Jonathan Jacobs

Religious traditions can be sources of values and attitudes supporting the liberal polity in ways that political theorizing and conceptions of public reason often fail to recognize. moreover, religious traditions can give support through the ways reason is crucial to their self-understanding. one understanding of Judaism is examined as an example. Also, the particularism of traditions can encourage commitment to universally valid values and ideals. reason’s role in Judaism and other religious traditions makes possible constructive interaction between those traditions and between religious and secular thought. exclusion of religiously grounded considerations from the discourse and deliberations of liberal polities can be counterproductively illiberal.

The main claim in this paper is that because organisms have teleological constitutions, the reduction of biology to physical science is not possible. It is argued that the teleology of organisms is intrinsic and not merely projected onto them. Many organic phenomena are end-oriented and reference to ends is necessary for explaining them. Accounts in terms of functions or goals are appropriate to organic parts and processes. siis is because ends as systemic requirements for survival and health have explanatory significance with respect to the processes that contribute to and constitute them. Reductionism cannot accommodate this sort of higher-level to lower-level explanation and so cannot account for why lower-level phenomena are as they are. Reductionism, it is claimed, is ultimately descriptive and not explanatory because it cannot regard teleological requirements as themselves basic. In seeking to explain them away it forfeits explanatory power.

Are there key respects in which character and character defects are voluntary? Can agents with serious vices be rational agents? Jonathan Jacobs answers in the affirmative. Moral character is shaped through voluntary habits, including the ways we habituate ourselves, Jacobs believes. Just as individuals can voluntarily lead unhappy lives without making unhappiness an end, so can they degrade their ethical characters through voluntary action that does not have establishment of vice as its end. Choosing Character presents an account of ethical disability, expanding the domain of responsibility and explicating the role of character in ethical cognition. Jacobs contends that agents become ethically disabled voluntarily when their habits impair their ability to properly appreciate ethical considerations. Such agents are rational, responsible individuals who are yet incapable of virtuous action. The view develops and modifies Aristotelian claims concerning the fixity of character. Jacobs' interpretation is developed in contrast to the overlooked work of Maimonides, who also used Aristotelian resources but argued for the possibility of character change. The notion of ethical disability has profound ramifications for ethics and for current debates about blame and punishment.

Many of the basic elements of Maimonides' moral psychology are Aristotelian, but there are some important respects in which Maimonides departs from Aristotle. One of those respect concerns the possibility of changing one's character. There is, according to Maimonides, redemptive possibility that Aristotle does not recognize. There is, according to Maimonides, a redemptive possibility that Aristotle does not recognize. This is based on the fact of revealed law. That is, if there is revealed law, then there is guidance for the ordering of one's dispositions to what is good, even though the individual lacks practical wisdom. There is, in the Maimonidean account, both allowance for more plasticity of character, and at the same time a heightened responsibility for acknowledging what is ethically required

The notions of autonomy and self-governance each capture something crucial about the moral dimensions of agents and actions. These notions are central to the ways in which we conceptualize ourselves and others. The concept of autonomy is especially crucial to understanding the distinct status of moral agents. For its part, self-governance has a significant relation to the evaluation of agents as individuals with particular characters, leading particular sorts of lives, and performing particular actions. Neither notion—autonomy nor self-governance—fully assimilates or dominates the other. Moreover, there are some important strains between them. There are certain forms of regard that the autonomy of an agent demands that are at odds with what an agent's exercise of self-governance merits. In this essay I plan to show this, and offer a diagnosis of why this is the case

There are several reasonable conceptions of liberalism. A liberal polity can survive a measure of disagreement over just what constitutes liberalism. In part, this is because of the way a liberal order makes possible a dynamic, heterogeneous civil society and how that, in turn, can supply participants with reasons to support a liberal political order. Despite the different conceptions of justice associated with different conceptions of liberalism, there are reasons to distinguish the normative focus of criminal justice from other aspects of justice in a liberal polity. Given the fundamental commitments of liberalism?of whatever variant?there are reasons for criminal justice not to be assimilated to wider conceptions of justice overall. Such assimilation risks undermining some of liberalism's distinctive commitments concerning the standing of individuals as voluntary, responsible agents. Criminal justice is not independent of other aspects of justice but has a distinct focus in a liberal polity

The main claims are the following. If we keep before us the distinction between the justification of punishment and its aims, we see that retribution is not an aim of punishment, and that there is a central place for retributivist considerations in the justification of punishment. Justifications based upon aims or consequentialist considerations suffer from a serious epistemic vulnerability not shared by retributivism. There are ethically sound sentiments that underwrite retributivist justification, and it would be a mistake to redeploy those sentiments. The ethical authority of those sentiments justifies punitive sanction. Retributivist justification is compatible with consequentialist aims

THERE IS AN IMPORTANT RESPECT in which virtue-centered ethical realism needs to be more Aristotelian than it is typically willing to admit. This concerns the way in which teleological considerations need to be more explicitly acknowledged. Reflection on moral phenomenology, discourse, and practice supports realism and also reveals that teleological considerations cannot be entirely disowned by it. The teleology is not a grand teleology, however; it is not the view that there is a unique perfection of human nature, and it is not the view that ethics is read off of a teleological metaphysics. On the other hand, this is not just the teleology of this and that particular subjective project, concern, or purposive action.

Recent developments in philosophy and in criminology indicate that there are significant respects in which the two disciplines can be mutually informing. Many philosophers are increasingly interested in exploring empirical aspects of philosophical claims, and criminologists are finding their way past the alleged fact/value distinction and are rediscovering the moral significance of facts, especially regarding punishment and desistance. In some recent criminological studies there are implicit links to the British moralists such as David Hume and Adam Smith, and to Aristotle as well. This paper explicates those links and some of the possibilities for philosophy and criminology to be mutually informing.

The article explores an intersection of moral psychology and political principles regarding criminal sanction. A liberal state cannot require that persons acquire certain states of character or lead certain specific kinds of lives; it cannot require virtue. Moreover, it would be wrong for the state to punish offenders in ways that damage their capacities for agency, and in ways that encourage vice. In the U.S. the terms and conditions of punishment often have deleterious effects on agential capacities, undermining the ability to reintegrate in civil society. Prison experience is often antithetical to maintaining or acquiring the dispositions of prudence, accountability, trust, and trustworthiness needed for participation in civil society, raising significant questions concerning the legitimacy of punishment.

Maimonides uses Aristotelian philosophical idiom to articulate his moral philosophy, but there are fundamental differences between his and Aristotle’s conceptions of moral psychology and the nature of the moral agent. The Maimonidean conception of volition and its role in repentance and ethical self-correction are quite un-Aristotelian. The relation between this capacity to alter one’s character and the accessibility of ethical requirements given in the Law is explored. This relation helps explain why for Maimonides practical wisdom is not recognized as a virtue, and why ethical perfection (a requirement for human perfection) is achievable even by those long-established in ethically unsound dispositions. The power of will to “restore the soul” (by following the prescriptions of the Law) when character is disordered is a significant departure from Aristotelian philosophical anthropology.

Are principles of criminal justice derived from a broader conception of justice, or does criminal justice involve some of its own distinctive principles such that it is not—for example—an aspect of distributive justice? Examining considerations regarding luck and desert provides an illuminating approach to this issue. The notion of desert has largely been excised from a great deal of recent political theorizing, and in particular, it has been eliminated from many influential conceptions of distributive justice. It is widely held that the pervasiveness of luck renders desert inappropriate to contexts of distributive justice, and incompatible with the freedom and equality of persons in a just political community. Should considerations of desert also have a minimal role in criminal justice—where they seem to still be important? Are considerations of desert in the context of criminal justice consistent with persons being free and equal participants in a just political community? How are principles of criminal justice related to principles of distributive justice and political justice in an overall just society? Many scholars agree that criminal justice presupposes an adequately just society. Still, that leaves open just how criminal justice relates to justice overall. That is the present topic.

It is only for persons that the question, “How shall I live?” arises, and it arises inevitably, even if in an inarticulate and unreflective manner. Persons must deliberate, decide, plan, and schedule their actions. Openness with respect to ends confronts them, and they must structure and direct their lives by determining what sort of career to trace out, even if it proves to be a career of routine or unambitious undertakings. Circumstances can constrain and compel, and the openness persons confront can be closed off by external factors. But it is intrinsic to the nature of persons that the exercise of capacities for thought and action may be directed this way or that. There are perhaps nonpersons whose activity is to be explained with reference to beliefs and desires. But even if they act in an end-directed way, they do not experience openness with respect to ends and do not order and orient their life histories by deliberative considerations.

A great deal is compressed into this passage; pleasure is associated in important ways with our nature; it has a crucial role in moral education; we can be pleased and displeased correctly or incorrectly, and this has a place in making character; and pleasure is something that matters all through a human life. Some of the themes are introduced and discussed at earlier places in the Ethics; some receive fuller treatment in book 10. The idea that some things are naturally pleasant and that the virtuous find pleasure in the correct things first occurrs in book 1. The centrality of pleasure to Aristotle's ethical inquiry is perhaps not obvious right away, but it is unmistakable when the Ethics is considered as a whole. Its relation to good is fundamental.

Aristotle's ethical theorizing contains resources for explaining what I call ‘ethical disability’. In theories such as Kant's and Mill's it is important that criteria of right action be accessible to anyone. Aristotle's moral psychology yields a plausible account of how they are not available to everyone. Unless a correct appreciation of good is part of the agent's second nature, the agent will not recognize ethical requirements, and will not have the resources to alter his judgments. Often, bad action is not a matter of agents' flouting or violating criteria of right action that they recognize, but is a matter of agents' regarding as choiceworthy things that are in fact no good, and the agents are unable to appreciate this because of their vices. However, on the Aristotelian view, this is not a condition that diminishes responsibility, because of how voluntariness is interpreted. Some of the views of Susan Wolf and Bernard Williams are discussed in the development of this view of the moral landscape.

Blame and also punishment do not reach many agents in the sense that many agents are not motivated to ethically self‐correct, and in fact, may be worsened by these practices. The main reasons agents may not be reached by them are that the agent's second nature may make inaccessible to him a sound appreciation of ethical considerations, and the fixity of mature character may make ethical self‐correction practically impossible. Still, when they are ethically rationalized, blame and punishment seem to be requirements. Even the most plausible secular or naturalistic ethics involves an important kind of incompleteness and unclarity concerning this issue. The Jewish and Christian traditions involve conceptions of the accessibility of ethical considerations and also the possibility of character change in ways that enable us to overcome the perplexity about blame and punishment. They are not ‘good for nothing’ even when they fail to improve agents. The religious traditions' conceptions of moral agency and the possibility of perfection enable us to see why there are reasons not to ethically ‘write off’ even persistently vicious agents. Moreover, we can see that the fulfilling of ethical requirements is an enabling condition for perfection that is not merely ethical. To highlight the contrast between the naturalistic view and the theistic view, Aristotle's moral psychology and moral epistemology are contrasted with those of Maimonides and Aquinas, both of whom borrow heavily from Aristotle, but fundamentally transform what they borrow

This article identifies a common intellectual project of the disciplines that constitute the Humanities. It does not define the humanities but characterizes some of the main features of the distinctive and essential kind of learning uniquely attainable by their study. The humanities enable us to attain an understanding of normativity in the broadest sense; humanistic study leads to a textured, penetrating comprehension of diverse valuative matters and concerns. Moreover, study in the humanities enables us to recognize and appreciate valuative realism . This is the view that valuative matters are appropriate objects of comprehension and that values are not simply projected in an expressivist or subjectivist manner. Valuative realism does not depend upon, and should not be assimilated into, knowledge that emulates the methods of the sciences. Humane studies develop a genuine understanding of diverse kinds of significance and educate people in the concepts and discourse to articulate it