•  450
    Legal and moral responsibility
    Philosophy Compass 4 (6): 978-986. 2009.
    The paper begins with the plausible view that criminal responsibility should track moral responsibility, and explains its plausibility. A necessary distinction is then drawn between liability and answerability as two dimensions of responsibility, and is shown to underpin the distinction in criminal law between offences and defences. This enables us to distinguish strict liability from strict answerability, and to see that whilst strict criminal liability seems inconsistent with the principle tha…Read more
  •  373
    Part of the Studies in Crime and Public Policy series, this book, written by one of the top philosophers of punishment, examines the main trends in penal theorizing over the past three decades. Duff asks what can justify criminal punishment, and then explores the legitimacy of actual practices by examining what would count as adequate justification for them. Duff argues that a "communicative conception of punishment," which he presents as a third way between consequentialist and retributive theo…Read more
  •  280
    Rule Violations and Wrongdoings
    In Stephen Shute & Andrew Simester (eds.), Criminal Law Theory: Doctrines of the General Part, Oxford University Press. pp. 47--74. 2002.
  •  218
    Towards a Modest Legal Moralism
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 8 (1): 217-235. 2014.
    After distinguishing different species of Legal Moralism I outline and defend a modest, positive Legal Moralism, according to which we have good reason to criminalize some type of conduct if it constitutes a public wrong. Some of the central elements of the argument will be: the need to remember that the criminal law is a political, not a moral practice, and therefore that in asking what kinds of conduct we have good reason to criminalize, we must begin not with the entire realm of wrongdoing, b…Read more
  •  217
    I begin by discussing the ways in which a would-be blamer's own prior conduct towards the person he seeks to blame can undermine his standing to blame her. This provides the basis for an examination of a particular kind of 'bar to trial' in the criminal law – of ways in which a state or a polity's right to put a defendant on trial can be undermined by the prior misconduct of the state or its officials. The examination of this often neglected legal phenomenon illuminates some central features of …Read more
  •  197
    Guiding Commitments and Criminal Liability for Attempts
    Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (3): 411-427. 2012.
    A critical discussion of Gideon Yaffe's "guiding commitment" account of attempts, with special reference to attempts in the criminal law.
  •  185
    Towards a theory of criminal law?
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84 (1): 1-28. 2010.
    After an initial discussion (§i) of what a theory of criminal law might amount to, I sketch (§ii) the proper aims of a liberal, republican criminal law, and discuss (§§iii–iv) two central features of such a criminal law: that it deals with public wrongs, and provides for those who perpetrate such wrongs to be called to public account. §v explains why a liberal republic should maintain such a system of criminal law, and §vi tackles the issue of criminalization—of how we should determine the prope…Read more
  •  160
    Public and Private Wrongs
    In James Chalmers, Fiona Leverick & Lindsay Farmer (eds.), Essays in Criminal Law in Honour of Sir Gerald Gordon, Edinburhg University Press. pp. 70-85. 2010.
    Gordon's emphasizes that the process of prosecution is crucial to the idea of crime. One who commits a public wrong is properly called to public account for it, and the criminal trial constitutes such a public calling to account. The state is the proper prosecutor of crimes: since a crime is ‘our’ wrong, rather than only the victim's wrong, it is appropriate that we should prosecute it, collectively. The case is not simply V the victim, or P the plaintiff, against D the defendant. It is brought,…Read more
  •  149
    Punishment and Crime
    with Ross Harrison
    Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 62 139-167. 1988.
  •  139
    Intention, responsibility and double effect
    Philosophical Quarterly 32 (126): 1-16. 1982.
    I discuss a significant distinction between two different applications of the principle of double effect. It serves sometimes to distinguish the intended effects of an action from side-Effects which are "relevant" to it, As providing reasons against it, For which the agent must admit responsibility, And of which he is the intentional agent; and sometimes to distinguish intended effects from side-Effects which are "irrelevant" to the action, As to which the agent denies responsibility and intenti…Read more
  •  128
    Intentionally Killing the Innocent
    Analysis 34 (1). 1973.
  •  123
    Theories of criminal law
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2008.
  •  119
    Authority and Responsibility in International Criminal Law
    In Samantha Besson & John Tasioulas (eds.), The Philosophy of International Law, Oxford University Press. 2010.
  •  111
    Psychopathy and Moral Understanding
    American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (3). 1977.
  •  108
    Good and Evil. An Absolute Conception
    Philosophical Books 34 (1): 43-45. 1993.
  •  102
    Iv-answering for crime
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (1): 87-113. 2006.
    We can gain fresh insights into aspects of criminal liability by focusing first on the prior topic of criminal responsibility, and on the relational dimensions of responsibility: responsibility is responsibility for something, to someone. We are criminally responsible as citizens, to our fellow citizens, for committing 'public' wrongs: I discuss the difficulty of giving determinate content to this idea of public wrongs, and the way in which, whereas moral responsibility is typically strict, crim…Read more
  •  99
  •  93
    Philosophical foundations of criminal law (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2011.
    Topics covered in this volume include the question of criminalization and the proper scope of the criminal law; the grounds of criminal responsibility; the ways ...
  •  93
    Crime, prohibition, and punishment
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 19 (2). 2002.
    Nigel Walker’s first principle of criminalization declares that ‘Prohibitions should not be included in the criminal law for the sole purpose of ensuring that breaches of them are visited with retributive punishment’. I argue that we should reject this principle, for ‘mala prohibita’ as well as for ‘mala in se’: conduct should be criminalized in order to ensure (as far as we reasonably can) that those who engage in it receive retributive punishment. In the course of the argument, I show why we s…Read more
  •  92
    Strict responsibility, moral and criminal
    Journal of Value Inquiry 43 (3): 295-313. 2009.
  •  91
    Authority and responsibility in international criminal law
    In Samantha Besson & John Tasioulas (eds.), Philosophy of International Law, Oxford University Press. pp. 589-604. 2010.
  •  88
    Philosophy and the criminal law: principle and critique (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 1998.
    Five pre-eminent legal theorists tackle a range of fundamental questions on the nature of the philosophy of criminal law. Their essays explore the extent to which and the ways in which our systems of criminal law can be seen as rational and principled. The essays discuss some of the principles by which, it is often thought, a system of law should be structured, and they ask whether our own systems are genuinely principled or riven by basic contradictions, reflecting deeper political and social c…Read more
  •  81
    Absolute Principles and Double Effect
    Analysis 36 (2). 1976.
    I argue that hanink's account of the principle of double effect ("some light on double effect," "analysis", volume 35, number 5) is inadequate, and rests on the mistaken assumption that the criteria for distinguishing acts from each other, intention from foresight, acting from refraining, can be specified independently of any moral perspective. i try to indicate the way to a better understanding of these distinctions, and the essential features of the kind of absolutist morality which invokes th…Read more
  •  78
    Richard Dagger (in this issue) provides perhaps the most persuasive version of a ‘fair play’ theory of criminal punishment, grounded in an attractive liberal republican political theory. But, I argue, his version of the theory still faces serious objections: that its explanation of why some central mala in se are properly criminalised is still distorting, despite his appeal to the burdens of ‘general compliance’; and that it cannot adequately explain (as it should explain) the differential serio…Read more
  •  74
    Review essay / justice, mercy, and forgiveness
    Criminal Justice Ethics 9 (2): 51-63. 1990.
    Jeffrie G Murphy & Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988, 194 pp. Kathleen Dean Moore, Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989, 271 pp