Dimitri Landa

One of the most potent motivations for retributivist approaches to punishment has been their apparent connection to an ethical background shaped by the Kantian notion of morally autonomous and rational human agency. The present article challenges the plausibility of this connection. I argue that retributivism subverts, rather than embodies, the normative consequences of moral autonomy, justifying a social practice that conflicts with the considered judgments that the proper recognition of moral autonomy would authorize. The core of my case is the analysis of whether a punishment should be understood as a restriction of a criminal's freedom properly understood. I argue that the affirmative view faces serious difficulties that have not been, and are not likely to be, resolved by retributivist justifications that draw their support from Kantian moral theory

We re-examine the relationship between coordination, legal sanctions, and free-riding in light of the recent controversy regarding the applicability of the coordination problem paradigm of law-making. We argue that legal sanctions can help solve coordination problems by eliminating socially suboptimal equilibrium outcomes. Once coordination has taken place, however, free-riding can not lead to the breakdown of coordination outcomes, even if sanctions may still be effective at increasing the equity of such outcomes. Finally, we argue that it is the choice of a legal or constitutional system rather than the choice of law that is paradigmatic of the coordination problem. This view requires a re-assessment of the normative status of sanctions attached to individual laws.

We develop a theory of joint intention in contexts in which participants have mixed motives that can manifest in all-things-considered reasons to deviate from contributing to the desired project, e.g., contexts with collective action problems. Our theory is based on strategic equilibrium-based reasoning, which links the characterization of joint intention in terms of individual intentions with conditions on strategy profiles of the underlying strategic games. We use elements of equilibrium reasoning to construct a counterfactual account of joint intention in the mixed-motive contexts, which extends the reach of the notion of joint intention considerably beyond that of previous formulations

The central question of this dissertation is "what must a theory of political legitimacy for a morally pluralist society look like?" The key building blocks of the proposed answer are a morally cognitivist approach to moral belief; prima facie unconstrained moral pluralism; a "broad interpretation" of deliberation ; and the complex moral economy of a decision to participate in moral deliberation. It is argued that internally consistent moral theories that are compatible with moral cognitivism, the possibility of moral pluralism, and a robust belief in being "right" face critical challenges that culminate in the existence of a fundamental ambiguity in relation to the interpretation of an empirical disagreement. The proposed approach to addressing these challenges is a specie of epistemic proceduralism. However, rather than relying for its epistemic claim on the force of the Condorcet Jury Theorem, it advances an alternative "error-elimination" model of political justification. The independent plausibility of this model relies on the existence of two distinct kinds of moral errors that could be incurred in a cognitivist political justification: those avoidable through deliberation and those that are unaffected by it. The epistemic force of the model is, inter alia, in its sanctioning of political institutions that affect the incentives for individual deliberative participation and, hence, the minimization of avoidable errors