John Kleinig

This textbook looks at the main ethical questions that confront the criminal justice system - legislature, law enforcement, courts, and corrections - and those who work within that system, especially police officers, prosecutors, defence lawyers, judges, juries, and prison officers. John Kleinig sets the issues in the context of a liberal democratic society and its ethical and legislative underpinnings, and illustrates them with a wide and international range of real-life case studies. Topics covered include discretion, capital punishment, terrorism, restorative justice, and re-entry. Kleinig's discussion is both philosophically acute and grounded in institutional realities, and will enable students to engage productively with the ethical questions which they encounter both now and in the future - whether as criminal justice professionals or as reflective citizens.

We would not be far wide of the mark if we suggested that the prevailing social ideology is structured round the presumption that interpersonal and political relationships ought to be, and for the most part are, based on the mutual consent of the parties involved. Liberal democratic theory has secured for consent a crucial role in the justification of political obligation and authority. In law, the maximvolenti non fit injuria,to the one who consents no wrong is done, constitutes a defence in cases where one person invades the interests of another. In the bioethical field, there is a preoccupation with the formulation of a standard of ‘informed consent’ in patient-doctor and subject-researcher relationships. And in the broader domain of ethical theory there is an influential view that consensual acts do not differ in moral quality from selfregarding behaviour.

J L Austin has left a firm imprint on much contemporary philosophy. Not surprisingly, however, his published papers and lectures have provoked strongly contrasting responses, some seeing in them the refinement of certain philosophical techniques and the introduction of new standards of care, others the final degeneration of linguistic philosophy into verbal hair-splitting. Whatever the response, his writings were bound to attract the attention of formal linguists, and the last decade has seen a significant number of contributions by the latter—notably Ziff, Katz and Fodor—appearing in the philosophical booklists. To these is now added this collection by Vendler, comprising an introductory essay attempting to justify the relevance of structural linguistics to philosophical argument, and six others in which the data of linguistics is applied to major philosophical issues. Their point, however, as Vendler is quick to note, ‘is not to offer impeccable solutions for a few problems, but to show that the more or less sophisticated data provided by structural linguistics can be used in philosophical arguments’. Earlier versions of four of these essays have been published previously, and in the case of the first two of these, before Vendler’s acquaintance with transformational analysis. The remaining three have been written for this volume.