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Full-Text Articles in Law
Punishing Without Free Will, Luis E. Chiesa
Punishing Without Free Will, Luis E. Chiesa
Journal Articles
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 …
Mercy, Crime Control, And Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson
Mercy, Crime Control, And Moral Credibility, Paul H. Robinson
All Faculty Scholarship
If, in the criminal justice context, "mercy" is defined as forgoing punishment that is deserved, then much of what passes for mercy is not. Giving only minor punishment to a first-time youthful offender, for example, might be seen as an exercise of mercy but in fact may be simply the application of standard blameworthiness principles, under which the offender's lack of maturity may dramatically reduce his blameworthiness for even a serious offense. Desert is a nuanced and rich concept that takes account of a wide variety of factors. The more a writer misperceives desert as wooden and objective, the more …
The Unsolved Mysteries Of Causation And Responsibility, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
The Unsolved Mysteries Of Causation And Responsibility, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan
All Faculty Scholarship
This article is part of a symposium on Michael Moore's Causation and Responsibility. In Causation and Responsibility, Moore adopts a scalar approach to factual causation, with counterfactual dependency serving as an independent desert basis. Moore’s theory of causation does not include proximate causation. The problem with Moore's argument is that the problems with which proximate causation dealt - how and when to limit cause in fact - remain unresolved. In this paper, I focus on two sets of problems. The first set is the “fit” or categorization problems within the criminal law. I focus on three matches: (1) the fit …