•  218
    I shall argue that advocates of denunciatory forms of expressivism can make a good case for restricting the range of measures that can be an appropriate form of punishment. They can do so by focusing not on the conditions of uptake of the message conveyed by punishment, but by the content of that message. For it is plausible that part of that message should be that the offender is a responsible agent and a member of the political community. Forms of punishment which do not treat the offender as …Read more
  •  17
  •  16
    Expressive Theories of Punishment
    In Matthew C. Altman (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 245-265. 2022.
    In this chapter, Wringe considers expressivist accounts of punishment with particular emphasis on the work of Joel Feinberg, Jean Hampton, and Antony Duff. After distinguishing between definitional and justificatory versions of expressivism and examining the case for definitional expressivism, Zaibert argues first that a recognition of the expressive functions of punishment does not require us to accept an expressive definition of punishment. He also argues that the best-known versions of justif…Read more
  • Global obligations and the human right to health
    In Kendy Hess, Violetta Igneski & Tracy Lynn Isaacs (eds.), Collectivity: Ontology, Ethics, and Social Justice, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2018.
  •  396
    Non‐paradigmatic punishments
    Philosophy Compass 17 (5). 2022.
    Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 5, May 2022.
  •  20
    Introduction: Nonparadigmatic Punishments
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (3): 357-365. 2021.
    This is an introduction to the Symposium on Nonparadigmatic Forms of Punishment. We explain what we mean by calling certain instances of punishment 'nonparadigmatic' and explain why nonparadigmatic punishments are of philosophical interest. We then introduce the contributions to the Special Issue and conclude by outlining directions that future research on nonparadigmatic punishment might take. We focus on three particular ways in which punishment might be nonparadigmatic: cases involving nonsta…Read more
  •  203
    Punishing Noncitizens
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 38 (3): 384-400. 2020.
    In this paper, I discuss a distinctively non-paradigmatic instance of punishment: the punishment of non-citizens. I shall argue that the punishment of non-citizens presents considerable difficulties for one currently popular account of criminal punishment: Antony Duff’s communicative expressive theory of punishment. Duff presents his theory explicitly as an account of the punishment of citizens - and as I shall argue, this is not merely an incidental feature of his account. However, it is plau…Read more
  •  274
    Global Obligations and the Human Right to Health
    In Isaacs Tracy, Hess Kendy & Igneski Violetta (eds.), Collective Obligation: Ethics, Ontology and Applications, . forthcoming.
    In this paper I attempt to show how an appeal to a particular kind of collective obligation - a collective obligation falling on an unstructured collective consisting of the world’s population as a whole – can be used to undermine recently influential objections to the idea that there is a human right to health which have been put forward by Gopal Sreenivasan and Onora O’Neill. I take this result to be significant both for its own sake and because it helps to answer a challenge often put to T…Read more
  •  598
    Thomas Pogge has argued, famously, that ‘we’ are violating the rights of the global poor insofar as we uphold an unjust international order which provides a legal and economic framework within which individuals and groups can and do deprive such individuals of their lives, liberty and property. I argue here that Pogge’s claim that we are violating a negative duty can only be made good on the basis of a substantive theory of collective action; and that it can only provide substantive ethical gui…Read more
  •  9
    Can Visual Experience have a Propositional Content?
    Proceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 57 151-155. 2018.
    Call the view that perceptual states can have propositional contents the ‘propositional view’ - or PV for short. Proponents of PV include John McDowell and Susanna Siegel; Anil Gupta and Charles Travis are prominent opponents. In this paper, I wish to address an argument against PV put forward by Anil Gupta. Gupta argues that the conjunction of PV with two further claims, which he calls the ‘Equivalence constraint’ and the ‘reliability constraint’, leads to skepticism. I shall argue that even if…Read more
  •  23
    Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by ph…Read more
  •  523
    Global obligations, collective capacities, and ‘ought implies can’
    Philosophical Studies 177 (6): 1523-1538. 2020.
    It is sometimes argued that non-agent collectives, including what one might call the ‘global collective’ consisting of the world’s population taken as a whole, cannot be the bearers of non-distributive moral obligations on pain of violating the principle that ‘ought implies can’. I argue that one prominent line of argument for this conclusion fails because it illicitly relies on a formulation of the ‘ought implies can’ principle which is inapt for contexts which allow for the possibility of non-…Read more
  •  39
    Punishment, Jesters and Judges: a Response to Nathan Hanna
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (1): 3-12. 2019.
    Nathan Hanna has recently argued against a position I defend in a 2013 paper in this journal and in my 2016 book on punishment, namely that we can punish someone without intending to harm them. In this discussion note I explain why two alleged counterexamples to my view put forward by Hanna are not in fact counterexamples to any view I hold, produce an example which shows that, if we accept a number of Hanna’s own assumptions, punishment does not require an intention to harm, and discuss whether…Read more
  •  196
    Punishment, Judges and Jesters: A Reply to Nathan Hanna
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. forthcoming.
    Nathan Hanna has recently addressed a claim central to my 2013 article ‘Must Punishment Be Intended to Cause Suffering’ and to the second chapter of my 2016 book An Expressive Theory of Punishment: namely, that punishment need not involve an intention to cause suffering. Hanna defends what he calls the ‘Aim To Harm Requirement’ (AHR), which he formulates as follows. AHR: ‘an agent punishes a subject only if the agent intends to harm the subject’ (Hanna 2017 p969). I’ll try to show in this note …Read more
  •  1676
    In this paper I discuss a number of different relationships between two kinds of obligation: those which have individuals as their subject, and those which have groups of individuals as their subject. I use the name collective obligations to refer to obligations of the second sort. I argue that there are collective obligations, in this sense; that such obligations can give rise to and explain obligations which fall on individuals; that because of these facts collective obligations are not simply…Read more
  •  612
    Many philosophers hold that punishment has an expressive dimension. Advocates of expressive theories have different views about what makes punishment expressive, what kinds of mental states and what kinds of claims are, or legitimately can be expressed in punishment, and to what kind of audience or recipients, if any, punishment might express whatever it expresses. I shall argue that in order to assess the plausibility of an expressivist approach to justifying punishment we need to pay careful a…Read more
  •  31
    Posidonije o emocijama i nekonceptualnom sadržaju
    Prolegomena 10 (2): 185-213. 2011.
    In this paper I argue that the work of the unorthodox Stoic Posidonius - as reported to us by Galen - can be seen as making an interesting contribution to contemporary debates about the nature of emotion. Richard Sorabji has already argued that Posidonius' contribution highlights the weaknesses in some well-known contemporary forms of cognitivism. Here I argue that Posidonius might be seen as advocating a theory of the emotions which sees them as being, in at least some cases, two-level intentio…Read more
  •  21
  •  81
    Collective Agents and Communicative Theories of Punishment
    Journal of Social Philosophy 43 (4): 436-456. 2012.
    This paper considers the applicability of expressive theories of punishment to the punishment of corporate entities. The author argues that although arguments which suggest that the denunciatory account is superior to a communicative account in paradigmatic cases of punishment cannot be transferred straightforwardly to cover this kind of case, there are other reasons, connected with the different attitudes we have to regret and remorse in individual and collective cases, for preferring a communi…Read more
  •  838
    May I Treat A Collective As A Mere Means
    American Philosophical Quarterly 51 (3): 273-284. 2014.
    According to Kant, it is impermissible to treat humanity as a mere means. If we accept Kant's equation of humanity with rational agency, and are literalists about ascriptions of agency to collectives it appears to follow that we may not treat collectives as mere means. On most standard accounts of what it is to treat something as a means this conclusion seems highly implausible. I conclude that we are faced with a range of options. One would be to rethink the equation of humanity with rationalit…Read more
  •  15
    Simulation, Co‐cognition, and the Attribution of Emotional States
    European Journal of Philosophy 11 (3): 354-374. 2003.
  •  58
    Needs and Moral Necessity – Soran Reader
    Philosophical Quarterly 60 (241): 882-884. 2010.
    This is a review of Soran Reader's monograph 'Needs and Moral Necessity'. Although my response to her book is largely positive, I have reservations about her views of the scope of the ethical, and the coherence of her views with the McIntyrean concept of practice which she espouses.
  •  628
    From Global Collective Obligations to Institutional Obligations
    Midwest Studies in Philosophy 38 (1): 171-186. 2014.
    According to Wringe 2006 we have good reasons for accepting the existence of Global Collective Obligations - in other words, collective obligations which fall on the world’s population as a whole. One such reason is that the existence of such obligations provides a plausible solution a problem which is sometimes thought to arise if we think that individuals have a right to have their basic needs satisfied. However, obligations of this sort would be of little interest – either theoretical or pr…Read more
  •  778
    Several philosophers think there are important analogies between emotions and perceptual states. Furthermore, considerations about the rational assessibility of emotions have led philosophers—in some cases, the very same philosophers—to think that the content of emotions must be propositional content. If one finds it plausible that perceptual states have propositional contents, then there is no obvious tension between these views. However, this view of perception has recently been attacked by ph…Read more
  •  624
    Ambivalence for Cognitivists: A Lesson from Chrysippus?
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 6 (1): 147-156. 2017.
    Ambivalence—where we experience two conflicting emotional responses to the same object, person or state of affairs—is sometimes thought to pose a problem for cognitive theories of emotion. Drawing on the ideas of the Stoic Chrysippus, I argue that a cognitivist can account for ambivalence without retreating from the view that emotions involve fully-fledged evaluative judgments. It is central to the account I offer that emotions involve two kinds of judgment: one about the object of emotion, and …Read more
  •  117
    This chapter applies insights from the expressive theory of punishment to the case of the punishment of war criminals by international tribunals. Wringe argues that although such cases are not paradigmatic cases of punishment, the denunciatory account can still cast light on them. He argues that war criminals can be seen as members of an international community for which international tribunals can act as a spokesperson. He also argues that in justifying the punishment lof war criminals we shoul…Read more