David Schmidtz

Christopher Morris’s book is a product of years of reflection, scholarship, and worldly experience. I have read books that were too long in the making, such that the young author who began and the older author who finished did not even use basic terms in the same way. In Morris’s case, however, the years of reflection were altogether salutary. Morris’s book started out clever and ended up wise. Any reader interested in political philosophy is bound to find it richly rewarding. Morris makes bold claims, but his arguments are unfailingly moderate, measured, and circumspect. This review largely will let Morris speak for himself

What is justice? Questions of justice are questions about what people are due. However, what that means in practice depends on the context in which the question is raised. Depending on context, the formal question of what people are due is answered by principles of desert, reciprocity, equality, or need. Justice, therefore, is a constellation of elements that exhibit a degree of integration and unity. Nonetheless, the integrity of justice is limited, in a way that is akin to the integrity of a neighborhood rather than that of a building. A theory of justice offers individuals a map of that neighborhood, within which they can explore just what elements amount to justice.

It is widely held that the proper role of criminal punishment is to ensure in a cost-efficient manner that criminal laws will be obeyed. As James Buchanan puts it,the reason we have courts is not that we want people to be convicted of crimes but that we want people not to commit them. The whole procedure of the law is one, essentially, of threatening people with unpleasant consequences if they do things which are regarded as objectionable.According to the deterrence theory of punishment, which I will here accept without argument in order to tease out some of its implications, legislators must be aware of opportunities to maximize the threat value of criminal prohibitions. By maximizing deterrence, we minimize the cost of crime. On the other hand, creating these threats, and carrying them out, is also costly. So we also wish to minimize the cost of avoiding crime. An efficient deterrent, therefore, will be one which minimizes the sum of the costs of crime and crime avoidance, where ‘cost’ is to be broadly construed.