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170Punishing the Guilty, Not Punishing the InnocentJournal of Moral Philosophy 7 (4): 462-488. 2010.Discussion in this paper focuses on how strongly we should prefer non-punishment of persons guilty of serious crimes to punishment of persons innocent of them. William Blackstone's version of that preference, expressed as a ten to one ratio, is first shown to be untenable on standard accounts of legal punishment's justifying aims. Somewhat weaker versions of that ratio also appear suspect. More to the point, Blackstone's adage obscures the crucial way in which there are risks to be assessed in s…Read more
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138No easy way out: Dangerous offenders and preventive detention (review)Law and Philosophy 27 (4). 2008.
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132The disenfranchisement of felonsLaw and Philosophy 20 (6). 2001.After discussing the interests that ground theright to democratic political participation,arguments for the disenfranchisement of thosewho commit serious criminal offenses areexamined. The arguments are divided into twogroups. The first group consists of argumentsthat are relatively independent of thejustifying aims of punishment. It is concededthat two of these arguments establish thatsome, though by no means all, serious offendersshould lose the vote for a period of time thatdoes not necessari…Read more
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116Advertising and the Social Conditions of AutonomyBusiness and Professional Ethics Journal 8 (4): 35-58. 1989.
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113Toward a Theory of Prisoners' RightsRatio Juris 15 (2): 122-145. 2002.This paper explores the issue of prisoners' rights. The conditions of incarcerated people in jails and prisons include psychological and physical deterioration brought on by their condition of confinement. The one sanction that has been debated extensively in the United States is the death penalty. Yet there are numerous losses or deprivations short of death that we might impose on legal offenders. In addition to broader issues such as the nature of rights and the basic moral rights possessed by…Read more
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110Punishment Drift: The Spread of Penal Harm and What We Should Do About ItCriminal Law and Philosophy 11 (4): 645-659. 2017.It is well documented that the effects of legal punishment tend to drift to the family members, friends, and larger communities of convicted offenders. Instead of conceiving of punishment drift as incidental to legal punishment, or as merely foreseen but not intended by state authorities and thus permissible, I argue that efforts ought to be undertaken to limit or ameliorate it. Failure to confine punishment drift comes perilously close to punishment of the innocent and is at odds with other leg…Read more
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104Why Sex (Offending) Is DifferentCriminal Justice Ethics 30 (2): 151-172. 2011.The central premise is that a significant amount of sex offending stems from unusual or inappropriate sexual preferences that appear in early adolescence, are relatively stable, and immutable. In those ways, they are like more ordinary sexual preferences, generating sexual impulses that are insistent. Individuals are strongly tempted to act on them, alternatives to satisfying them are unfulfilling, and complete long-term control of such impulses is unlikely. Yet, since individuals with sexual pr…Read more
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95The “Necessary Evil” Defense of Manipulative AdvertisingBusiness and Professional Ethics Journal 18 (1): 3-20. 1999.
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93Imprisonable offensesJournal of Moral Philosophy 3 (3): 265-287. 2006.Imprisonment imposes very substantial losses and deprivations on people convicted of crimes. The question for which crimes imprisonment is an appropriate sanction is addressed employing both retributive and crime reduction approaches to the justification of legal punishment. Although there is not complete convergence between what the two approaches imply about its use, it is argued that both would reserve imprisonment for serious offenses, ones that inflict or threaten significant harms with mod…Read more
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88Preventive Pre-trial Detention without PunishmentRes Publica 20 (2): 111-127. 2014.The pre-trial detention of individuals charged with crimes is viewed by many legal scholars as problematic. Standard arguments against it are that it constitutes legal punishment of individuals not yet convicted of crimes, violates the presumption of innocence, and rests on dubious predictions of future crime. I defend modified and restrained forms of pre-trial detention. I argue that pre-trial detention could be made very different than imprisonment, should be governed by strict criteria, and i…Read more
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86Mixed Theories of Punishment and Mixed Offenders: Some Unresolved TensionsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 44 (2): 273-295. 2006.Mixed theories of legal punishment treat both crime reduction and retributive concerns as irreducibly important and so worthy of inclusion in a single justificatory framework. Yet crime reduction and retributive approaches employ different assumptions about the necessary characteristics of those liable to punishment. Retributive accounts of legal punishment require offenders to be more responsive to moral considerations than do crime reduction accounts. The tensions these different assumptions c…Read more
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85The Prosecutor and the Presumption of InnocenceCriminal Law and Philosophy 8 (2): 337-352. 2014.In what ways is the conduct of prosecutors constrained by the presumption of innocence? To address this question, I first develop an account of the presumption in the trial context, according to which it is a vital element in a moral assurance procedure for the justified infliction of legal punishment. Jurors must presume the factual innocence of defendants at the outset of trials and then be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt by the government’s evidence before they convict defendants. Prosecu…Read more
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81To Waive or Not to Waive: The Right to Trial and Plea Bargaining (review)Criminal Law and Philosophy 2 (2): 181-199. 2008.Criminal defendants in many countries are faced with a dilemma: If they waive their right to trial and plead guilty, they typically receive charge or sentence reductions in exchange for having done so. If they exercise their right to trial and are found guilty, they often receive stiffer sanctions than if they had pled guilty. I characterize the former as ‘waiver rewards’ and the latter as ‘non-waiver penalties.’ After clarifying the two and considering the relation between them, I briefly expli…Read more
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79The Elusive Distinction Between Negative and Positive RightsSouthern Journal of Philosophy 33 (3): 335-346. 1995.
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78Larry Laudan, Truth, Error, and Criminal Law: An Essay in Legal Epistemology: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, Hardback ISBN: 0-521-86166-7Criminal Law and Philosophy 2 (1): 85-89. 2008.
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74A Critique of Business EthicsBusiness Ethics Quarterly 1 (4): 367-384. 1991.The dominant approach to the analysis of issues in business ethics consists in the articulation and use of a set of mid-level moral principles. This approach is geared to business practitioners who are not interested in the difficult problems of moral and political theory. I argue that this "practitioner model" is philosophically suspect. I show how the theoretical frameworks prominent business ethicists employ are insufficiently developed. I also show how many of their analyses presuppose subst…Read more
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65Retributive parsimonyRes Publica 15 (4): 377-395. 2009.Retributive approaches to the justification of legal punishment are often thought to place exacting and unattractive demands on state officials, requiring them to expend scarce public resources on apprehending and punishing all offenders strictly in accordance with their criminal ill deserts. Against this caricature of the theory, I argue that retributivists can urge parsimony in the use of punishment. After clarifying what parsimony consists in, I show how retributivists can urge reductions in …Read more
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62Against supermaxJournal of Applied Philosophy 21 (2). 2004.abstract Supermax prisons subject inmates to extreme isolation and sensory deprivation for extended periods of time. Crime reduction and retributive arguments in favour of supermax confinement are elaborated. Both types of arguments are shown to falter once the logic of the two approaches to the justification of legal punishment is made clear and evidence about the effects of supermax confinement on inmates is considered. It is also argued that many criminal offenders suffer from defects in thei…Read more
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61Justice and Insider TradingJournal of Applied Philosophy 10 (2): 215-226. 1993.While many countries are following the lead of the United States in making insider trading illegal, its moral status is still controversial. I summarise the scholarly debate over the fairness of insider trading and lay bare the assumptions about fairness implicit in that debate. I focus on the question whether those assumptions can be defended independently of a more comprehensive theory of social justice. Current analyses presuppose that we can intelligently discuss what the social rules regard…Read more
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58Response to Tudor: Remorse-based Sentence Reductions in Theory and PracticeCriminal Law and Philosophy 2 (3): 259-268. 2008.Steven Tudor defends the mitigation of criminal sentences in cases in which offenders are genuinely remorseful for their crimes. More than this, he takes the principle that such remorse-based sentence reductions are appropriate to be a âwell-settled legal principleââso well settled, in fact, that âit is among those deep-seated commitments which can serve to test general theories as much as they are tested by themâ. However, his account of why remorse should reduce punishment is strongl…Read more
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56Social Deprivation as Tempting FateCriminal Law and Philosophy 5 (3): 277-291. 2011.Two recent discussions concerning punishment of the socially deprived reach conflicting conclusions. Andrew von Hirsch and Andrew Ashworth argue that we should sympathize with the predicament of the poor and therefore mitigate their sentences. Peter Chau disputes von Hirsch and Ashworth’s conclusion, contending that having to face strong temptations is not an appropriate ground for reducing anyone’s punishment for their crimes. I argue that neither von Hirsch and Ashworth’s account nor Chau’s cr…Read more
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52The Nature of Retributive Justice and Its Demands on the StateLaw and Philosophy 38 (1): 53-77. 2019.The enterprise of state punishment requires the use of limited resources for which there are other competitors, such as national defense, market regulation, and social welfare. How resource-demanding retributive justice will turn out to be depends on how retributivists answer a series of questions concerning the theory’s structure. After elaborating these questions and the varieties of retributive justice that answers to them might generate, I consider the resource demands of retributive justice…Read more
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48Some Surprising Implications of Negative RetributivismJournal of Applied Philosophy 31 (1): 49-62. 2013.Negative retributivism is the view that though the primary justifying aim of legal punishment is the reduction of crime, the state's efforts to do so are subject to side-constraints that forbid punishment of the innocent and disproportionate punishment of the guilty. I contend that insufficient attention has been paid to what the side-constraints commit us to in constructing a theory of legal punishment, even one primarily oriented toward reducing crime. Specifically, I argue that the side-const…Read more
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47Susan Easton: Prisoners’ Rights: Principles and Practice: Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, 2011, 304 pp, ISBN: 978-1843928089 (review)Criminal Law and Philosophy 6 (1): 111-113. 2012.