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Selected Works

2017

Punishment

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Punishing Without Free Will, Luis E. Chiesa Nov 2017

Punishing Without Free Will, Luis E. Chiesa

Luis Chiesa

Most observers agree that free will is central to our practices of blaming and punishment. Yet the conventional conception of free will is under sustained attack by the so-called determinists. Determinists claim that all of the events that take place in the universe – including human acts – are the product of causally determined forces over which we have no control. If human conduct is really determined by factors that we cannot control, how can our acts be the product of our own unfettered free will and what would that mean for the criminal law? The overwhelming majority of legal …

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Fortifying The Self-Defense Justification Of Punishment, Zac Cogley Sep 2017

Fortifying The Self-Defense Justification Of Punishment, Zac Cogley

Zac Cogley

David Boonin has recently advanced several challenges to the self-defense justification of punishment. Boonin argues that the self-defense justification of punishment justifies punishing the innocent, justifies disproportionate punishment, cannot account for mitigating excuses, and does not justify intentionally harming offenders as we do when we punish them. In this paper, I argue that the self-defense justification, suitably understood, can avoid all of these problems. To help demonstrate the self-defense theory’s attraction, I also develop some contrasts between the self-defense justification, Warren Quinn’s better known ‘auto-retaliator’ argument, and desert-based justifications of punishment. In sum, I show that the self-defense justification of …

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