What makes someone responsible for a crime and therefore liable to punishment under the criminal law? Modern lawyers will quickly and easily point to the criminal law's requirement of concurrent actus reus and mens rea, doctrines of the criminal law which ensure that someone will only be found criminally responsible if they have committed criminal conduct while possessing capacities of understanding, awareness, and self-control at the time of offense. Any notion of criminal responsibility based on the character of the offender, (...) meaning an implication of criminality based on reputation or the assumed disposition of the person, would seem to today's criminal lawyer a relic of the 18th Century. In this volume, Nicola Lacey demonstrates that the practice of character-based patterns of attribution was not laid to rest in 18th Century criminal law, but is alive and well in contemporary English criminal responsibility-attribution. Building upon the analysis of criminal responsibility in her previous book, Women, Crime, and Character, Lacey investigates the changing nature of criminal responsibility in English law from the mid-18th Century to the early 21st Century. Through a combined philosophical, historical, and socio-legal approach, this volume evidences how the theory behind criminal responsibility has shifted over time. The character and outcome responsibility which dominated criminal law in the 18th Century diminished in ideological importance in the following two centuries, when the idea of responsibility as founded in capacity was gradually established as the core of criminal law. Lacey traces the historical trajectory of responsibility into the 21st Century, arguing that ideas of character responsibility and the discourse of responsibility as founded in risk are enjoying a renaissance in the modern criminal law. These ideas of criminal responsibility are explored through an examination of the institutions through which they are produced, interpreted and executed; the interests which have shaped both doctrines and institutions; and the substantive social functions which criminal law and punishment have been expected to perform at different points in history. (shrink)

the standard reading of plato's Republic is that justice is predicated of the ideal city and of the philosophers, and that all other constitutions, both psychic and political, that are mentioned in the course of the dialogue are in some way or another defective and unjust. A non-standard reading appears to be gaining traction, however. Unorthodox Plato commentators such as Silverman, Jonas, Nakazawa, Braun, and Rowe argue that the ideal city—lovingly named 'Kallipolis'—is not just, that it is merely an improvement (...) upon, but not a complete cure for, the Luxurious City that is described immediately before it.1 If we want to gaze upon a just city, these unorthodox commentators propose, look no farther than the City of... (shrink)

Hugh Lacey (1939) é pesquisador emérito na Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, Estados Unidos, onde começou a lecionar em 1972. É Doutor em História e Filosofia da Ciência pela Universidade de Indiana (EUA), tendosido professor visitante na Universidade de São Paulo em diversas ocasiões (1973, 1996, 2000 e 2004). Seus trabalhos atribuem lugares próprios aos valores dentro da tecnociência, procurando mostrar que a abordagem científica materialista precisa assumir também o lugar que as coisas ocupam em sistemas ecológicos e sociais. Lacey (...) é autor de diversos artigos e livros, entre os quais estão Valores e Atividade Científica 1, Valores e Atividade Científica 2, A Controvérsia sobre os transgênicos: questões científicas e éticas, entre outros. (shrink)

We begin by a summary of the standardized version of the model of the interaction between scientific activities and values (elaborated fully in Lacey and Mariconda, 2015), and based on it we argue that there is a profound incoherence in the self- understanding of the modern scientific tradition, and that the main options actually available to ensure continuity with the positive realizations of this tradition can be well represented by two sorts of ideal types that we name, respectively,“commercially orientated (...) technoscience” and “multi-strategic research”. Then, in the light of the predominance that commercially oriented technoscience has gained in contemporary scientific institutions, we argue for the importance of developing multi-strategic research in areas such as agriculture. This is needed so that adequate evaluation of the potential risks of large scale applications of technoscience, as well as harm they may have actually occasioned, can be made; and also so that these applications can be rigorously compared with scientifically informed practices, such as agroecology, which are not as problematic for human health and the environment and which explore the regenerative powers of nature itself. (shrink)

We argue that work on norms provides a way to move beyond debates between proponents of individualist and structuralist approaches to bias, oppression, and injustice. We briefly map out the geography of that debate before presenting Charlotte Witt’s view, showing how her position, and the normative ascriptivism at its heart, seamlessly connects individuals to the social reality they inhabit. We then describe recent empirical work on the psychology of norms and locate the notions of informal institutions and soft structures with (...) respect to it. Finally, we argue that the empirical resources enrich Witt’s ascriptivism, and that the resulting picture shows theorists need not, indeed should not, choose between either the individualist or structuralist camp. (shrink)

Hobbits and hooligans -- Ignorant, irrational, misinformed nationalists -- Political participation corrupts -- Politics doesn't empower you or me -- Politics is not a poem -- The right to competent government -- Is democracy competent? -- The rule of the knowers -- Civic enemies.

Within contemporary penal philosophy, the view that punishment can only be justified if the offender is a moral agent who is responsible and hence blameworthy for their offence is one of the few areas on which a consensus prevails. In recent literature, this precept is associated with the retributive tradition, in the modern form of ‘just deserts’. Turning its back on the rehabilitative ideal, this tradition forges a strong association between the justification of punishment, the attribution of responsible agency in (...) relation to the offence, and the appropriateness of blame. By contrast, effective clinical treatment of disorders of agency employs a conceptual framework in which ideas of responsibility and blameworthiness are clearly separated from what we call ‘affective blame’: the range of hostile, negative attitudes and emotions that are typical human responses to criminal or immoral conduct. We argue that taking this clinical model of ‘responsibility without blame’ into the legal realm offers new possibilities. Theoretically, it allows for the reconciliation of the idea of ‘just deserts’ with a rehabilitative ideal in penal philosophy. Punishment can be reconceived as consequences—typically negative but occasionally not, so long as they are serious and appropriate to the crime and the context—imposed in response to, by reason of, and in proportion to responsibility and blameworthiness, but without the hard treatment and stigma typical of affective blame. Practically, it suggests how sentencing and punishment can better avoid affective blame and instead further rehabilitative and related ends, while yet serving the demands of justice. (shrink)

Can Martyrdom survive Secularization? is a survey of martyrdom in western society starting with the early Christian martyrs, and narrating its increasing politicization and secularization in more modern times. It argues that martyrdom is a two way street: the courage of men and women in the face of torture and death and the willingness of society to grant them the title of martyr. It recounts the careers of John Brown and his death on a Virginia gallows in 1859, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (...) and his execution by the Nazis in 1945, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and the atomic bomb. The story ends with the advent of suicide bombers, the apparent reintroduction of religion as a motive and their role as a political weapon. (shrink)

Individuals shift their language to converge with interlocutors. Recent work has suggested that convergence can target not only observed but also expected linguistic behavior, cued by social information. However, it remains uncertain how expectations and observed behavior interact, particularly when they contradict each other. We investigated this using a cooperative map task experiment, in which pairs of participants communicated online by typing messages to each other in a miniature “alien” language that exhibited variation between alien species. The overall task comprised (...) three phases, in each of which participants were told that they would be paired with a different partner. One member of the pair was given explicit linguistic expectations in each phase, while the software controlled whether or not observed behavior from their partner would be consistent or inconsistent with these expectations. The other participant was given no such expectations, allowing us to control for the role of expectation. Participants converged to both observed and expected linguistic behavior, and convergence was boosted when observation and expectation were aligned. When expected and observed behavior were misaligned, participants updated their expectations, though convergence levels did not drop. Furthermore, participants generalized what they learned about one partner to apparent novel partners of the same alien species. We also discuss individual variation in convergence patterns and the lack of a relationship between linguistic convergence and success at the map task. Findings are consistent with observations outside the laboratory that language users converge toward expected linguistic behavior. They also have broader implications for understanding linguistic accommodation and the influence of social information on linguistic processing and production. (shrink)

Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law (...) cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority. (shrink)

Utilitarianism has been attacked many times and from many points of view. Among other objections has been the charge that it cannot account for the moral phenomena connected with justice; we are interested, it is said, not only in producing as much good as possible, but also in distributing it in a certain way. The Utilitarian usually replies that these phenomena either can be deduced from Utilitarianism or are illusory, but a natural reluctance to go against the data of our (...) moral experience usually inclines him to the first alternative. One of the most interesting of the Utilitarians from this point of view is Sidgwick, because he makes Utilitarianism his philosophical basis, but at the same time he has a set of maxims 2 part of whose purpose is to cover the common-sense views on justice. In this article I shall consider the relations between these maxims and Utilitarianism, and shall try to show by means of an example that some of them do go beyond Utilitarianism, and that in so far, at any rate, as these maxims do represent the common-sense view, it and Utilitarianism are not in all cases strictly reconcilable. (shrink)

In this article I argue for a change to the text of Stobaeus’ doxography of Stoic ethics. I propose we emend it by reference to a parallel text in the Scholia in Lucianum. In order to make that argument, I offer a new assessment of the value of the scholiast's report of Stoic doxography – a report that, at least in virtue of its length ought to be better known to scholars of Stoicism than it currently is.

Stephen Hood asks a number of interesting questions about which moral norms govern competition. Pace Hood, I argue that these questions have no bearing on the debate between G. A. Cohen and me, as either one of us could answer those questions any number of ways, without this changing our view on whether a fully just society would be socialist or capitalist.

I argue in this essay that today’s conservatives have proven themselves radical—i.e., completely out of step with the history of western political thought—in their refusal to acknowledge the existence of collective action problems and the role government must often play to solve them.

Epistemologies of the South explores “a set of inquiries into the construction and validation of knowledge born in struggle, of ways of knowing developed by social groups as part of their resistance against the systematic injustices and oppressions caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy” . The author, Boaventura de Sousa Santos—Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin–Madison—is one of the leading intellectuals of the World Social Forum , the network of (...) organizations from the “global South” that challenge the current dominant order, and whose activities are often informed by experiences, aspirations and understanding that lie outside of the comprehension of the world as provided by mainstream scientific, economic and social theories. Through the WSF, Santos has made profound contact with the knowledge, forms of knowledge , their strengths and limitations, and the practices infor .. (shrink)

Exploring the role of values in scientific inquiry, Hugh Lacey examines the nature and meaning of values, and looks at challenges to the view, posed by postmodernists, feminists, radical ecologists, Third-World advocates and religious fundamentalists, that science is value free. He also focuses on discussions of 'development', especially in Third World countries. This paperback edition includes a new preface.

This article surveys recent feminist contributions to moral philosophy with an emphasis on those works which engage with debates within mainstream ethics. The article begins by examining a tension said to arise from the two criteria a theory must meet if it is to count as feminist moral theory: the women's experience requirement and the feminist conclusion requirement. Subsequent sections deal with feminist relational theories of rights, feminist work on responsibility and feminist contractarian approaches to ethics. A final section looks (...) at the application of some feminist moral theories to the problem of abortion. (shrink)

IVF as lottery or investment: contesting metaphors in discourses of infertilityThis paper reports an aspect of a poststructural feminist study in which I explored the discursive formations within which women for whom in vitro fertilisation (IVF) was unsuccessful constitute themselves. In my exploration I draw on data from interviews with women who discontinued infertility treatment, print media material and infertility self‐help books. Specifically, I highlight a metaphor of lottery in discourses of infertility, arguing that it is hegemonic and showing how (...) when women are situated as gamblers, the metaphor is instrumental in polarising them into ‘winners’ or ‘losers’ in relation to the subjectivity of motherhood. I further deconstruct these subjectivities, showing how ‘winners’ are valorised and ‘losers’ are pathologised. But importantly, I show how infertile women who are not mothers resisted locating themselves as ‘losers’ in a metaphor of lottery and instead situated themselves in a contesting metaphor of investment as diligent ‘workers’ and as active agents in choosing the best employment of their bodily and monetary resources. This paper therefore amplifies the marginalised perspective of infertile women who are not mothers. (shrink)

This chapter investigates three basic questions concerning the ethics of voting: is there a duty to vote? Are there moral obligations regulating how one ought to vote? How well do most voters meet these obligations? I argue the answers are, in order: no, yes, and badly.

One way of responding to the question of what PPE is involves mobilizing the tools that PPE involves. That is the exercise attempted in this article. The object is to use PPE as a method to analyze PPE as a subject matter. PPE is, whatever else, an interdisciplinary enterprise; so the point of departure involves analyzing the role and properties of disciplines within the institutional organization of enquiry. The basic idea is that enquiry is governed by a ‘division of epistemic (...) labour’ in Adam Smith’s sense, and that that division of labour depends for its working on institutions for the reliable certification of claims. Disciplines are such ‘institutions’. As such, they are indispensable. But they impose centripetal forces within the organization of enquiry that stand against interdisciplinary work. Understanding these forces offers some hope of securing an ‘optimal’ compromise between the benefits and costs that disciplines entail. Examples are offered from each of the disciplines involved in PPE separately, and some observations are offered about the architecture of the three disciplines’ interrelationships. (shrink)

Greek Philosophers of the Hellenistic Age examines an important but frequently neglected group of philosophers writing after Aristotle between the third and first centuries B.C. The work of a distinguished intellectual historian, this book is based on an erudite reading of a vast number of primary sources: the Greek and Latin writings of the philosophers, and the fragments, paraphrases, and testimonies from their lost works. Kristeller explores the thought of Epicurus; Zenon and Cleanthes, the founder of the Stoic school and (...) his successor; Pyrrhon and Arcesilaus, the founder of Skepticism and the philosopher who introduced it into the Platonic Academy; and Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic school and its most important representative. Other figures include Carneades and Philo of Larissa, the second and third representatives of Skepticism in the Platonic Academy, respectively; Panaetius, the first leader of Middle Stoicism; and Antiochus of Ascalon, the head of the Academy, who led it back from Skepticism and prepared Middle Platonism, which paved the way for Neoplatonism. Originally presented as a series of lectures before the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy, Greek Philosophers of the Hellenistic Age assesses a group of philosophers who exerted an enormous influence upon pagan and Christian writers of late antiquity - including Cicero and St. Augustine - and on many medieval and early modern philosophers, theologians, and other thinkers. (shrink)

Many people believe that we should not be friends with others if they have bad enough moral and political beliefs. For instance, they think that we should not befriend KKK members or Nazis. However, not all errors in moral and political belief disqualify people from friendship. If so, then there is some line to be drawn somewhere which indicates when a person's beliefs are bad enough that we should not befriend them. This paper considers many candidate proposals for how and (...) why to draw the line, including that beliefs might be extreme, be held irrationally, dehumanize others, are unreasonable, and more. However, upon inspection, each candidate proposal fails. They either provide the wrong kind of reason to reject people as friends, or they fail to explain what counts as ‘bad enough’ beliefs. There are various arguments in favour of rejecting people from friendship on the basis of their bad beliefs, but these arguments also fail to explain what counts as ‘bad enough’. Thus, this paper concludes there is a genuine puzzle: we should indeed blackball some people from friendship when their beliefs are bad enough, but we do not have even a rough specification of what counts as bad enough. (shrink)