Renee Nicole Souris

The edited volume brings together contemporary work by philosophers, legal scholars, and political theorists. This volume presents relevant understandings of the common good, democracy, liberty, and law, and situates them in the context of contemporary countervailing pressures posed by issues in education, access to medical treatment in a pandemic, and the media. Motivated to ascertain how democracy is threatened by a variety contemporary challenges, the authors examine core aspects of law, representative democracy, and constitutionalism to shed light on worrisome contemporary phenomena such as social media-driven conspiracy theories, unequal access to education and medical treatment, among other topics.

Adrian Vermeule’s book Common Good Constitutionalism presents a profound challenge to the reigning schools of American legal thought in an effort to return to our classical roots. Vermeule describes his theory as methodologically Dworkinian in that he intends it to fit and justify American law, but unlike Dworkin’s judge-centered theory of law as integrity, common good constitutionalism argues for judicial deference to political authorities—legislative and executive officials—who have ‘primary competence for promoting the common good.’ Indeed, common good constitutionalism urges political authorities to show a ‘candid willingness to legislate morality.’ The deference expected of judges toward legislators is part of common good constitutionalism’s ‘role morality’ within our constitutional system, though the theory is presented as ‘agnostic at the level of institutions’ such that it does not require any particular institutional scheme. I challenge common good constitutionalism’s argument for judicial deference to legislators from within the classical tradition itself by showing that within this tradition, deference depends upon a presumption of virtue among legislators which is untenable in our institutional environment. From here, I argue that common good constitutionalism either needs a new basis beyond virtue for judicial deference to legislators, or that Vermeule needs to revise the theory’s institutional commitments so that it rules out those institutions that fail to cultivate political virtue among our legislators.

This paper critically examines two formulations of the view that the crime of using child soldiers is less serious than other international crimes. The first formulation presents a sociological argument that using child soldiers is not as serious as other international crimes involving rape or murder, and the second formulation relies on deontological moral norms to argue that using child soldiers is less serious than crimes involving murder because child soldiering does not violate fundamental human values, like the right to life. After critically examining each formulation of this view, I argue that using child soldiers does violate a fundamental human value by attacking the dignity of the developing child, where dignity is understood in terms of a person’s moral agency.

In this article, I contribute to the debate between two philosophical traditions—the Kantian and the Aristotelian—on the requirements of criminal responsibility and the grounds for excuse by taking this debate to a new context: international criminal law. After laying out broadly Kantian and Aristotelian conceptions of criminal responsibility, I defend a quasi-Aristotelian conception, which affords a central role to moral development, and especially to the development of moral perception, for international criminal law. I show than an implication of this view is that persons who are substantially and non-culpably limited in their capacity for ordinary moral perception warrant an excuse for engaging in unlawful conduct. I identify a particular set of conditions that trigger this excuse, and then I systematically examine it as applied to the controversial case of former-child-soldier-turned leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Dominic Ongwen, who is currently at trial at the International Criminal Court.