinary citizens. In European countries, the identities of offenders are routinely kept hidden, with some exceptions. The question addressed in this discussion concerns whether the public disclosure of the identities of offenders is part and parcel of their legal punishment. My contentions are that public disclosure is not conceptually part of legal punishment, necessary to serve substantive penal aims, or (...) likely to enhance penal aims. At times, it will conflict with defensible aims of legal punishment. Other values might support or require the public identification of criminal offenders, but the aims of legal punishment do not appear to do so. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPeople have procedural rights because states are under a duty of political morality to provide them with fair procedures for settling disputes about the application of the laws. This obligation flows from the state's duty to treat each person as a free and equal member of the legal order. Yet adherence to procedural rights can impede accuracy in fact-finding, which in turn can result in poor protection for substantive rights. So the state also has a duty to provide a reasonable (...) degree of accuracy in fact-finding. The legal order should therefore strive to improve the accuracy of fact-finding, within the constraints imposed by procedural rights people have. Nevertheless, the duty to provide reasonably accurate procedures is subordinate to the duty to provide procedural rights because the settlement of disputes among free persons must be conducted in a manner that respects their status as free persons. (shrink)

This article is a companion to an article by the same author in issue 33.3 of Criminal Justice Ethics on the question of the standard by which the severity of punishment is determined to be proportional to the seriousness of the crime for which it is inflicted. Its chief argument is that basing the determination on what the offender deserves to suffer is morally problematic because it conflicts with principles of humanity that call for our taking the good of human (...) beings as our end. By contrast, it is also argued, basing the determination on promoting public safety or preserving civil order is not similarly problematic because punishment inflicted to serve either of these ends is compatible with principles of humanity. The article concludes with a comment on how the harsh sentencing laws enacted in the United States in the past 40 years should be seen as a product of the former mode of determining punishment and not the latter. (shrink)