Jonathan A. Jacobs

Are there key respects in which character and character defects are voluntary? Can agents with serious vices be rational agents? Jonathan Jacobs answers in the affirmative. Moral character is shaped through voluntary habits, including the ways we habituate ourselves, Jacobs believes. Just as individuals can voluntarily lead unhappy lives without making unhappiness an end, so can they degrade their ethical characters through voluntary action that does not have establishment of vice as its end. Choosing Character presents an account of ethical disability, expanding the domain of responsibility and explicating the role of character in ethical cognition. Jacobs contends that agents become ethically disabled voluntarily when their habits impair their ability to properly appreciate ethical considerations. Such agents are rational, responsible individuals who are yet incapable of virtuous action. The view develops and modifies Aristotelian claims concerning the fixity of character. Jacobs' interpretation is developed in contrast to the overlooked work of Maimonides, who also used Aristotelian resources but argued for the possibility of character change. The notion of ethical disability has profound ramifications for ethics and for current debates about blame and punishment.

The main claims are the following. If we keep before us the distinction between the justification of punishment and its aims, we see that retribution is not an aim of punishment, and that there is a central place for retributivist considerations in the justification of punishment. Justifications based upon aims or consequentialist considerations suffer from a serious epistemic vulnerability not shared by retributivism. There are ethically sound sentiments that underwrite retributivist justification, and it would be a mistake to redeploy those sentiments. The ethical authority of those sentiments justifies punitive sanction. Retributivist justification is compatible with consequentialist aims

The enormous financial cost of criminal justice has motivated increased scrutiny and recognition of the need for constructive change, but what of the ethical costs of current practices and policies? Moreover, if we seriously value the principles of liberal democracy then there is no question that the ethics of criminal justice are everybody’s business, concerns for the entire society. _The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics_ brings together international scholars to explore the most significant ethical issues throughout their many areas of expertise, anchoring their discussions in the empirical realities of the issues faced rather than applying moral theory at a distance. Contributions from philosophers, legal scholars, criminologists and psychologists bring a fresh and interdisciplinary approach to the field. The _Handbook _is divided into three parts: Part I addresses the core issues concerning criminal sanction, the moral and political aspects of the justification of punishment, and the relationship between law and morality. Part II examines criminalization and criminal liability, and the assumptions and attitudes shaping those aspects of contemporary criminal justice. Part III evaluates current policies and practices of criminal procedure, exploring the roles of police, prosecutors, judges, and juries and suggesting directions for revising how criminal justice is achieved. Throughout, scholars seek pathways for change and suggest new solutions to address the central concerns of criminal justice ethics. This book is an ideal resource for upper-undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in criminal justice ethics, criminology, and criminal justice theory, and also for students of philosophy interested in punishment, law and society, and law and ethics

Blame and also punishment do not reach many agents in the sense that many agents are not motivated to ethically self‐correct, and in fact, may be worsened by these practices. The main reasons agents may not be reached by them are that the agent's second nature may make inaccessible to him a sound appreciation of ethical considerations, and the fixity of mature character may make ethical self‐correction practically impossible. Still, when they are ethically rationalized, blame and punishment seem to be requirements. Even the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethics involves an important kind of incompleteness and unclarity concerning this issue. The Jewish and Christian traditions involve conceptions of the accessibility of ethical considerations and also the possibility of character change in ways that enable us to overcome the perplexity about blame and punishment. They are not ‘good for nothing’ even when they fail to improve agents. The religious traditions' conceptions of moral agency and the possibility of perfection enable us to see why there are reasons not to ethically ‘write off’ even persistently vicious agents. Moreover, we can see that the fulfilling of ethical requirements is an enabling condition for perfection that is not merely ethical. To highlight the contrast between the naturalistic view and the theistic view, Aristotle's moral psychology and moral epistemology are contrasted with those of Maimonides and Aquinas, both of whom borrow heavily from Aristotle, but fundamentally transform what they borrow.

This book begins with a critique of moral relativism and proceeds to develop a realist account of practical wisdom. The central claims are that there are objective moral facts and that knowledge of these facts can be action-guiding. The justification for these claims involves explaining the role of imagination in moral judgment and action and also showing how a realist approach to morality enables us to better account for immorality, revealing it to involve ignorance, error or falsification. The book concludes with an analysis of how the character of social relations is crucial to the formation of self-conceptions and the development of moral knowledge and moral imagination.

Jonathan Jacobs examines the injustice of incarceration in the U.S. and U.K., both during incarceration and upon release into civil society. Situated at the intersection of criminology and political philosophy, Jacobs's focus is on moral reasoning, and he argues that the current state of incarceration is antithetical to the project of liberal democracy, as it strips incarcerated people of their agency. He advocates for reforms through a renewed commitment to the values and principles of liberal democracy and proposes a retributivist conception of sanction to reform the criminal justice system and emphasizes the importance of proportionality.

In this original study, Jonathan Jacobs provides a new account of ethical realism that combines both abstract meta-ethical issues defining the debate on realism and concrete topics in moral psychology. Jacobs argues that practical reasoners can both understand the ethical significance of facts and be motivated to act by that understanding. In that sense, objective considerations are prescriptive. In his discussion of the theory of practical realism, he extends themes and claims originating in Aristotelian ethics while engaging with the most important contemporary literature. Arguing that desire and reason can agree on what is good, Jacobs explains how good action is naturally pleasing to the agent. In acting well, the agent affirms certain values and enjoys doing so. Jacobs grounds his explanation of ethical value in detailed explorations of the moral psychology of self-love, friendship, and respect. Students and scholars of philosophy will be intrigued by this integrated account of meta-ethics, practical reason, and moral psychology.

This book is a systematic defense of a nonnaturalist, intuitionist moral realism. It supplies an account of moral facts according to which moral value is supervenient, undefinable, and nonreducible. The author also argues that "we must accept without proof some claim to the effect that a given thing is intrinsically good or bad if we are to prove that anything at all is so". The project is explicitly in the tradition of philosophers such as Brentano, Moore, and Ross. The author focuses on developing his views rather than engaging in current debates by explicit reference to other work in value theory. The account is responsive to what one might take to be the most significant objections to it, but there are few references to specific arguments of recent and contemporary philosophers. On the one hand, this helps maintain the tightly interwoven systematic character of the account; but on the other, those not already disposed to accept some of its main claims may not find the articulation and defense of them compelling.

The main claim is that there is a fundamental and ineliminable relationship between teleology and essence in those things which have life-histories, whether organic or personal. The dissertation is divided into two Parts. In the first Part necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being an organism are formulated. In the second Part this is done for persons. ;What it is to be an organism is explained in terms of the entity being so constituted as to undergo a multi-stage, internally-regulated career directed toward a state of completed development. While the changes an organism undergoes may be explained by physio-chemical laws, what it is to be an organism must be understood in terms of the entity having a kind-specific teleological constitution, involving an intrinsic natural end, or condition of good. ;In contrast, persons change and develop according to self-imposed thought and action guiding conceptions. The natural end or good for persons is the achievement of self-enjoyment; a condition brought about through directing the exercise of one's capacities so as to realize ends one desires for their own sake and judges to be worthwhile. Furthermore, while an organic life-history is traced out according to laws, a person's life-history is unified through construction of a personal narrative, an account of one's life-history that one supplies to oneself. Thus, the teleology of persons involves self-directedness in a way organic teleology does not. Persons have the intrinsic end of self-enjoyment, but what activities it consists in must be specified by the individual. The relation between deliberation, end-setting and self-enjoyment is explained, with a focus on the role of historical self-understanding in directing one's life. ;The chief result is that there is a way of articulating our intuitions about what it is for a thing to have a life-history, which explains this in metaphysical terms, and enables us to express certain distinctive and essential facts about the nature of persons in a distinctively humanistic manner.