Matthew Kramer’s The Ethics of Capital Punishment: A Philosophical Investigation of Evil and its Consequences explores the morality of capital punishment and develops his own “purgative rationale” in support of the practice. I present my objections to Kramer’s purgative rationale and trace our disagreement to differences over the nature of evil, the autonomy of human character formation, and the concept of defilement.

This brief response to Carol Steiker’s essay asks questions about the kind of contribution Christian theologians and ethicists can make to large pluralistic debates about criminal justice, and highlights several insights that it discerns in Steiker’s argument—insights that, it argues, require a theological register and idiom to be identified, and articulated, in their proper fullness.

This article defends my 2011 book “The Ethics of Capital Punishment” against the thoughtful critiques written by Carol Steiker and John Danaher respectively. It does not attempt to respond to every point of contention in the two critiques, but concentrates instead on a few of the main points from each of them.

With the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the most controversial question in world politics fast became whether the United States stands within the order of international law or outside it. Does America still play by the rules it helped create? American Exceptionalism and Human Rights addresses this question as it applies to U.S. behavior in relation to international human rights. With essays by eleven leading experts in such fields as international relations and international law, it seeks to show (...) and explain how America's approach to human rights differs from that of most other Western nations. In his introduction, Michael Ignatieff identifies three main types of exceptionalism: exemptionalism ; double standards ; and legal isolationism. The contributors use Ignatieff's essay as a jumping-off point to discuss specific types of exceptionalism--America's approach to capital punishment and to free speech, for example--or to explore the social, cultural, and institutional roots of exceptionalism.These essays--most of which appear in print here for the first time, and all of which have been revised or updated since being presented in a year-long lecture series on American exceptionalism at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government--are by Stanley Hoffmann, Paul Kahn, Harold Koh, Frank Michelman, Andrew Moravcsik, John Ruggie, Frederick Schauer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Carol Steiker, and Cass Sunstein. (shrink)

"The Justice of Mercy is exhilarating reading. Teeming with intelligence and insight, this study immediately establishes itself as the unequaled philosophical and legal exploration of mercy. But Linda Meyer's book reaches beyond mercy to offer reconceptualizations of justice and punishment themselves. Meyer's ambition is to rethink the failed retributivist paradigm of criminal justice and to replace it with an ideal of merciful punishment grounded in a Heideggerian insight into the gift of being-with-others. The readings of criminal law, Heideggerian and Levinasian (...) philosophy, and literature are powerful and provocative. The Justice of Mercy is a radical and rigorous exploration of both punishment and mercy as profoundly human activities." ---Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Ethical and Political Thinking, Bard College "This book addresses a question both ancient and urgently timely: how to reconcile the law's call to justice with the heart's call to mercy? Linda Ross Meyer's answer is both philosophical and pragmatic, taking us from the conceptual roots of the supposed conflict between justice and mercy to concrete examples in both fiction and contemporary criminal law. Energetic, eloquent, and moving, this book's defense of mercy will resonate with philosophers, legal scholars, lawyers, and policymakers engaged with criminal justice, and anyone concerned about our current harshly punitive legal system." ---Carol Steiker, Harvard Law School "Far from being a utopian, soft and ineffectual concept, Meyer shows that mercy already operates within the law in ways that we usually do not recognize.... Meyer's piercing insights and careful analysis bring the reader to think of law, justice, and mercy itself in a new and far more profound light." ---James Martel, San Francisco State University How can granting mercy be just if it gives a criminal less punishment than he "deserves" and treats his case differently from others like it? This ancient question has become central to debates over truth and reconciliation commissions, alternative dispute resolution, and other new forms of restorative justice. The traditional response has been to marginalize mercy and to cast doubt on its ability to coexist with forms of legal justice. Flipping the relationship between justice and mercy, Linda Ross Meyer argues that our rule-bound and harsh system of punishment is deeply flawed and that mercy should be, not the crazy woman in the attic of the law, but the lady of the house. This book articulates a theory of punishment with mercy and illustrates the implications of that theory with legal examples drawn from criminal law doctrine, pardons, mercy in military justice, and fictional narratives of punishment and mercy. Linda Ross Meyer is Carmen Tortora Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of Law; President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities; and Associate Editor of Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities. Jacket illustration: "Lotus" by Anthony James. (shrink)

Siblings Carol and Jordan Steiker come by their opposition to capital punishment honestly. As law clerks to Justice Thurgood Marshall, an inveterate abolitionist, they observed and participated in...

In earlier work ( Cleland [2001] , [2002]), I sketched an account of the structure and justification of ‘prototypical’ historical natural science that distinguishes it from ‘classical’ experimental science. This article expands upon this work, focusing upon the close connection between explanation and justification in the historical natural sciences. I argue that confirmation and disconfirmation in these fields depends primarily upon the explanatory (versus predictive or retrodictive) success or failure of hypotheses vis-à-vis empirical evidence. The account of historical explanation that (...) I develop is a version of common cause explanation. Common cause explanation has long been vindicated by appealing to the principle of the common cause. Many philosophers of science (e.g., Sober and Tucker) find this principle problematic, however, because they believe that it is either purely methodological or strictly metaphysical. I defend a third possibility: the principle of the common cause derives its justification from a physically pervasive time asymmetry of causation (a.k.a. the asymmetry of overdetermination). I argue that explicating the principle of the common cause in terms of the asymmetry of overdetermination illuminates some otherwise puzzling features of the practices of historical natural scientists. (shrink)

Vulnerability is one of the least examined concepts in research ethics. Vulnerability was linked in the Belmont Report to questions of justice in the selection of subjects. Regulations and policy documents regarding the ethical conduct of research have focused on vulnerability in terms of limitations of the capacity to provide informed consent. Other interpretations of vulnerability have emphasized unequal power relationships between politically and economically disadvantaged groups and investigators or sponsors. So many groups are now considered to be vulnerable in (...) the context of research, particularly international research, that the concept has lost force. In addition, classifying groups as vulnerable not only stereotypes them, but also may not reliably protect many individuals from harm. Certain individuals require ongoing protections of the kind already established in law and regulation, but attention must also be focused on characteristics of the research protocol and environment that present ethical challenges. (shrink)

Eighty‐two participants listened to sentences and then judged whether two sequentially presented visual objects were the same. On critical trials, participants heard a sentence describe the motion of a ball toward or away from the observer (e.g., “The pitcher hurled the softball to you”). Seven hundred and fifty milliseconds after the offset of the sentence, a picture of an object was presented for 500 ms, followed by another picture. On critical trials, the two pictures depicted the kind of ball mentioned (...) in the sentence. The second picture was displayed 175 ms after the first. Crucially, it was either slightly larger or smaller than the first picture, thus suggesting movement of the ball toward or away from the observer. Participants responded more quickly when the implied movement of the balls matched the movement described in the sentence. This result provides support for the viewthat language comprehension involves dynamic perceptual simulations. (shrink)

The concept of solidarity has recently come to prominence in the healthcare literature, addressing the motivation for taking seriously the shared vulnerabilities and medical needs of compatriots and for acting to help them meet these needs. In a recent book, Prainsack and Buyx take solidarity as a commitment to bear costs to assist others regarded as similar, with implications for governing health databases, personalized medicine, and organ donation. More broadly, solidarity has been understood normatively to call for ‘standing with’ or (...) assisting fellow community members and possibly also distant others in regard to their needs, whether for its own sake or in order to realize the demands of justice. I argue here that the understanding of solidarity in the existing bioethics literature is unduly restricted by not sufficiently theorizing the notion of structural (or systemic) injustice and its import for understanding solidarity. Extending traditional conceptions of labor and social movement solidarity, I contrast unitary solidarity within a given group with ‘networking solidarities’ across groups. I analyze the meaning of structural injustice and its significance for solidarity, including countering institutionally entrenched inequalities and economic exploitation. I then apply this broadened conception to healthcare, discussing structural problems with the U.S. insurance system and the solidarity movements addressing its deficiencies. I analyze some natural disasters and global health challenges that were aggravated by structural injustices, along with the solidarity movements they engendered. Finally, I revisit the questions of governing health databases and of personalized medicine with the enlarged conception of solidarity in view. (shrink)

Many scientists believe that there is a uniform, interdisciplinary method for the prac- tice of good science. The paradigmatic examples, however, are drawn from classical ex- perimental science. Insofar as historical hypotheses cannot be tested in controlled labo- ratory settings, historical research is sometimes said to be inferior to experimental research. Using examples from diverse historical disciplines, this paper demonstrates that such claims are misguided. First, the reputed superiority of experimental research is based upon accounts of scientific methodology (Baconian inductivism (...) or falsificationism) that are deeply flawed, both logically and as accounts of the actual practices of scientists. Second, although there are fundamental differences in methodology between experimental scien- tists and historical scientists, they are keyed to a pervasive feature of nature, a time asymmetry of causation. As a consequence, the claim that historical science is methodo- logically inferior to experimental science cannot be sustained. (shrink)

The HRAF databases, eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology, each containing large corpora of curated text subject-indexed at the paragraph-level by anthropologists, were designed to facilitate rapid retrieval of information. The texts describe social and cultural life in past and present societies around the world. As of the spring of 2018, eHRAF contains almost three million indexed “paragraph” units from over 8000 documents describing over 400 societies and archaeological traditions. This chapter first discusses concrete problems of scale resulting from large (...) numbers of complex elements retrieved by any given search. Second, we discuss potential and partial solutions that resolve these problems to advance research, whether based on specific hypotheses, classification or identifying and evaluating embedded patterns of relationships. Third, we discuss new kinds of research possibilities that can be further advanced, have not yet been successfully attempted, or have not even been considered using anthropological data because of scale and complexity of achieving a result. (shrink)

Courting Death: The Supreme Court and Capital Punishment by Carol and Jordan Steiker is, as the introduction states, “the story of how the American death penalty has come full circle over the past...

In the technical literature of computer science, the concept of an effective procedure is closely associated with the notion of an instruction that precisely specifies an action. Turing machine instructions are held up as providing paragons of instructions that "precisely describe" or "well define" the actions they prescribe. Numerical algorithms and computer programs are judged effective just insofar as they are thought to be translatable into Turing machine programs. Nontechnical procedures (e.g., recipes, methods) are summarily dismissed as ineffective on the (...) grounds that their instructions lack the requisite precision. But despite the pivotal role played by the notion of a precisely specified instruction in classifying procedures as effective and ineffective, little attention has been paid to the manner in which instructions "precisely specify" the actions they prescribe. It is the purpose of this paper to remedy this defect. The results are startling. The reputed exemplary precision of Turing machine instructions turns out to be a myth. Indeed, the most precise specifications of action are provided not by the procedures of theoretical computer science and mathematics (algorithms) but rather by the nontechnical procedures of everyday life. I close with a discussion of some of the rumifications of these conclusions for understanding and designing concrete computers and their programming languages. (shrink)

I thank Jane Sedlakova and Manuel Trachsel for their work on situating conversational artificial intelligence’s (CAI) potential role in psychotherapy. In their article, Sedlakova and Trachsel argue...

Since the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the Turing machine has dominated thought about effective procedures. This paper presents an alternative to Turing's analysis; it unifies, refines, and extends my earlier work on this topic. I show that Turing machines cannot live up to their billing as paragons of effective procedure; at best, they may be said to provide us with mere procedure schemas. I argue that the concept of an effective procedure crucially depends upon distinguishing procedures as definite courses (...) of action(- types) from the particular courses of action(-tokens) that actually instantiate them and the causal processes and/or interpretations that ultimately make them effective. On my analysis, effectiveness is not just a matter of logical form; `content' matters. The analysis I provide has the advantage of applying to ordinary, everyday procedures such as recipes and methods, as well as the more refined procedures of mathematics and computer science. It also has the virtue of making better sense of the physical possibilities for hypercomputation than the received view and its extensions, e.g. Turing's o-machines, accelerating machines. (shrink)

In recent decades, the governance of food safety, food quality, on-farm environmental management and animal welfare has been shifting from the realm of ‘the government’ to that of the private sector. Corporate entities, especially the large supermarkets, have responded to neoliberal forms of governance and the resultant ‘hollowed-out’ state by instituting private standards for food, backed by processes of certification and policed through systems of third party auditing. Today’s food regime is one in which supermarkets impose ‘private standards’ along the (...) food supply chain to ensure compliance with a range of food safety goals—often above and beyond those prescribed by government. By examining regulatory governance in Australia, Norway and the United Kingdom we highlight emerging trajectories of food governance. We argue that the imposition of the new private forms of monitoring and compliance continue the project of agricultural restructuring that began with government support for structural adjustment schemes in agriculture and that these are most evident in the UK and Australia where neoliberalism is an entrenched philosophy. However, despite Norway’s identity as a social democracy, we also identify neoliberal ‘creep’ into the system of food governance. Small-scale producers in all three nations are finding themselves increasingly subject to governance through private, market-based mechanisms that, to varying degrees, are dominated by major supermarket chains. The result is agricultural restructuring not through the traditional avenues of elected governments, but via non-elected market operatives. (shrink)

Coming more than a decade after I first argued that people who are oppressed have an obligation to resist their oppression, this paper expands the implications of the original account and connects it up to some of the important contemporary work published in oppression studies in the interim. I then move on to respond to two critical objections to my view. The first objection charges that the typical severity of oppressive harms is not sufficiently great to ground a general obligation (...) of resistance. The second objection charges that this project would do better to conceive of resistance in political, rather than moral, terms. (shrink)

The book reviews the theory and concepts of happiness, explaining how these concepts underpin a line of research which is both an attempt to understand the determinants of happiness and a tool for understanding the effects of a host of phenomena on human well being.

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction The Scientific Method of Yore The Structure and Research Practices of Scientific Historiography of Nature Explanation and Confirmation in Scientific Historiography Narrative Explanation Common Cause Explanation References.

Being hit or being given away are subabusive, common behaviors that harm companion animals. Violent childhood socialization increases the risk of adult abuse of animal companions, but relatively little is known about the origins of societally tolerated maltreatment of pets by adults. University students completed surveys about general attitudes toward animals, family socializaton, and current relationships with pets. These students generally had positive childhood socialization about pets and reported high levels of current attachment. Adults whose parents had given children's companion (...) animals away had a heightened likelihood of giving their own pets away. Mothers' kindness to their children's pets was associated with adults' attachment to animal companions, but attachment was not related to the likelihood of hitting current pets. People who score high on a measure of pet abuse potential hit their pets. The pattern of findings related to gender implies that males are at somewhat greater risk for having negative socialization experiences involving pets, for greater pet abuse potential as adults, and for weaker attachments. However, females were equally likely to hit their pets or give them away. The childhood predictors of attitudes about animals, pet abuse potential, hitting pets, giving away pets, and attachment found in this nonclinical, noncriminal sample contribute to our understanding of developmental influences upon relationships with companion animals. (shrink)

Arguments in favor of legalized assisted suicide often center on issues of personal privacy and freedom of choice over one's body. Many disability advocates assert, however, that autonomy arguments neglect the complex sociopolitical determinants of despair for people with disabilities. Specifically, they argue that social approval of suicide for individuals with irreversible conditions is discriminatory and that relaxing restrictions on assisted suicide would jeopardize, not advance, the freedom of persons with disabilities to direct the lives they choose. This paper examines (...) the idea promoted by some proponents of assisted suicide that it is reasonable to be depressed about one's diminished quality of life in cases of irreversible illness or disability and, therefore, such depression should not call into question the individual's competence to request assistance in dying. The concept of rational depression is defined and examined in the context of: four real-life cases involving individuals with disabilities who requested assistance in dying; a set of criteria commonly applied to decision-making to determine rationality; and research bearing on the emotional status of people with disabilities. It is concluded that although disability is associated with particular socially mediated stressors, there is no theoretical or empirical evidence to indicate that depression and its role in the right to die is dynamically different, more natural, or more reasonable for disabled people than for non-disabled people. (shrink)

Despite substantial evidence pointing to a looming Malthusian catastrophe, governmental measures to reduce population have been opposed both by religious conservatives and by many liberals, especially liberal feminists. Liberal critics have claimed that 'utilitarian' population policies violate a 'fundamental right of reproductive liberty'. This essay argues that reproductive liberty should not be considered a fundamental human right, or certainly not an indefeasible right. It should, instead, be strictly regulated by a global agreement designed to reduce population to a sustainable level. (...) Three major points are discussed: 1) the current state of the overpopulation problem; 2) the claim of a fundamental human right of reproductive liberty; 3) an outline of a global agreement to address overpopulation as a 'tragedy of the commons'. (shrink)

The pluralism of methodologies and severe time constraints pose important challenges to pedagogy in clinical ethics. We designed a step-by-step student handbook to operate within such constraints and to respect the methodological pluralism of bioethics and clinical ethics. The handbook comprises six steps: Step 1: What are the facts of the case?; Step 2: What are your obligations to your patient?; Step 3: What are your obligations to third parties to your relationship with the patient?; Step 4: Do your obligations (...) converge or conflict?; Step 5: What is the strongest objection that could be made to the identification of convergence in step 4 or the arguments in step 4? How can this objection be effectively countered?; and Step 6: How could the ethical conflict, or perceived ethical conflict, have been prevented? (shrink)

This article argues that prevailing accounts of structural injustice, which focus on the way our replication of social practices has unjust consequences for individuals, tend to be insufficiently attentive to the differential power relations within the institutions that structure these practices. For economic exploitation, a structural account would instead locate domination in the operation of the system itself, and would distinguish it from the general constraint characteristic of all social practices as given or inherited. The argument further suggests limits to (...) unitary group agency approaches to corporations, and proposes construing them as artifacts as much as agents, while corporate responsibility would need to better track the division of power between top managers and workers within firms. (shrink)

Menu labelling is a public health policy intervention that applies principles of nutrition labelling to the eating out environment. While menu labelling has received a good deal of attention with regard to its effectiveness in shaping food choices for obesity prevention, its premises have not yet been fully explored in terms of its broader applications to social equity and population health. In the following case, we focus on the example of menu labelling within the context of food policy at the (...) local level, a fruitful substantive area of consideration for public health ethics. (shrink)

Aging at work is a dynamic process. As individuals age, their motives, abilities and values change as suggested by life-span development theories (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2004; Lang & Carstensen, 2002). Their growth and extrinsic motives weaken while intrinsic motives increase (Kooij, De Lange, Jansen, Kanfer, & Dikkers, 2011), which may result in workers investing their resources in different areas accordingly. However, there is significant individual variability in aging trajectories (Hedge, Borman, & Lammlein, 2005). In addition, the changing nature of work, (...) the evolving job demands, as well as the available opportunities at work may no longer be suitable for older workers, increasing the likelihood of person-job misfit. The potential misfit may, in turn, impact how older workers perceive themselves on the job, which leads to conflicting work identities. With the traditional job redesign approach being a top-down process, it is often difficult for organizations to take individual needs and skills into consideration and tailor jobs for every employee (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). Therefore, job crafting, being an individualized process initiated by employees themselves, can be a particularly valuable mechanism for older workers to realign and enhance their demands-abilities and needs-supplies fit. Through job crafting, employees can exert personal agency and make changes to the task, social and cognitive aspects of their jobs with the goal of improving their work experience (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Building on the Life Span Theory of Control (Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995), we posit that job crafting, particularly cognitive crafting, will be of increasing value as employees age. Through reframing how they think of their job and choosing to emphasize job features that are personally meaningful, older workers can optimize their resources to proactively redesign their jobs and maintain congruent, positive work identities. (shrink)

The book is a collection of the presentations of the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy from 1998 to 2008. The essays are organized historically, starting in 1998. Their topics cover virtually every philosophical field, and such that each is connected to gay and lesbian studies. Topics include how we are to understand sexual orientation, whether same-sex leads to polygamy, teaching gay studies to undergraduates, promiscuity and virtue, the "war on terror" and gay oppression, the rationality of coming out, the (...) ethics of outing, connections between being gay and being happy, and last, but not least, dignity and being gay. (shrink)