Matt Matravers

New Books on Philosophy of Religion Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks By Nicholas Wolterstorff, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. 326. ISBN 0–521–47557–0. $18.95 (pbk). The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incamational Narrative as History By C. Stephen Evans, Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 386. ISBN 0–19–826397‐X $17.95 (pbk). Consciousness and the Mind of God By Charles Taliaferro, Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. 349. ISBN 0–521–46173–1. $65.00 (hbk). Wittgenstein and Quine By Robert L. Arrington and Hans‐Johann Glock (eds) Routledge, 1996. Pp. xvii + 286. ISBN 0–415–09676–6. £40.00. Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas's Pragmatics By Maeve Cooke, MIT Press, 1997 (hbk 1994). Pp. 232. ISBN 0–262–53145–3. £12.00 (pbk). Form and Good in Plato's Eleatic Dialogues By Kenneth Dorter, University of California Press, 1994. Pp. x + 156. ISBN 0–520–08331–8. $45.00 Plotin über Sein, Zahl und Einheit By Christoph Horn, B. G. Teubner, 1995. Pp. 368. ISBN 3–519–07611‐X. The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa Contra Gentiles I By Norman Kretzmann, Clarendon Press, 199. Pp. 000. 0–19–823660–3. Price £35.00. Reason, Truth and Self: The Postmodern Reconditioned By Michael Luntley, Routledge, 1995. Pp. xv + 248, ISBN 0–415–11853–0. £11.99 Approaches to Intentionality By William Lyons, Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. 261. ISBN 0–19–823526–7. £30.00 Benacerraf and his Critics Edited by Adam Morton and Stephen P. Stich, Blackwell, 1996. Pp. xi + 271. ISBN 0–631–19268–9. £45.00. Atheism and Theism By Jack J. C. Smart and John J. Haldane, Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Pp. 234. ISBN 0–631–19291–3 (hbk). £40.00. ISBN 0–631–19292–1 (pbk). £12.99. Human Lives: Critical Essays on Consequentialist Bioethics Edited by David S. Oderberg and Jacqueline A. Laing Macmillan Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 244. ISBN 0–333–62980–0. £40 Freedom within Reason By Susan Wolf, Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. 162. ISBN 0–19–508565–5. £13.99 (pbk). An Introduction to Political Philosophy By Jonathan Wolff, Opus, Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. 230 + index. ISBN 19–289251–7 £8.99.

This chapter argues that neurointerventions, whether in criminal justice or in any other social practice, need to be understood, and can only be evaluated, in light of the context provided by the relevant practice. In the case of criminal justice, the meaning and nature of the practice is contested and so the evaluation of proposed neurointerventions must be preceded by substantive argument about its justification. The chapter considers the retributive context of much criminal justice theory and practice before noting the continued existence—and indeed renaissance—of rehabilitative features of that practice. The argument proceeds by showing that neither retributive considerations, such as proportionality, nor an appeal to independent moral values, such as dignity, can in themselves guide us in deciding on the justification of neurointerventions. It also raises the question of whether, in evaluating alternatives to current practices, we should take as our baseline what we currently do or what we would ideally do in ideal circumstances.

This chapter argues that the way people are has a profound effect on what they do. As a result, we have reason to question attributions of desert and responsibility to them. The problematic nature of desert in relation to natural attributes is an accepted part of Rawlsian theorizing. Having considered John Rawls's account of desert in distributive justice, the chapter proceeds by asking whether an analogous account can be given of retributive justice. Scheffler denies that it can because, he argues, distributive and retributive justice are asymmetrical. The chapter aims to refute Scheffler's argument and then to consider the consequences for our understanding of desert in retributive justice.

The chapter concerns the relationship between the justification of criminal law and punishment and the justification of the state. It briefly surveys the debate between retributivists and consequentialists and argues that both are inappropriate when it comes to state punishment. It next turns to arguments by Vincent Chiao, Malcolm Thorburn, and Antony Duff that locate criminal law and punishment in public law. The final parts of the chapter develop an account of criminal law and punishment as best understood as constitutive elements of a liberal political community necessary to ensure stability, to reinforce the commitment of the members to the rules as regulative of their plans of life, and to communicate and censure the offender for the wrong that has been done.

The state's use of the threat, and imposition, of punishments to regulate conduct is thought (or at least said) by many to be legitimised by the idea that the criminal law's burdens only fall on those who are blameworthy for their conduct. However, the formal concept of 'blameworthiness' needs to be made substantive. This puts various ideas regarding the criminal law's person at the heart of debates about blame, guilt, and responsibility. How is the criminal law's person constructed, by whom, and with what disciplinary norms? How is it threatened by new 'knowledge', and how do those threats play out amongst the various stakeholders who claim the criminal law's person as 'theirs'? To address these and cognate questions, this volume brings together an international group of academics to engage with the criminal law's person from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Justice and Coercion in the Pandemic Coercion plays two essential roles in theories of justice. First, in assuring those who comply with the demands of justice that they are not being exploited by others who do not do so. Second, in responding to, and managing, those who are unreasonable. With respect to the first, responses to the pandemic have potentially undermined this assurance. This is true in the distributions of vaccines internationally, and in some domestic contexts in which the rich and powerful have avoided public health guidance not to travel, to isolate, and so on. With respect to the second, the article considers whether those who refuse to be vaccinated are unreasonable, and if so, what follows for how they ought to be treated.

This brief article is concerned with an aspect of Jonathan Glover's book, Alien Landscapes?. After reflecting a little on the book as a whole, the question that is taken up is, ‘Why might a book that seeks to help those without mental disorders understand what they are like “from the inside” be of interest to laymen and practitioners in the criminal law?’. One answer lies in part in the way that ‘what it is like from the inside’ might interact with judgements of criminal responsibility. Taking its cue from examples used by Glover the article considers, and puts pressure on, the ‘dual view’ he proposes: that when dealing with those with mental disorders we should treat them as responsible agents in the sense of not withholding from them Strawson's ‘reactive attitudes’, while nevertheless accepting that their personalities and behaviours are the results of large doses of ‘bad luck’.

Antony Duff has argued that an important precondition of criminal liability is that the state has the moral standing to call the offender to account. Conditions of severe social injustice, if allowed or perpetuated by the state, can undermine this standing. Duff’s argument appeals to the ordinary idea that a person’s own behaviour can sometimes negate his standing to call others to account. It is argued that this is an important issue, but that the analogy with individual standing is problematic. Moreover, Duff’s account of standing needs to address two interconnected issues: first, when and in what way the state can lose its standing to call offenders to account, and second, over what range of offences. Key Words: criminal liability • Duff • punishment • social injustice.

Brian Barry's Justice as Impartiality is an important book. One of its contributions to the discipline is a characteristically clear presentation of what follows if one accepts a commitment to equality, and the reasonableness of continuing and profound disagreements about the nature of the good life. I take the argument of Justice as Impartiality to be an important next step in the attempt to give an account of the content of justice which is impartial, fair, or neutral between conceptions of the good, and engaging with it has the great advantage that many of the criticisms that can be made of Barry apply to other liberal contractualist theories of social justice. It is faintly ironic that it is one of Barry's great virtues, his clarity, that makes it easier to see the problems inherent in the attempt to complete the impartialist project. I have not attempted below to offer a systematic summary and critique of Barry's book or any particular section of it. Instead I have opted to try to engage with the ideas that drive it at a more fundamental level

Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch’s Crimes, Harms, and Wrongs: On the Principles of Criminalisation (Simester and von Hirsch 2011) is an important contribution to the philosophical debate over the nature and ethical limits of criminalisation. As they note in their reply in this symposium, one of the novel aspects of their account is that they do not advance one “unified, grand theory”. Rather, they analyse each ground of criminal prohibition—wrongfulness, harm-based, offense, and paternalistic prohibitions aimed at preventing self-harm—so as to develop guiding principles for their use (or, in the case of paternalism, the absence of an independent principle that would underwrite its use).The result is a rich set of arguments that advance a number of debates across the field of criminalisation.However, that is not all: the participants share the view that, as Tatjana Hörnle puts it, “any theory of criminalization presupposes assumptions about the functions of the criminal law. The q

Michelle Madden Dempsey’s Prosecuting Domestic Violence: A Philosophical Analysis (2009) is an important book for many reasons. Amongst these are the prevalence of domestic violence and the extraordinary, largely unaccountable discretionary powers wielded by prosecutors in the United States. Against this background, Dempsey asks in particular what prosecutors should do when the victims of domestic violence withdraw their support from the proposed prosecution. In Prosecuting Domestic Violence, Dempsey provides a general account of prosecutorial practical reasoning that can be applied to answer this question. Given that she argues that “particularly aggressive prosecution” is in at least some cases justified, the later chapters of the book address issues surrounding the victims of domestic violence: their rights and duties when it comes to prosecution and the measures that might be directed against victims who are unwilling to co-operate.What Dempsey calls her “central analytic tool” in ..

This paper is concerned with how we ought to think about legitimate expectations in the non-ideal, ‘real’ world. In one (dominant) strand of contemporary theories of justice, justice requires not that each gets what she deserves, but that each gets that to which she is entitled in accordance with what Rawls calls ‘the public rules that specify the scheme of cooperation’. However, that is true only if those public rules are part of a fully just scheme and it is plausibly the case that no such scheme obtains in the real world. Given that, and given the centrality of legitimate expectations to theories of justice, it is vital to think about the status of such expectations in non-ideal circumstances. Having explained the sense in which legitimate expectations have come to play a role often previously associated with desert, a brief argument in favour of an ‘expectations’ view of punishment is considered to show that the system to public rules that generates expectations must itself be (in some sense) just. This argument is illustrated by appeal to just punishment and the relevance of thinking about punishment and not merely distributive justice is defended. In the absence of justice, one possibility would be simply to declare that there are no legitimate expectations and so theories of justice provide no guidance as to who should get what in non-ideal conditions. However, this would be to render such theories more-or-less useless in practice. Through discussion of a series of vignettes, the paper offers an account of how we might think about the demands such expectations place on the systems that give rise to them even in cases where the system is unjust.

In this essay I agrue that contemporary Anglo-American liberal egalitarianism has at its heart a tension: the goal is to find principles of justice that are fair in respecting the distinction between choice and chance and that do not invoke controversial metaphysical arguments. This is a tension because distinguishing between choice and chance itself requires invoking controversial metaphysical arguments. I proceed by offering, and then examining, the thought that Scanlon's distinction between ?attributive? and ?substantive? responsibility offers a route out of the tension described above. The greater part of the essay is taken up with examining Scanlon's account of responsibility and the distinction between substantive and attributive responsibility. My conclusion is that Scanlon does not offer a compelling account of substantive compatibilism; that his theory does not, therefore, release the liberal egalitarian from the tension; but that this does not show that the direction indicated by Scanlon's theory is the wrong one