•  570
    Criminal Justice without Retribution
    Journal of Philosophy 106 (8): 440-462. 2009.
  •  317
    Injustice and the right to punish
    with Göran Duus-Otterström
    Philosophy Compass 14 (2). 2019.
    Injustice can undermine the standing states have to blame criminal offenders, and this raises a difficulty for a range of punishment theories that depend on a state's moral authority. When a state lacks the moral authority that flows from political legitimacy, its right to punish criminal lawbreakers cannot depend on a systematic claim about the legitimacy of the law. Instead, an unjust state is permitted to punish only criminal acts whose wrongness is established directly by morality, and only …Read more
  •  153
    On tolerating the unreasonable
    Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (1). 2001.
    Philosophy, Tufts University, USA.
  •  130
    Hume’s moral philosophy is a sentiment-based view. Moral judgment is a matter of the passions; certain traits of character count as virtues or vices because of the approval or disapproval they evoke in us, feelings that express concern we have about the social effects of these traits. A sentiment-based approach is attractive, since morality seems fundamentally to involve caring for other people. Sentiment-based views, however, face a real challenge. It is clear that our affections are often part…Read more
  •  90
    Doing without desert
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 83 (2). 2002.
    The idea of ‘moral responsibility’ is typically linked with praise and blame, and with the notion of ‘the voluntary’. It is often thought that if we are free, in the relevant sense, we may “deserve” praise or blame; otherwise, we do not. But when we look at whether and why we need the notions of praise and blame, we find that they are not as intimately connected with desert as many philosophers have thought. In particular, this paper challenges the idea that forms of evaluation and behavior tied…Read more
  •  76
    Liberal political philosophers have underestimated the philosophical relevance of historical injustice. For some groups, injustices from the past—particularly surrounding race, ethnicity, or religion—are a source of entrenched social inequality decades or even hundreds of years later. Rawls does not advocate the importance of redressing historical injustice, yet political liberalism needs a principle of historical redress. Rawls’s principle of fair equality of opportunity, which is designed to p…Read more
  •  60
    Prisoner's mistrust
    Ratio 20 (1). 2007.
    The standard, non‐repeated prisoner's dilemma poses no true dilemma about rationality, we argue. What the prisoners ought rationally to do, unless they are selfless, depends on the relationship of trust that they have or lack with one another. This helps to diffuse the apparent conflict between individual and collective rationality. If the prisoners have reason to trust one another, pursuing a joint strategy would be rational for them. In the absence of trust, pursuing an individual strategy wou…Read more
  •  60
    Tommie Shelby argues that social injustice undermines the moral standing states would have, were they just, to condemn criminal wrongdoers. He makes a good argument, but he does not go far enough to reject the blaming function of punishment. Shelby’s argument from “impure dissent,” in particular, helps to demonstrate the limits of blame in criminal justice.
  •  56
    From Retributive to Restorative Justice
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 15 (2): 237-247. 2021.
    I am very grateful to Justin Coates, Adina Roskies, and Costanza Porro for their thoughtful and challenging comments on my book, The Limits of Blame: Rethinking Punishment and Responsibility. My response is organized around their discussion of four main topics: moral competence, proportionality, restorative justice, and excessive punishment.
  •  53
    Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. The author underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indic…Read more
  •  47
    Tolerance: Between Forbearance and Acceptance
    Philosophical Review 112 (2): 266-269. 2003.
    Multiculturalism is not a flag that political philosophers seem eager to wave these days. Conservatives complain about the supposedly hazardous effects of the notion that non-Western societies have ideas and ways of life that are worthy enough to compete with those of Western societies for study and respect. Progressives worry that multiculturalism can be too uncritical of certain non-Western attitudes, especially about the nature and role of women. Perhaps this helps to explain why Hans Oberdie…Read more
  •  37
    Desert and Fairness in Criminal Justice
    Philosophical Topics 40 (1): 63-77. 2012.
    Moral condemnation has become the public narrative of our criminal justice practices, but the distribution of criminal sanctions is not and should not be guided by judgments of what individual wrongdoers morally deserve. Criteria for evaluating a person’s liability to criminal sanctions are general standards that are influenced by how we understand the relative social urgency and priority of reducing crimes of various types. These standards thus depend on considerations that are not a matter of …Read more
  •  32
    Is blame warranted in applying justice?
    Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 26 (1): 71-87. 2023.
    The belief that people convicted of crimes deserve punishment is commonplace. Yet the punitive conception of individual responsibility commonly associated with ‘just deserts’ exaggerates the moral meaning of criminal guilt, normalizes excessive punishment, and distracts from shared responsibility for social injustice. The problem is, many people who get caught up in the criminal justice system cannot reasonably be thought to deserve their fate. Mental illness, intellectual disability, addiction,…Read more
  •  30
    Rethinking Criminal Justice
    Res Philosophica 97 (2): 169-183. 2020.
    The punitive, moralizing conception of individual responsibility commonly associated with retributive justice exaggerates the moral meaning of criminal guilt. Criminal guilt does not imply moral desert, nor does it justify moral blame. Mental illness, intellectual disability, addiction, immaturity, poverty, and racial oppression are factors that mitigate our sense of a wrongdoer’s moral desert, though they are mostly not treated by the criminal justice system as relevant to criminal culpability.…Read more
  •  24
    Law and Institutional Legitimacy in the Practice of Human Rights
    Law and Philosophy 36 (2): 155-168. 2017.
    The Heart of Human Rights develops an account of human rights as legal entities that serve important moral purposes in a legitimate international human rights practice. This paper examines Allen Buchanan’s general concept of institutional legitimacy and aims to expand that concept by emphasizing its connection with several ideas developed in the book about the nature and function of a system of international human rights. When it incorporates those ideas, Buchanan’s ‘Metacoordination View’ can b…Read more
  •  13
    Gideon Yaffe argues that children should be treated as less culpable by the criminal justice system because children have little political say over the law. I analyze several elements of Yaffe’s argument and express qualified agreement with his thesis. Though I reject the role he assigns to the notions of desert and legal reasons, I agree that people who lack political power are less accountable to the criminal justice system’s legal authorities.
  •  12
    Redress and Reparations for Injurious Wrongs
    Law and Philosophy 41 (1): 105-125. 2021.
    In Recognizing Wrongs, John C. P. Goldberg and Benjamin C. Zipursky develop and defend “civil recourse theory,” according to which torts are injurious wrongs that give rise to a claim of redress. My discussion extends beyond tort law to explore the ethics of reparations for historical injustice, in particular, regarding the case of Black Americans. I begin by relating the notion of wrongdoing that figures prominently in civil recourse theory to morality. Then I explore the idea that the relevant…Read more
  •  10
    Accountability in criminal justice
    Journal of Social Philosophy. forthcoming.
    Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.
  •  10
    This book brings together a team of leading theorists to address the question 'What is the right measure of justice?' Some contributors, following Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum, argue that we should focus on capabilities, or what people are able to do and to be. Others, following John Rawls, argue for focussing on social primary goods, the goods which society produces and which people can use. Still others see both views as incomplete and complementary to one another. Their essays evaluate the…Read more
  •  7
    Gendered Challenge, Gendered Response: Confronting the Ideal Worker Norm in a White-Collar Organization
    with Phyllis Moen, Kelly Chermack, and Samantha K. Ammons
    Gender and Society 24 (3): 281-303. 2010.
    This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative, the Results-Only Work Environment, implemented in the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations “accommodate” individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinize…Read more
  •  2
    Inequality, Difference, and Prospects for Democracy
    In Jon Mandle & David A. Reidy (eds.), A Companion to Rawls, Wiley. 2013.
    Rawls's signature is the thought experiment he introduced to sort out the requirements of justice. Rawls argues that “justice as fairness” will be a form of political liberalism. Rawls claims that under free institutions we should expect “profound and irreconcilable differences” in people's religious and philosophical worldviews, and in people's basic notions of what makes life worth living. In his vision of democracy, the solidarity required to support common political values and egalitarian no…Read more
  • 13 Against Naturalism in Ethics
    In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question, Harvard University Press. pp. 259-274. 2004.