Retributive accounts of the justification of criminal punishment are increasingly fashionable, yet their proponents frequently rely more on suggestive metaphor than on reasoned explanation. This article seeks to question whether any such coherent explanations are possible. I briefly sketch some general doubts about the validity of retributivist views and then critique three recent efforts (by George Sher, Jean Hampton, and Michael Moore) to put retributivism on a sound basis.

Retributivism is commonly taken as an alternative to a consequentialist justification of punishment. It has recently been suggested, however, that retributivism can be recast as a consequentialist theory. This suggestion is shown to be untenable. The temptation to advance it is traced to an “intrinsic good” claim prominent in retributive thinking. This claim is examined, and is argued to be of little help in coping with the difficulties besetting the retributive theory, as well as clashing with a “desert” claim equally (...) central to that theory. (shrink)

Unlike other treatments of legal punishment, Punishment: Theory and Practice takes both an external approach, asking why we punish at all, and an internal approach, considering issues faced by those 'inside' the practice: For what actions should we punish? Should we allow plea-bargaining? the insanity defense? How should sentencing be determined? The two approaches are connected: To decide whether to punish someone who is 'insane', or who cops a plea, we need to ask whether doing so is consistent with our (...) theory of why we punish at all. In connecting theory and practice, I draw on a broad range of thought: radical criticisms of punishment (Nietzsche, Foucault, Marxists), sociological theories (Durkheim, Girard), various philosophical traditions (utilitarian, German Idealism, modern liberalism), and the 'law and economics' movement. Against radical critics who argue we shouldn't punish at all, but who then leave us without an alternative for dealing with crime, I defend the practice, offering a version of retribution (which I distinguish from revenge and non-consequential theories) that holds we punish not to deter, reform, or otherwise augment social utility, but to mete out just deserts, vindicate right, and express society's condemnation of actions it deems blameworthy. I argue that this theory best accounts for how we do punish, and then use this theory to provide immanent criticism of certain features of our actual practice that don't accord with the retributive principle. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive handbook in the philosophy of criminal law. It contains seventeen original essays by leading thinkers in the field and covers the field's major topics including limits to criminalization, obscenity and hate speech, blackmail, the law of rape, attempts, accomplice liability, causation, responsibility, justification and excuse, duress, provocation and self-defense, insanity, punishment, the death penalty, mercy, and preventive detention and other alternatives to punishment. It will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students whose research and (...) studies concern philosophical issues in criminal law and criminal law theory. (shrink)

This study described the relationships between academic class and student moral sensitivity and reasoning and between curriculum design components for ethics education and student moral sensitivity and reasoning. The data were collected from freshman (n = 506) and senior students (n = 440) in eight baccalaureate nursing programs in South Korea by survey; the survey consisted of the Korean Moral Sensitivity Questionnaire and the Korean Defining Issues Test. The results showed that moral sensitivity scores in patient-oriented care and conflict were (...) higher in senior students than in freshman students. Furthermore, more hours of ethics content were associated with higher principled thinking scores of senior students. Nursing education in South Korea may have an impact on developing student moral sensitivity. Planned ethics content in nursing curricula is necessary to improve moral sensitivity and moral reasoning of students. (shrink)

This volume offers a selection of significant and influential research articles from the contemporary philosophical debate over the fundamental concepts and structures of Anglo-American criminal law. The articles consider the moral legitimacy of punishment, excuse and justification defenses and the conundrums of attempt liability, the bases of culpability and criminal responsibility and the appropriate limits of the criminal law. The introduction clarifies the contexts in which these subjects are discussed, and the volume includes an extensive bibliography.

The integration of artificial intelligence into bioethics education represents a new pedagogical approach that addresses complex moral issues in healthcare. The use of AI-driven platforms like ChatGPT in bioethics education can enhance critical thinking and decision-making skills among students by providing a diverse range of perspectives and solutions. To assess the ability of ChatGPT-4 to understand and resolve ethical dilemmas using validated clinical case vignettes, thereby determining its suitability as a teaching aid in bioethics. Ten clinical scenarios, each with inherent (...) ethical issues, were presented to ChatGPT-4. These scenarios were expert-validated to ensure relevance and complexity. ChatGPT's responses were evaluated by two blinded external raters to eliminate bias. The assessment criteria included identification of bioethical principles, recognition of stakeholders and their outcomes, and comprehension of ethical and legal frameworks. Additionally, the quality of responses was scored on a scale of 1–10. ChatGPT showed proficiency in identifying the pertinent bioethical principles and stakeholders involved in the ethical dilemmas presented. It achieved an overall score of 84.5%, with high marks for its analytical capabilities in complex scenarios. However, the study identified areas for improvement, particularly in proposing comprehensive solutions and alternative actions. ChatGPT demonstrates potential as an effective tool for bioethics education, capable of guiding learners through the resolution of ethical issues in clinical practice. However, to fully integrate ChatGPT into bioethics education, it requires enhancements in delivering detailed, actionable guidance in ethical decision-making. Future development should focus on refining ChatGPT’s ability to offer nuanced solutions aligned with patient values and clinician needs. (shrink)

Equity was first established as a terminus technicus by Aristotle, but the word was initially shaped by Plato in his Statesman. Aristotle considers equity as a necessary criterion of the interpretation of human action, i.e., the ultimate, the particular moral situation, given that law is general, and every moral agent makes different moral choices, since man exhibits a multiplicity of purposes as a being and every person acts on the basis of a variety of moral perspectives and values. Therefore, the (...) task of every judge is to trace the moral choice made by a moral agent, as well as to interpret the law and attribute justice, since, as it is attested, law may be deficient, whereas this does not necessarily apply to justice itself. (shrink)

This work presents the concepts of translation and conservative translation between logics. By using algebraic semantics we introduce several conservative translations involving the classical propositional calculus and the many-valued calculi of Post and Lukasiewicz.

This is a review of the challenging book in which Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan propose sweeping revisions to the structure of substantive criminal law.

One prominent contemporary retributivist theory is built on the notion that crime yields an “unfair advantage” over law-abiding citizens which punishment removes or nullifies. Michael Davis has defended this theory by constructing a market model of “unfair advantage” that he contends answers critics' objections to the retributivist enterprise. I seek to demonstrate the inadequacy of Davis's approach, arguing in particular that the market model rests on an incoherent notion of “demand” and would not, even if coherent, link “unfair advantage” to (...) the seriousness of crimes in any acceptable fashion. The salience of traditional objections to retributivism is thus unaffected by Davis's theory. (shrink)

In books such as The World Within the World and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, astronomer John Barrow has emerged as a leading writer on our efforts to understand the universe. Timothy Ferris, writing in The Times Literary Supplement of London, described him as "a temperate and accomplished humanist, scientist, and philosopher of science--a man out to make a contribution, not a show." Now Barrow offers the general reader another fascinating look at modern physics, as he explores the quest for a (...) single, unifying theory that will unlock nature's secrets. Theories of Everything is more than a history of science, more than a popular report on recent research and discoveries. Barrow provides a reflective, intelligent commentary on what a true Theory of Everything would be--its ingredients, its limitations, and what it could tell us about the universe. Never before, he writes, have physicists been so confident and so eager in the hunt for this "cosmic Rosetta Stone," as he calls it: "a single all-embracing picture of all the laws of nature from which the inevitability of all things seen must follow with unimpeachable logic." He lays out eight essential ingredients for a Theory of Everything and then explores each in turn, tracing how our knowledge has developed and how scientific discovery relates to our changing philosophy and religious thought in each area. Some of these ingredients are obvious--the laws of nature must be explained, for example, as well as its organizing principles--but others may be surprising, such as broken symmetries and selection biases. A Theory of Everything must account for the fact that the universe is "messy and complicated," he tells us, and for the limitations imposed by the questions we ask and the information we can obtain. The key lies in the remarkable capacity of mathematics to express the fundamental workings of the physical world--a language that the human mind is uniquely equipped to understand and manipulate. Barrow examines what mathematics actually is and describes how it makes the universe intelligible and provides a path to the underlying coherence in nature--which has led, in fact, to arguments that the universe itself is a vast computer. Yet even the most complete theory, even the most comprehensive mathematical explanation, cannot account for the uncomputable varieties of human experience and thought. "No non-poetic account of reality," he writes, "can be complete." In a field where the authorities converse in equations and mathematical notations, John Barrow speaks with the voice of thoughtful and knowledgeable humanist. Written with eloquence and expertise, Theories of Everything establishes a new perspective on humanity's efforts to explain the universe. (shrink)

A record of the words and teachings of Confucius, _The Analects_ is considered the most reliable expression of Confucian thought. However, the original meaning of Confucius's teachings have been filtered and interpreted by the commentaries of Confucianists of later ages, particularly the Neo-Confucianists of the Song dynasty, not altogether without distortion.In this monumental translation by Professor D. C. Lau, an attempt has been made to interpret the sayings as they stand. The corpus of the sayings is taken as an organic (...) whole and the final test of the interpretation rests on the internal consistency it exhibits. In other words, _The Analects_ is read in the light of _The Analects._This results in a truer understanding of Confucius' thought than the traditional interpretation and paves the way for a re-assessment of its importance in the history of Chinese thought and its relevance to the present day world.This volume also contains an introduction to the life and teachings of Confucius, and three appendices on the events in the life of Confucius, on his disciples, and on the composition of _The Analects._. (shrink)

RésuméLa croyance que l'on est (ou pas) dans un état de douleur est singulière en ceci qu'elle semble pouvoir être qualifiée d'infaillibilité ou d'incorrigibilité logique, de même que le cogito. Mais comment se peut-il que l'existence d'une croyance (vraie) et l'existence du fait qui est l'objet de cette croyance puisssent constituer la même existence? Je propose ici une réponse à cette question. Parfois, une croyance peut être un désir.

The evolution of the human mind through natural selection mandates that our conscious experiences are causally potent in order to leave a tangible impact upon the surrounding physical world. Any attempt to construct a functional theory of the conscious mind within the framework of classical physics, however, inevitably leads to causally impotent conscious experiences in direct contradiction to evolution theory. Here, we derive several rigorous theorems that identify the origin of the latter impasse in the mathematical properties of ordinary differential (...) equations employed in combination with the alleged functional production of the mind by the brain. Then, we demonstrate that a mind--brain theory consistent with causally potent conscious experiences is provided by modern quantum physics, in which the unobservable conscious mind is reductively identified with the quantum state of the brain and the observable brain is constructed by the physical measurement of quantum brain observables. The resulting quantum stochastic dynamics obtained from sequential quantum measurements of the brain is governed by stochastic differential equations, which permit genuine free will exercised through sequential conscious choices of future courses of action. Thus, quantum reductionism provides a solid theoretical foundation for the causal potency of consciousness, free will and cultural transmission. (shrink)

Will we ever discover a single scientific theory that explains everything that has ever happened and everything that will happen - a key that unlocks the ...

We propose a kernel method for using combinations of features across example pairs in learning pairwise classifiers. Pairwise classifiers, which identify whether two examples belong to the same class or not, are important components in duplicate detection, entity matching, and other clustering applications. Existing methods for learning pairwise classifiers from labeled training data are based on string edit distance or common features between two examples. However, if two examples from the same class have few common features, these methods have difficulties (...) in finding these pairs and achieving high recall. One typical example is to check whether two abbreviated author names in different citations refer to the same person or not. Since similarities between examples from the same class become close to zero, classifiers fail to distinguish positive pairs from negative pairs. One approach to avoiding the problem of zero similarities is using conjunctions of different features across examples, but implementing this idea straightforwardly makes the computational cost prohibitive for practical problems. Using a kernel on pair instances, our method can use feature conjunctions across examples without actually doing feature mappings, which are computationally expensive. The kernel is a tensor product of two inner products on the original feature space. The corresponding feature mapping generates conjunctions of features only across the two different examples while that of the conventional polynomial kernel also generates conjunctions of features from the same example, which are irrelevant to pairwise classification and cause deterioration of accuracy. Our experiments on the author matching problem show that this method can give a precision 4 to 8 times higher than that of previous methods at medium recall levels. (shrink)

This is a study of a crucial and controversial topic in metaphysics and the philosophy of science: the status of the laws of nature. D. M. Armstrong works out clearly and in comprehensive detail a largely original view that laws are relations between properties or universals. The theory is continuous with the views on universals and more generally with the scientific realism that Professor Armstrong has advanced in earlier publications. He begins here by mounting an attack on the orthodox and (...) sceptical view deriving from Hume that laws assert no more than a regularity of coincidence between instances of properties. In doing so he presents what may become the definitive statement of the case against this position. Professor Armstrong then goes on to establish his own theory in a systematic manner defending it against the most likely objections, and extending both it and the related theory of universals to cover functional and statistical laws. This treatment of the subject is refreshingly concise and vivid: it will both stimulate vigorous professional debate and make an excellent student text. (shrink)

Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized bullying, indicative of commodification of labour and disembeddedness. In contrast, children working in their home villages were not under debt bondage and underwent less exploitation and occasional and mild depersonalized bullying, indicative of how civil society organizations, (...) along with the state, attempt to re-embed economic activities in the social context. Polanyi’s double movement was evident. ‘Place’ emerged as the pivotal factor determining children’s experiences. A ‘protective alliance’ of community controls and social power, associated with in-group affiliations and cohesive ties, stemming from a common village and tribal identity, aided children working at home for Bhil farmers. ‘Asymmetric intergroup inequality’ due to pronounced social identity and class differences, coupled with locational constraints and developmental disadvantage, made migrant children vulnerable targets. Social embeddedness influences how child workers are treated because it forces employers to be ethical and not engage in bullying. However, by shifting production to children’s home villages, there is an attempt to obscure the difference between child labour and child work. Thus, the seeds of disembeddedness are sown through the very act of re-embeddeding, potentially hampering future interventions. (shrink)

The Arabic version of the Enneads is the earliest datable text in which appears the term "anniyya", that features in Avicenna’s metaphysics and lies in the background of the Latin definition of the Causa prima as esse tantum, typical of the Liber de Causis. This paper examines some examples of the use of "to be" in the Arabic translation of the Enneads. It also discusses the description of the First Cause as ‘pure Being’ or ‘first Being’ in the Arabic Plotinus, (...) and compares it with the Divine Names of the pseudo-Dionysius. icona . (shrink)

In this short text, a distinguished philosopher turns his attention to one of the oldest and most fundamental philosophical problems of all: How it is that we are able to sort and classify different things as being of the same natural class? Professor Armstrong carefully sets out six major theories—ancient, modern, and contemporary—and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each. Recognizing that there are no final victories or defeats in metaphysics, Armstrong nonetheless defends a traditional account of universals as the (...) most satisfactory theory we have.This study is written for advanced students, but as Armstrong goes considerably beyond his earlier work on this topic, it will interest professional scholars as well. Carefully plotted and clearly written, Universals is both a paradigm of exposition and a case study on the value of careful analysis of fundamental issues in philosophy. (shrink)

In this important study D. M. Armstrong offers a comprehensive system of analytical metaphysics that synthesises but also develops his thinking over the last twenty years. Armstrong's analysis, which acknowledges the 'logical atomism' of Russell and Wittgenstein, makes facts the fundamental constituents of the world, examining properties, relations, numbers, classes, possibility and necessity, dispositions, causes and laws. All these, it is argued, find their place and can be understood inside a scheme of states of affairs. This is a comprehensive and (...) rigorously this-worldly account of the most general features of reality, argued from a distinctive philosophical perspective, and it will appeal to a wide readership in analytical philosophy. (shrink)