This book presents a comprehensive overview of what the criminal law would look like if organised around the principle that those who deserve punishment should receive punishment commensurate with, but no greater than, that which they deserve. Larry Alexander and Kimberly Kessler Ferzan argue that desert is a function of the actor's culpability, and that culpability is a function of the risks of harm to protected interests that the actor believes he is imposing and his reasons for acting in (...) the face of those risks. The authors deny that resultant harms, as well as unperceived risks, affect the actor's desert. They thus reject punishment for inadvertent negligence as well as for intentions or preparatory acts that are not risky. Alexander and Ferzan discuss the reasons for imposing risks that negate or mitigate culpability, the individuation of crimes, and omissions. (shrink)

In "The Rule of Rules" Larry Alexander and Emily Sherwin examine this dilemma.

The publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology provoked a great controversy, for in that work Wilson claimed that ethics was rooted in human biology. On the first page of the book, he asserted that our deepest intuitions of right and wrong are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved via natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural environment. In 1998, the publication of Wilson's Consilience renewed the (...) controversy, as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments.Footnotes* I am grateful to the Earhart Foundation for a research grant that supported the writing of this essay. (shrink)

It is difficult, if not impossible, to so define the term as to satisfy a subtle and metaphysical mind, bent on the detection of some point, however attenuated, upon which to hang a criticism. —Supreme Court of Virginia 1.

For more than a half-century, evidence scholars have been exploring whether the criminal standard of proof can be grounded in decision theory. Such grounding would require the emergence of a social consensus about the utilities to be assigned to the four outcomes at trial. Significant disagreement remains, even among legal scholars, about the relative desirability of those outcomes and even about the formalisms for manipulating their respective utilities. We attempt to diagnose the principal reasons for this dissensus and to suggest (...) ways in which a broadly shared evaluation might be forged, both with respect to the appropriate equations for defining the standard of proof and with respect to the appropriate utilities to associate with the various trial outcomes. Where consensus cannot be forged, we hold that remaining differences can probably be finessed. We also suggest ways to elicit the utilities of individuals on these matters so as to avoid the usual flaws of such surveys. Along the way, we note a). the disproportionate role that the Blackstone ratio of errors continues to play in appraisals of the utilities of trial outcomes (despite its unintelligibility in the context of utilities) and b). the persisting belief -for which there is no theoretical basis-that every plausible assignment of utilities will inevitably result in a very high standard of proof. Finally, we examine some of the technical features associated with a proposed rank ordering of the utilities of trial outcomes. (shrink)

The psychology of ownership is rooted in self-ownership. The human brain has an evolved interoceptive sense of owning the body that supports self-ownership and the ownership of external things as extensions of the self-owning self. In this way, evolutionary neuroscience supports a Lockean liberal conception of equal natural rights rooted in natural self-ownership.

Kant's relation to Hobbesian voluntarism has recently become a source of controversy for the interpretation of Kant's practical philosophy. Realist interpreters, most prominently Karl Ameriks, have attacked the genealogies of Kantian autonomy suggested by J. B. Schneewind and Christine Korsgaard as misleadingly voluntarist and unacceptably anti-realist. In this debate, however, there has been no real discussion of Kant's own views about Hobbes. By examining the relation of Hobbes' voluntarism to a kind of conventionalism, and through a reading of Kant's most (...) explicit discussion of Hobbes, in “Theory and Practice,“ 1 I argue that Kant's criticism of Hobbes is much more limited than it might first appear. Rather than rejecting Hobbes' voluntarism and conventionalism entirely, Kant ends up criticizing only Hobbes' understanding of the relation between these doctrines. The essay thus defends Schneewind's and Korsgaard's histories of modern moral philosophy, and raises doubts about realist readings of Kant's practical philosophy. (shrink)

James Ashbrook is described as a negotiator in the sense of arbitration and pathbreaking, followed by an account of how he achieved a new way of “making sense” in his neurotheology. Questions are raised about what is distinctly theological about Ashbrook's effort and how the issue of human and divine will is treated. Ashbrook provides inspiration and model for scientifically‐based religious inquiry.

Into the not so tranquil atmosphere of American race relations blew Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life proclaiming the emergence of a New Class of the “cognitive elite” and an underclass of the cognitively unfit. Public response has been both extensive and contradictory. Russell Jacoby and Naomi Glauberman have compiled the most comprehensive anthology of these responses, which they appropriately describe as a “gale in the Zeitgeist.” Many of the selections are (...) critical because, as they point out, the book fairly reflects the weight of published opinion thus far. As for themselves, they feel the work “gives a sophisticated voice to a repressed and illiberal sentiment: a belief that ruinous divisions in society are sanctioned by nature itself (p. ix). (shrink)

Working memory resources are needed for processing and maintenance of information during cognitive tasks. Many models have been developed to capture the effects of limited working memory resources on performance. However, most of these models do not account for the finding that different individuals show different sensitivities to working memory demands, and none of the models predicts individual subjects' patterns of performance. We propose a computational model that accounts for differences in working memory capacity in terms of a quantity called (...) source activation, which is used to maintain goal‐relevant information in an available state. We apply this model to capture the working memory effects of individual subjects at a fine level of detail across two experiments. This, we argue, strengthens the interpretation of source activation as working memory capacity. (shrink)

The practice of confessing one's sexual sins has historically provided boys and men with mixed messages. Engaging in coercive sex is publicly condemned; yet it is treated as not significantly different from other transgressions that can be easily forgiven. We compare Catholic confessional practices to those of psychoanalytically oriented male writers on masculinity. We argue that the latter is no more justifiable than the former, and propose a progressive confessional mode for discussing male sexuality.