Richard Lippke

The development of AI sentencing algorithms raises the prospect of more consistent and transparent sentencing outcomes. However, the hoped-for improvements in sentencing may not occur in legal jurisdictions that permit prosecutors an outsized role in determining sentencing outcomes through plea bargaining. In what I term “robust” plea bargaining regimes, prosecutors often view charging decisions and sentencing recommendations strategically. They negotiate them in ways aimed primarily at producing guilty pleas rather than producing consistent or truthful outcomes. Prosecutors in such regimes might resist efforts to make the plea deals they forge more consistent and transparent. Given the centrality of charging decisions in determining sentencing outcomes in robust plea bargaining regimes, I examine the feasibility of devising AI charging algorithms.

In Chap. 5 of his book _Ethics and Situational Crime Prevention_, Thomas Søbirk Petersen addresses the questions of whether and when employers should have access to the criminal records of prospective employees. Given the well-established link between ex-offenders being able to secure employment and their desistance from further crimes, Petersen argues that it is vital to limit how much employers can come to discover about the criminal pasts of people whom they might hire. Petersen urges a “relevant matching” approach to employer access to criminal records. Several challenges to implementing such an approach are discussed. These include doubts about how often we will have empirical verification of relevant matches, how serious past crimes must be before they are subject to disclosure, whether individuals’ criminal records should ever lapse, and whether recidivist minor offenders should have their records disclosed. Then there are the problems raised by low conviction rates for many crimes and biased policing, both of which produce skewed pictures of who has committed crimes.

ABSTRACT While many countries are following the lead of the United States in making insider trading illegal, its moral status is still controversial. I summarise the scholarly debate over the fairness of insider trading and lay bare the assumptions about fairness implicit in that debate. I focus on the question whether those assumptions can be defended independently of a more comprehensive theory of social justice. Current analyses presuppose that we can intelligently discuss what the social rules regarding insider trading should be while ignoring questions about the broader principles of justice that should be adopted and the extent to which existing institutions realise those principles. I argue that such questions must be addressed. I then employ an egalitarian conception of social justice to analyse insider trading. I thereby illustrate how a more systematic approach, grounded in a comprehensive theory of justice, transforms the debate about the fairness of insider trading.

Mixed theories of legal punishment treat both crime reduction and retributive concerns as irreducibly important and so worthy of inclusion in a single justificatory framework. Yet crime reduction and retributive approaches employ different assumptions about the necessary characteristics of those liable to punishment. Retributive accounts of legal punishment require offenders to be more responsive to moral considerations than do crime reduction accounts. The tensions these different assumptions create are explored in the mixed theories of John Rawls, H. L. A. Hart, and Andrew von Hirsch. It is argued that none of these theories successfully resolve the tensions. The prospects for resolving them are then discussed.

Jails in the United States hold both pre-trial detainees and persons convicted of less serious crimes. Jails are uniquely inhospitable institutions whose denizens are disproportionately socially marginalized, mentally ill, and struggling with problems of substance abuse. The case against jails consists of two parts: First, we should curtail the use of pre-trial detention. Accused persons who are justifiably detained should not be kept in punishment facilities, since they have not yet been convicted. Second, convicted offenders who are currently housed in jails should be dealt with in other ways. Most are not dangerous and will be returning to civil society in relatively short order. The focus should be on doing less harm to them and addressing their criminogenic needs.

The central aim of my dissertation is to consider the theoretical basis for the moral evaluation of character and the constituents of character. The latter are simply those traits that we commonly attribute to individuals, such as honesty, cruelty, sympathy, and the like. In general, I contend that an individual's character is to be evaluated by reference to the individual's orientation toward the dignity and well-being of human beings. Character traits that interfere with, impede, or destroy dignity and well-being are vices. Those traits that facilitate or promote dignity and well-being are virtues. Thus, a normative theory of character is an attempt to say which traits taken together will enable individuals to live in such a way as to respect the dignity and promote the well-being of themselves and others. ;In Chapter 1, I detail the complex nature of character traits, and argue that character is a dynamic, projective system of traits which determines how an individual will respond to a given situation. ;In Chapter 2, I briefly consider the moral evaluation of actions, suggesting that actions are to be evaluated by reference to the notions dignity and well-being. The latter is a by-product of the utilization of those physical and psychological capacities that rights protect. ;Chapter 3 aims at showing how traits can be evaluated by reference to the notions of dignity and well-being. I stress that no single virtue, or kind of virtue, is sufficient to guarantee that an individual is properly oriented toward the dignity and well-being of himself and others. Traits vary considerably in the nature of their bearing on dignity and well-being. ;I continue to develop these claims in Chapter 4 by considering several character types that are unsatisfactorily oriented toward the dignity and well-being of individuals. Though a character type may exhibit certain virtues, the vices present in it may render the overall orientation it represents ignoble and unappealing. By first considering a range of unsatisfactory orientations, I prepare the way for presentation of what I take to be the most satisfactory one

Arguing against most scholars of business ethics who have articulated a set of moral principles and applied them to problems faced by business people, Richard Lippke steers away from offering moral directives. In Radical Business Ethics, he develops a more comprehensive perspective on business issues that is tied to larger questions of social justice. Analyzing a select group of timely issues such as advertising, employee privacy, and insider trading in the context of debates about the nature of the just society, Lippke argues that the most plausible theory of justice is one whose implications are highly critical of many features of advanced capitalist societies. Radical Business Ethics will be an eye-opening book for students and scholars of ethics, and anyone interested in the role business plays in a just society

Steven Tudor defends the mitigation of criminal sentences in cases in which offenders are genuinely remorseful for their crimes. More than this, he takes the principle that such remorse-based sentence reductions are appropriate to be a ‘well-settled legal principle’—so well settled, in fact, that ‘it is among those deep-seated commitments which can serve to test general theories as much as they are tested by them’. However, his account of why remorse should reduce punishment is strongly philosophical in character. He sets to one side the many practical difficulties in implementing such reductions in the real world of criminal justice institutions so that he can focus on the question of whether a plausible account of sentencing can show that remorse should mitigate punishment. I contend that Tudor’s defense of such reductions is unpersuasive in certain respects. Yet even if it can be made more persuasive, I argue that the conditions that would have to be satisfied for remorse-based sentence reductions to be justifiably implemented are so many and various that they would likely exceed our abilities to responsibly grant them in real world legal contexts. I therefore claim that Tudor has failed to provide a defense of the ‘remorse principle’ that serves to explain or justify existing legal practices

The central premise is that a significant amount of sex offending stems from unusual or inappropriate sexual preferences that appear in early adolescence, are relatively stable, and immutable. In those ways, they are like more ordinary sexual preferences, generating sexual impulses that are insistent. Individuals are strongly tempted to act on them, alternatives to satisfying them are unfulfilling, and complete long-term control of such impulses is unlikely. Yet, since individuals with sexual preferences for inappropriate objects or activities are neither morally nor legally permitted to act on them, they find themselves in a terrific bind. The public is, to some extent, correct to not trust the individuals with such preferences and to attempt to monitor or control them. However, most such efforts appear ineffective and counterproductive. Recidivist sex offenders are particularly worrisome. The possibility of voluntary castration for such offenders, in lieu of preventive detention or other more restrictive measures, is explored

Critics charge that retributivists fail to show why the state should concern itself with ensuring that criminal offenders are punished in accordance with their ill deserts. Drawing on the notion that the state should attempt to equalize the realization of the interests designated by rights, it is argued that legal punishment restores the equality of condition, disrupted by criminal conduct, that all citizens are entitled to. While this equality of condition might be restored in various ways, it is argued that the imposition of punitive losses is the most appropriate way to restore it in most cases. An account of the ill deserts of offenders, as a function of the harms their crimes produce and the extent of their culpability for those harms, is briefly elaborated.

After discussing the interests that ground theright to democratic political participation,arguments for the disenfranchisement of thosewho commit serious criminal offenses areexamined. The arguments are divided into twogroups. The first group consists of argumentsthat are relatively independent of thejustifying aims of punishment. It is concededthat two of these arguments establish thatsome, though by no means all, serious offendersshould lose the vote for a period of time thatdoes not necessarily overlap with the durationof the other sanctions visited upon them. Thesearguments also imply that the state isjustified in attempting to exclude theoffenders in question from all forms ofpolitical participation, a position thatarguably runs afoul of moral limits onpunishment. The second group of arguments makesexplicit reference to the justifying aims ofpunishment. None supports the blanketdisenfranchisement of felons, though some mayjustify it in relation to some seriousoffenders for certain periods of time. All ofthe arguments supporting the disenfranchisementof serious offenders are most persuasive on theassumption that they live in reasonably justsocieties that are genuinely democratic. Ifthat assumption is false or questionable, thenit is argued that the force of such argumentsmay be weakened considerably.

Numerous legal theorists argue that corrective justice is distinct both conceptually and normatively from distributive justice. In particular, they contend that it is an error to view corrective justice as ancillary to distributive justice, necessary only to maintain or restore a preferred allocation of benefits and burdens. The specific arguments of these legal theorists are addressed and shown to be inconclusive in relation to what I term the Dependence Thesis. The Dependence Thesis holds that a normative account of the occasions of corrective justice is dependent on a larger theory of distributive justice. The nature of this dependence relation varies from theory to theory. The role of tort compensation schemes within libertarian, liberal egalitarian, and utilitarian theories of distributive justice is discussed. It is argued that such theories provide comprehensive and critical perspectives on historical corrective practices, neither simply endorsing nor invalidating them. An alternative normative account of the occasions of corrective justice, offered by legal theorists who support the autonomy of corrective justice from distributive justice, is also discussed.

This paper explores the issue of prisoners' rights. The conditions of incarcerated people in jails and prisons include psychological and physical deterioration brought on by their condition of confinement. The one sanction that has been debated extensively in the United States is the death penalty. Yet there are numerous losses or deprivations short of death that we might impose on legal offenders. In addition to broader issues such as the nature of rights and the basic moral rights possessed by individuals, issues specific to the rights of serious legal offenders are distinguished and discussed. The latter issues include whether offenders forfeit all or some of their moral rights, whether their retained rights are less stringent, whether the state has any obligation to facilitate exercise of their retained rights, and what specific rights prisoners retain or acquire.

It is well documented that the effects of legal punishment tend to drift to the family members, friends, and larger communities of convicted offenders. Instead of conceiving of punishment drift as incidental to legal punishment, or as merely foreseen but not intended by state authorities and thus permissible, I argue that efforts ought to be undertaken to limit or ameliorate it. Failure to confine punishment drift comes perilously close to punishment of the innocent and is at odds with other legal doctrines and broader penal practices that hold offenders, and offenders alone, responsible for their crimes. Numerous arguments urging tolerance of punishment drift, or more assertively defending it, are examined and found wanting.