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Some Doubts About Argument By Hypothetical, Paul H. Robinson

All Faculty Scholarship

In his paper, Why the Successful Assassin Is More Wicked than the Unsuccessful One, Leo Katz "pick[s] up the gauntlet [Sandy] Kadish throws down" to offer a nonconsequentialist justification for giving significance to resulting harm and, in particular, to justify the common practice of punishing attempts less than the completed offense. In one sense, I may not be the ideal person to serve as critic. I am not one of those who, like Kadish and others, does not believe in the significance of resulting harm in assessing blameworthiness (people whom Katz calls the "luck- skeptics" but to whom I will …