Douglas Husak

I tackle the difficult problem of specifying how voluntary intoxication affects criminal culpability generally and recklessness in particular. I contend that the problem need not be conceptualized as an instance of actio libera in causa, namely the situation in which persons do something at t1 to culpably create the conditions of their own defense at t2. Instead, I argue that we need only consider intoxicated defendants at t2 in order to justify their punishment. In the course of defending my view, I challenge conventional wisdom about both the nature of recklessness and the effects of intoxicants. I conclude by discussing a possible ground on which involuntary intoxication might be treated differently

Our drug policy has been widely deemed a failure because the criminalization of drug use has not succeeded in reducing prevalence rates. I contend that the most promising basis to defend the justifiability of drug offenses is to construe them as proxy crimes: offenses designed to prevent the commission of other, more serious crimes. I make a case that many law enforcement officials use drug proscriptions for this purpose in the real world. When construed as proxy crimes, drug prohibitions are less vulnerable to some of the familiar objections brought against their legitimacy. Nonetheless, the justification for punishing those who violate drug proscriptions remains unpersuasive.

This important book was the first serious work of philosophy to address the question: Do adults have a moral right to use drugs for recreational purposes? Many critics of the 'war on drugs' denounce law enforcement as counterproductive and ineffective. Douglas Husak argues that the 'war on drugs' violates the moral rights of adults who want to use drugs for pleasure, and that criminal laws against such use are incompatible with moral rights. This is not a polemical tract but a scrupulously argued work of philosophy that takes full account of all available data concerning drug use in the United States today. The author is careful to describe the properties a recreational drug would have to possess before the state would be justified in prohibiting it. Since criminal laws against the use of recreational drugs are justified neither by the harm users cause to themselves nor by the harm users cause to each other, Professor Husak concludes that such laws are, in almost all cases, unjustified

Does criminal liability require an act? -- Motive and criminal liability -- The costs to criminal theory of supposing that intentions are irrelevant to permissibility -- Transferred intent -- The nature and justifiability of nonconsummate offenses -- Strict liability, justice, and proportionality -- The sequential principle of relative culpability -- Willful ignorance, knowledge, and the equal culpability thesis : a study of the significance of the principle of legality -- Rapes without rapists : consent and reasonable mistake -- Mistake of law and culpability -- On the supposed priority of justification to excuse -- Partial defenses -- The "but everybody does that!" defense -- The de minimis "defense" to criminal liability -- Why punish the deserving -- Malum prohibitum and retributivism -- Already punished enough.

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 kind of example, no single perspective on blame and liability proves to be defensible. Nonetheless, a discussion of this type of case is helpful because it enables us to appreciate the difficulties in understanding the nature of negligence and the ensuing uncertainty about whether penal liability for negligence is ever warranted

Do non-persons have moral rights? I will suppose this question can best be answered by inquiring whether some animals and/or environmental objects have moral rights, for if any non-persons are possessors of rights, animals and/or environmental objects are the most plausible candidates. As so interpreted, this question has received an extraordinary amount of recent attention from philosophers. Arguments have been offered and defended; rebuttals have appeared in print. Yet, so far as I am aware, no one has presented a clear and accurate statement of what turns on the issue of whether non-persons have moral rights. In the absence of such a statement, philosophers are likely to be at sea in determining on which side of the controversy their initial sympathies lie. In this paper it is my central concern to help clarify what turns on the issue of whether non-persons are possessors of moral rights, rather than to argue decisively for one position or the other.