Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Discipline
- Institution
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Law
Who’S To Blame? Blame Attributions And Obesity-Related Law And Policy, Lindsey E. Wylie
Who’S To Blame? Blame Attributions And Obesity-Related Law And Policy, Lindsey E. Wylie
Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Obesity is a foremost public health concern that has received considerable attention. Because of this so-named “epidemic,” law-makers are challenged with implementing effective policies that the public supports. Little is known, however, about the antecedents and consequences of these policies—especially attributions of blameworthiness. Study 1 developed the Obesity Blame Attribution Scale (OBAS). Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that controllability, responsibility and dispositional blame were separate constructs and were part of a higher-order dispositional blame factor. Situational blame was a separate higher-order factor, not correlated with dispositional blame, consisting of blame toward the food industry and towards government policy. Using the OBAS, …
Punishment And Blame For Culpable Indifference, Kenneth Simons
Punishment And Blame For Culpable Indifference, Kenneth Simons
Faculty Scholarship
In criminal law, the mental state of the defendant is a crucial determinant of the grade of crime that the defendant has committed and of whether the conduct is criminal at all. Under the widely accepted modern hierarchy of mental states, an actor is most culpable for causing harm purposely, and progressively less culpable for doing so knowingly, recklessly, or negligently. Notably, this hierarchy emphasizes cognitive rather than conative mental states. But this emphasis, I argue, is often unjustified. When we punish and blame for wrongful acts, we should look beyond the cognitive dimensions of the actor’s culpability, and should …
Blame And The Criminal Law, David Lefkowitz
Blame And The Criminal Law, David Lefkowitz
Philosophy Faculty Publications
Many retributivists appear to presume that the concept of blame that figures in their accounts of just punishment is the same one people employ in their interpersonal moral relationships. David Shoemaker contends that this presumption is mistaken. Moral blameworthiness, he maintains, tracks only the meaning of a person's action––his reasons for acting as he did––while criminal blameworthiness, which he equates with liability to punishment, tracks only the impermissibility of an agent's action. I contest the second of these two claims, and in doing so defend the retributivists’ presumption. First, I argue that the purpose of a criminal trial can be …