Gideon Yaffe

Reid argues that Hume’s claim that justice is an artificial virtue is inconsistent with the fact that gratitude is a natural sentiment. This chapter shows that Reid’s argument succeeds only given a philosophy of mind and action that Hume rejects. Among other things, Reid assumes that one can conceive of one of a pair of contradictories only if one can conceive of the other—a claim that Hume denies. So, in the case of justice, the disagreement between Hume and Reid is, at bottom, a disagreement over their respective conceptions of how the human mind works at its most fundamental level.

This paper considers the question of why the non-citizenship of offenders poses an obstacle to their criminal punishment. Several proposals are rejected, including Antony Duff’s proposal. It is proposed, instead, that governments are not authorized to punish any offender who cannot be attributed with the norm he violates. The government cannot attribute the norm that a non-citizen violates to him, if the non-citizen can raise in his favor the fact that he has no say over the law. Under certain circumstances, such as when they are visiting, non-citizens cannot raise this point, and so can be attributed with the norms they violate.

Before the recent presidential election, a bipartisan congressional effort was made to pass a criminal justice reform bill. The bill faltered in part because of a proposed default mens rea provision: statutes silent on mens rea, that were not explicitly identified as strict liability by the legislature, would be taken to require for guilt proof of knowledge with respect to each material element. This paper focusses on a prominent line of disagreement about the default mens rea provision. Proponents argued that it would reduce the number of unjust verdicts in corporate cases. They noted that there have been convictions of corporations and corporate officers for public welfare offenses in instances in which there was good reason to believe that the defendants lacked mens rea. They touted the legislation, then, as a way of reducing the false positive rate. Opponents noted that the provision would also reduce the rate of true positives in corporate prosecutions—convictions of those possessing mens rea who could not be proven to—and opposed the legislation on those grounds. Both sides, then, accepted that the relevant question was, in part, numerical: under the provision, would the reductions in guilty verdicts of those lacking mens rea outnumber and outweigh the increases in acquittals of those possessing it? This paper critically examines this numerical approach for assessing and justifying the default mens rea provision. The paper argues that there is a small domain under which it is appropriate to reason in such numerical terms about a default mens rea provision, but that that domain is so small as to make such arguments inappropriate when it comes to sweeping legislation, such as that proposed. The paper further argues that in light of this conclusion the default mens rea provision must be examined non-numerically, through appeal to principled considerations about the necessary conditions for morally justified infliction of punishment. When such arguments are freed from numerical considerations of the kind that dominated the public discussion of the legislation, they decide the matter: the default mens rea provision deserves bipartisan support.

Hobbes believed there was nothing more to freedom than the ability to do as we choose. According to this view, freedom is undermined only by ropes and chains, those features of our circumstances that prevent the realization of choices. Such views have been criticized on the grounds that freedom can be undermined also by forces that perniciously influence what we choose. Indoctrination, coercion and psychological disorders such as addiction and compulsion detract from freedom by influencing what we will rather than by determining what we do independently of what we will. Freedom of will is as much a part of full-fledged free agency as freedom of action, and an agent who does not face obstacles to the realization of her choices possesses only freedom of action. This dissertation has two aims: supplement the Hobbesean view of free agency with an account of freedom of will, and examine the account of free agency offered by John Locke, an account that also extends Hobbes' view. ;Both the view for which I argue and the view that Locke defends involve the idea that an agent who lacks freedom of will--who lacks whatever it is that is needed for full-fledged free agency over and above freedom of action--falls short of exemplifying an ideal of agency. The first half of the dissertation argues in favor of views that analyze freedom of will through appeal to ideals of agency, and a particular conception of the relevant ideal. The second of these tasks is approached through examination of the freedom-undermining effects of irresistible desires and threats. ;The second half of the dissertation examines Locke's addition to Hobbes' account of freedom of action in his intriguing conception of volition and voluntary action, the particular conception of ideal agency that informs Locke's conception of freedom of will, the arguments that Locke employs in arguing against alternative conceptions of freedom of will, and the relations between his conception of free agency and his view of personal identity.

This paper is concerned to bring out the philosophical contribution that Thomas Reid makes in his discussions of promising. Reid discusses promising in two contexts: he argues that the practice of promising presupposes the belief that the promisor is endowed with what he calls 'active power' , and he argues against Hume's claim that the very act of promising—and the obligation to do as one promised—are "artificial," or the products of human convention . In addition to explaining what Reid says in each of these two contexts, the paper demonstrates that the two discussions are linked. It is, in part, because he thinks that promises are a special kind of act —performable solely through the exercise of our native, natural capacities—that he thinks that the practice of promising presupposes active power. Towards this end, the paper explains how Reid conceives of active power and explains his concept of a social act. The paper argues that, when considered as part of a single, unitary conception of the nature of promises, Reid's two discussions provide important insights into the nature of promising, particularly with regard to the sense in which promisory obligations are conditional: they are conditional upon a rather short list of circumstances that are not within our power—a shorter list than those on which other obligations are conditional

Manipulation by another person often undermines freedom. To explain this, a distinction is drawn between two forms of manipulation: indoctrination is defined as causing another person to respond to reasons in a pattern that serves the manipulator’s ends; coercion as supplying another person with reasons that, given the pattern in which he responds to reasons, lead him to act in ways that serve the manipulator’s ends. It is argued that both forms of manipulation undermine freedom because manipulators track the compliance of their victims, while neutral causal mechanisms do not. Manipulators see to it that their victims comply even in the face of forces that threaten to derail them from the manipulator’s desired course. It is suggested that this has an impact on freedom because part of what we desire in wanting to be free is the availability of forms of life very different from those we actually enjoy

Under the “Willful Ignorance Principle,” a defendant is guilty of a crime requiring knowledge he lacks provided he is ignorant thanks to having earlier omitted inquiry. In this paper, I offer a novel justification of this principle through application of the theory that knowledge matters to culpability because of how the knowing action manifests the agent’s failure to grant sufficient weight to other people’s interests. I show that, under a simple formal model that supports this theory, omitting inquiry manifests precisely the same degree of disregard of others’ interests as manifested in knowingly acting criminally. Several surprising implications of this view are described, including that when the agent’s method of inquiry has a non-zero false positive rate, his omission of inquiry does not make the same contribution to his culpability as knowledge, while it does, by contrast, when the false negative rate is non-zero.

Criminal law casebooks and treatises frequently mention the possibility that criminal liability for possession is inconsistent with the Voluntary Act Requirement, which limits criminal liability to that which includes an act or an omission. This paper explains why criminal liability for possession is compatible with the Voluntary Act Requirement despite the fact that possession is a status. To make good on this claim, the paper defends the Voluntary Act Requirement, offers an account of the nature of omissions of the kind that need be included in that for which criminal liability is imposed in the absence of a voluntary act, and argues that possession is a status that is constituted in part by an omission of this sort. The result is that to hold people criminally liable for possession is to hold them criminally liable both for a status and for an omission, an omission that is part of what it is to have that status. The paper also distinguishes possession from vagrancy, which is not a proper object of criminal liability, precisely because of constraints placed by the Voluntary Act Requirement. And the paper argues that possession incident to dispossession is not a proper object of criminal liability because it does not involve an omission of the kind that other forms of possession involve.