Jeffrey Howard

Should governments pay ransoms to terrorist organisations that unjustly kidnap their citizens? The United Kingdom and the United States refuse to negotiate with terrorist groups that kidnap and threaten to kill their people. In contrast, continental European countries, such as France and Germany, have regularly paid ransoms to rescue hostages. Who is right? This debate has raged in the public domain in recent years, but no sustained attempt has been made to subject the matter to philosophical scrutiny. This article explores this issue, focusing on the case of ransom payments to terrorist organisations. It contends that the state's duty to protect its citizens from murder grounds a defeasible obligation to pay ransoms. It considers the objection that a policy of paying ransoms endangers citizens abroad by increasing the likelihood of future kidnappings, and it explains why this objection is not sufficiently weighty. It then identifies a more powerful objection: namely, that a state's payment of ransoms makes the state complicit in the serious injustices that its ransom payments fund. It concludes that unless states can offset their contributions to such injustices, paying ransoms is wrong.

Why, exactly, should we punish children who commit crimes more leniently than adults who commit the same offenses? Gideon Yaffe thinks it is because they cannot vote, and so the strength of their reasons to obey the law is weaker than if they could. They are thus less culpable when they disobey. This argument invites an obvious objection: why not simply enfranchise children, thereby granting them legal reasons that are the same strength as enfranchised adults, and so permitting similarly severe punishment? Yaffe answers this question by arguing that child enfranchisement would objectionably undermine the values of political equality and self-government. This article explores some serious doubts about these arguments. It closes by questioning Yaffe’s reliance on a retributivist theory of punishment, contending that, once we reject retributivism in favor of more humane and productive alternatives, the thesis that child criminals deserve a break—which Yaffe assumes to be undeniably correct—becomes less plausible.

© 2015 by The American Association of Immunologists, Inc. Acute respiratory distress syndrome is a devastating disorder characterized by increased alveolar permeability with no effective treatment beyond supportive care. Current mechanisms underlying ARDS focus on alveolar endothelial and epithelial injury caused by products of innate immune cells and platelets. However, the role of adaptive immune cells in ARDS remains largely unknown. In this study, we report that expansion of Ag-specific abTh17 cells contributes to ARDS by local secretion of IL-17A, which in turn directly increases alveolar epithelial permeability. Mice with a highly restrictive defect in Ag-specific αβTh17 cells were protected from experimental ARDS induced by a single dose of endotracheal LPS. Loss of IL-17 receptor C or Ab blockade of IL-17A was similarly protective, further suggesting that IL-17A released by these cells was responsible for this effect. LPS induced a rapid and specific clonal expansion of αβTh17 cells in the lung, as determined by deep sequencing of the hypervariable CD3RβVJ region of the TCR. Our findings could be relevant to ARDS in humans, because we found significant elevation of IL-17A in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid from patients with ARDS, and rIL-17A directly increased permeability across cultured human alveolar epithelial monolayers. These results reveal a previously unexpected role for adaptive immune responses that increase alveolar permeability in ARDS and suggest that abTh17 cells and IL-17A could be novel therapeutic targets for this currently untreatable disease.

The proposal that the criminal justice system should focus on rehabilitation – rather than retribution, deterrence, or expressive denunciation – is among the least popular ideas in legal philosophy. Foremost among rehabilitation’s alleged weaknesses is that it views criminals as blameless patients to be treated, rather than culpable moral agents to be held accountable. This article offers a new interpretation of the rehabilitative approach that is immune to this objection and that furnishes the moral foundation that this approach has lacked. The view rests on the principle that moral agents owe it to one another to maintain the dependability of their moral capacities. Agents who culpably commit criminal wrongs, however, betray an unacceptable degree of moral unreliability. Punishment, on this theory, consists in the enforcement of the duties that offenders have to reduce their own likelihood of recidivism.

The idea that victims of social injustice who commit crimes ought not to be subject to punishment has attracted serious attention in recent legal and political philosophy. R. A. Duff has argued, for example, a states that perpetrates social injustice lacks the standing to punish victims of such injustice who commit crimes. A crucial premiss in his argument concerns the fact that when courts in liberal society mete out legitimate criminal punishments, they are conceived as acting in the name of all citizens—on behalf of the whole political community. Resisting this premiss, Peter Chau has suggested that courts ought to be conceived as acting only in the name of “just citizens”: citizens who cannot be plausibly seen as having contributed to distributive injustice. When conceived in this way, Chau argues, courts can no longer plausibly be regarded as lacking standing to punish. This article uses the debate between Duff and Chau to explain why the question of whether to punish socially deprived offenders can only be answered adequately when connected to broader concerns of democratic theory. Specifically, it argues that Chau’s proposal is not available within the context of the kind of political community upon which (Duff rightly believes) a system of liberal criminal law depends for its justification and maintenance: a community in which citizens see the law as embodying shared norms whose specific demands they disagree about. State officials are morally permitted to see themselves as acting on behalf of a subset of the citizenry, I argue, only in circumstances of democratic crisis : circumstances in which a moral community can no longer be plausibly said to exist