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25Offenders, the Making of Amends and the StateIn Gerry Johnstone & Daniel W. van Ness (eds.), Handbook of Restorative Justice, . pp. 192--207. 2007.This essay asks whether restorative justice practices in criminal legal systems are consistent with the aims of a liberal state.
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156Justice in the family: A defence of feminist contractarianismJournal of Applied Philosophy 22 (1). 2005.Jean Hampton argues that we can detect exploitation in personal relationships by thinking about what we would agree to were we to set aside the emotional benefits we receive from those relationships. Hampton calls her account "feminist contractarianism," but it has recently been critiqued as decidedly unfeminist, on the grounds that it is hostile to women's interests and women's values. Furthermore, Hampton's requirement that we imaginatively distance ourselves from our emotional connections to …Read more
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89Moral Bystanders and the Virtue of ForgivenessIn Christopher R. Allers & Marieke Smit (eds.), Forgiveness in Perspective, Rodopi. pp. 66--69. 2010.According to standard philosophical analyses, only victims can forgive. There are good reasons to reject this view. After all, people who are neither direct nor indirect victims of a wrong frequently feel moral anger over injustice. The choice to foreswear or overcome such moral anger is subject to most of the same sorts of considerations as victims’ choices to forgive. Furthermore, bystanders’ reactions to their experiences of moral anger often reflect either virtues or vices that are of a piec…Read more
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19Incorrigible Norms: Foundationalist Theories of Normative AuthoritySouthern Journal of Philosophy 38 (4): 633-649. 2000.
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80Desert of What? On Murphy’s Reluctant RetributivismCriminal Law and Philosophy 11 (1): 161-173. 2017.In Punishment and the Moral Emotions, Jeffrie Murphy rejects his earlier, strong endorsements of retributivism. Questioning both our motivations for embracing retributivism and our views about the basis of desert, he now describes himself as a “reluctant retributivist.” In this essay, I argue that Murphy should reject retributivism altogether. Even if we grant that criminals have negative desert, why should we suppose that it is desert of suffering? I argue that it is possible to defend desert-b…Read more
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121A coherentist theory of normative authorityThe Journal of Ethics 6 (1): 21-42. 2002.What makes an ``ought'''' claim authoritative? What makes aparticular norm genuinely reason-giving for an agent? This paper arguesthat normative authority can best be accounted for in terms of thejustification of norms. The main obstacle to such a theory, however, isa regress problem. The worry is that every attempt to offer ajustification for an ``ought'''' claim must appeal to another ``ought''''claim, ad infinitum. The paper argues that vicious regress canbe avoided in practical reasoning in …Read more
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181On the Virtue of Minding Our Own BusinessJournal of Value Inquiry 46 (2): 173-182. 2012.Sometimes we should mind our own business. But at other times it would be wrong to mind one's own business. This paper explores the tension between these two claims by presenting a tendency to mind one's own business as an Aristotelian-style virtue. It is furthered argued that this is a different virtue than tolerance.
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175Living with Uncertainty: The Moral Significance of Ignorance * By MICHAEL J. ZIMMERMAN (review)Analysis 69 (4): 785-787. 2009.Michael J. Zimmerman offers a conceptual analysis of the moral ‘ought’ that focuses on moral decision-making under uncertainty. His central case, originally presented by Frank Jackson, concerns a doctor who must choose among three treatments for a minor ailment. Her evidence suggests that drug B will partially cure her patient, that one of either drug A or C would cure him completely, but that the other drug would kill him. Accepting the intuition that the doctor ought to choose drug B, Zimmerma…Read more
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154Gossip and Social PunishmentRes Philosophica 93 (1): 185-204. 2016.Is gossip ever appropriate as a response to other people’s misdeeds or character flaws? Gossip is arguably the most common means through which communities hold people responsible for their vices and transgressions. Yet, gossiping itself is traditionally considered wrong. This essay develops an account of social punishment in order to ask whether gossip can serve as a legitimate means of enforcing moral norms. In the end, however, I argue that gossip is most likely to be permissible where it rese…Read more
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2Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 22 (1): 43-45. 2002.
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63Moral Rebukes and Social AvoidanceJournal of Value Inquiry 48 (4): 643-661. 2014.IntroductionStrawsonian theories of moral responsibility, which aim to ground the phenomenon of moral responsibility in our practices of holding one another accountable for our actions, lead us to think more carefully about the content of those practices. Strawson and his followers have done much to explore the significance of the deontic reactive attitudes (resentment, indignation and guilt), which we tend to aim at wrongdoers.P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," Proceedings of the British…Read more
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128Incorrigible Norms: Foundationalist Theories of Normative AuthoritySouthern Journal of Philosophy 38 (4): 633-649. 2000.What makes a norm a genuinely authoritative guide to action? For many theorists, the answer takes a foundationalist form, analogous to foundationalism in epistemology. They say that there is at least one norm that is justified in itself. On most versions, the norm is said to be incorrigibly authoritative. All other norms are justified in virtue of their connection with it. This essay argues that all such foundationalist theories of normative authority fail because they cannot give an account of …Read more
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79Do Wrongdoers Have a Right to Make Amends?Social Theory and Practice 29 (2): 325-41. 2003.Do people deserve a chance to right the wrongs they have committed? Would denying an offender the opportunity to make amends amount to an injustice? There are compelling reasons to grant such a right. However, there are also significant objections. First, a right to make amends potentially undermines the state's right to punish criminal wrongdoers. Secondly, the alleged right threatens to put undue pressure on victims to forgive their abusers. In this essay I argue that these objections can be m…Read more
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63A Normative Regress ProblemAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1): 35-47. 1999.The article argues that theorists who try to justify 'ought'-claims, i.e., who try to show that a standard of behavior has normative authority, will run into a regress problem. The problem is similar in structure to the familiar regress in the justification of belief. The point of the paper is not skeptical. Rather, the aim is to help theorists better understand the challenges associated with formulating a theory of normative authority.
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65Uncertainty in everyday lifeThe Philosophers' Magazine 66 77-83. 2014.What should a bystander do when she witnesses something that may be morally problematic, but also may not be?
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92Making AmendsAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 41 (2): 141-54. 2004.The literature in ethics is filled with theories of what makes an action wrong, what makes an actor responsible and blamable for his wrongful actions and what we are justified in doing to wrongdoers (e.g., may we punish them? must we forgive them?). However, there is relatively little discussion of what wrongdoers themselves must do in the aftermath of their wrongful acts. This essay attempts to remedy that problem by critically evaluating some competing accounts of the moral obligations of wro…Read more
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71Historical Memory as Forward‐ and Backward‐Looking Collective ResponsibilityMidwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1): 26-39. 2014.Do future generations of a wrongdoing group have a responsibility to preserve the memory of the past? If so, what manner of responsibility is it? In this essay, I critically examine the categories of forward-looking and backward-looking collective responsibility to see what they might offer to this discussion. I argue that these concepts of responsibility are ambiguous in ways that threaten to prevent important questions from being raised. I draw my examples from contemporary German practices of…Read more
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Christopher Kutz, Complicity: Ethics and Law for a Collective Age (review)Philosophy in Review 22 43-45. 2002.
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106Hampton on the expressive power of punishmentJournal of Social Philosophy 35 (1). 2004.In her later writings Jean Hampton develops an expressive theory of punishment she takes to be retributivist. Unlike Feinberg, Hampton claims wrongdoings as well as punishments are expressive. Wrongdoings assert that the victim is less valuable than victimizer. On her view we are obligated to punish because we are obligated to respond to this false assertion. Punishment expresses the moral truth that victim and wrongdoer are equally valuable. We argue that Hampton's argument would work only if s…Read more
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