•  95
    The Moral Weight of a Democratic Majority
    The Political Quarterly 92 (4): 691-698. 2021.
    It is a still-influential characteristic of liberal thought since Mill that it advances moral arguments for limiting the authority of a democratic majority. This article suggests several reasons for thinking that a numerical majority nevertheless has some, though not necessarily decisive, moral weight. At the core of these reasons is the principle that every individual citizen has equal moral standing, even when he or she belongs to a numerical majority.
  •  297
    Informed Altruism and Utilitarianism
    Social Theory and Practice 47 (4): 717-746. 2021.
    Utilitarianism is a consequentialist theory that assigns value impartially to the well-being of each person. Informed Altruism, introduced in this paper, is an intentionalist theory that relegates both consequentialism and impartiality to subordinate roles. It identifies morally right or commendable actions (including collective actions such as laws and policies) as those motivated by a sufficiently informed intention to benefit and not harm others. An implication of the theory is that multiple …Read more
  •  25
    J. R. R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life (review)
    The European Legacy 19 (3): 409-410. 2014.
  •  173
    The Intrinsic Good of Justice
    Ratio Juris 32 (2): 193-209. 2019.
    Some retributivists claim that when we punish wrongdoers we achieve a good: justice. The paper argues that the idea of justice, though rhetorically freighted with positive value, contains only a small core of universally-agreed meaning; and its development in a variety of competing conceptions simply recapitulates, without resolving, debates within the theory of punishment. If, to break this deadlock, we stipulate an expressly retributivist conception of justice, then we should concede that puni…Read more
  •  93
    Book Review: On Empson (review)
    The European Legacy 23 (7-8): 881-882. 2018.
    A review of Michael Wood's book, On Empson
  •  49
    Book Review: Moral appraisability: Puzzles, proposals and perplexities (review)
    Philosophical Review 109 (1): 132-135. 2000.
    Moral Appraisability is not quite such a good book as its confident and lucid introduction leads one to hope, but it is work of both substance and promise. Ishtiyaque Haji’s main project is to determine sufficient conditions for moral appraisability: that is, for the propriety of holding an agent praiseworthy or blameworthy for an action. Identifying three primary conditions—control, autonomy, and epistemic—he refines them with the aid of a meticulous analysis of recent discussions and a range o…Read more
  •  221
    Private revenge and its relation to punishment
    Utilitas 21 (1): 1-21. 2009.
    In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private revenge are rare in moral philosophy. This paper reviews some examples, from both classical and recent writers, finding uncertainty and equivocation over the ethical significance of acts of revenge, and in particular over their possible resemblances, in motive, purpose or justification, to acts of lawful punishment. A key problem for the coherence of our ethical conception of revenge is the considera…Read more
  •  14
    Book Review: Deontic Morality and Control (review)
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 1 (1): 112-115. 2004.
  •  56
    The Political Logic of Victim Impact Statements
    Criminal Justice Ethics 30 (1): 39-67. 2011.
    The paper examines three aspects of the debate over the introduction of victim impact statements (VIS) in criminal cases. The first is the challenge VIS presents to the wholly public conception of criminal justice, in which the offender is prosecuted, tried and punished in the name of the state and not the individual victim. The second is the claim by supporters of VIS that the enhancement of victim input contributes to repairing an imbalance between offender and victim, created by the crime its…Read more
  •  96
    Moore’s Moral Facts and the Gap in the Retributive Theory
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 5 (3): 361-376. 2011.
    The purely retributive moral justification of punishment has a gap at its centre. It fails to explain why the offender should not be protected from punishment by the intuitively powerful moral idea that afflicting another person (other than to avoid a greater harm) is always wrong. Attempts to close the gap have taken several different forms, and only one is discussed in this paper. This is the attempt to push aside the ‘protecting’ intuition, using some more powerful intuition specially invoked…Read more
  •  122
    Respect for just revenge
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 77 (2): 451-471. 2008.
    The paper considers acts of private (in the sense of individually motivated and extra-legal) revenge, and draws attention to a special kind of judgement we may make of such acts. While endorsing the general view that an act of private revenge must be morally wrong, it maintains that under certain special conditions (which include its being just) it is susceptible of a rational respect from others which is based on its standing outside morality, as a choice by the revenger not to act morally but …Read more
  •  156
    Fiction, emotion and ’belief’: A reply to Eva Schaper
    British Journal of Aesthetics 19 (2): 120-130. 1979.
    The paper argues that our emotions in response to fictional representations are best explained, not as requiring a suspension of disbelief, but as resembling the emotions we feel when we propound a hypothetical case to ourselves, such as the imagined happiness or suffering of ourselves or another. In reading fiction we voluntarily participate in a hypothesis represented by the work. If this explanation is accepted, we can retain the view that beliefs always entail commitment to the reality of wh…Read more
  •  44
    The Theory of the Offender's Forfeited Right
    Criminal Justice Ethics 34 (3): 259-283. 2015.
    In justifying punishment we sometimes appeal to the idea that the punished offender has, by his criminal action against others, forfeited his moral right (and therefore his legal right) against hard treatment by the state. The imposition of suffering, or deprivation of liberty, loses its prima facie morally objectionable character, and becomes morally permissible. Philosophers interrogating the forfeited right theory generally focus on whether the forfeiting of the right constitutes a necessary…Read more
  •  324
    Moral responsibility and "moral luck"
    Philosophical Review 104 (4): 499-524. 1995.
    This paper argues that "moral luck", understood as a susceptibility of moral desert to lucky or unlucky outcomes, does not exist. The argument turns on the claim that epistemic inquiry is an indissoluble part of moral responsibility, and that judgment on the moral decision making of others should and can adjust for this fact; test cases which aim to isolate moral dilemmas from epistemic consideration misrepresent our moral experience. If the phenomena believed by some philosophers to exemplify t…Read more
  •  80
    Reply to Silcox on Moral Luck
    Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (1): 109-113. 2009.
    In earlier work, I argued that examples supposed to substantiate consequential moral luck can lose their anomalous appearance if due account is taken of the moral obligation to discharge epistemic responsibilities, and of the different scope and focus of this obligation for the agent as contrasted with the observer. In his recent JMP article, Mark Silcox argues that my explanatory strategy is dependent on an unacceptable commitment to an ‘ineliminable epistemic gulf’ between first-person and thi…Read more
  •  53
    Irrecoverable intentions and literary interpretation
    British Journal of Aesthetics 37 (1): 15-30. 1997.
    The paper explores the relevance of irrecoverable authorial intentions to the interpretation of texts. It suggests that the ways in which different conventions of discourse take account of the existence of irrecoverable intentions (i.e. of the failure of texts perfectly to represent their authors' intentions) can guide us to a criterion for distinguishing 'literary' from 'non-literary' texts, or 'literary'(aesthetically motivated) from 'non-literary' readings of texts.
  •  27
    Book Review: The Unnatural Lottery (review)
    Philosophical Review 107 (2): 291-293. 1998.
    Claudia Card’s The Unnatural Lottery is a fluently written and intricately argued study of the importance of historical difference for moral thought and action. It moves from theoretical and methodological arguments, in which the philosophical interest of the work largely resides, into a series of applications, mainly in the field of sexual politics, which are always at least thought-provoking.
  •  33
    On Punishing Emotions
    Ratio Juris 16 (1): 37-55. 2003.
    This paper challenges recent influential arguments which would encourage legislators and courts to give weight to an assessment of the “evaluative judgements” expressed by the emotions which motivate crimes. While accepting the claim of Kahan and Nussbaum and others that emotions, other than moods, have intentional objects , and are not mere impulses which bypass cognition, it suggests the following criticisms of their analysis. First, the concept of an emotional “evaluative judgement” tends to …Read more
  •  177
    The historical contingency of aesthetic experience
    British Journal of Aesthetics 40 (1): 73-88. 2000.
    The paper seeks to defend the following view. Aesthetic experience is historically contingent. Each of us is situated at a unique point in space and time, from which standpoint we continuously imagine our personal, and our collective, history. Our experience of any object of aesthetic intention is susceptible of being influenced by associations, that is by our locating the contemplated object in relation to some part or parts of this imagined history. We should not be embarrassed by the role tha…Read more