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Scanlon’s “Giving Desert its Due”
A couple of years back Tim Scanlon did a blog post and comment-section discussion on PEA Soup. Here’s one bit: In earlier work, including my Tanner Lectures on the significance of choice and Chapter 6 of What We Owe to Each Other, I rejected the idea of moral desert because I identified it with the…
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The “Humanitarianism” of Living in Prison Until Death
The profile of Judith Clark from last month has me worried: We are more willing to impose death when the killer is painted in monochrome—if we can define him or her by the horror of the crime. Many think this is just; that is what blame and punishment are about. But in rare public comments…
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I have some questions about violence
It looks like I’ll be co-teaching a course on violence with Daniel Levine in the spring, and I have some questions: Is it just me, or do philosophers rarely talk about violence? We talk a lot about killing, and war, and punishment, and even torture. We talk about peace and non-violence. But “violence” doesn’t come…
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Reflections on my Crime and Punishment Seminar
This semester I taught a course on crime and punishment, and in part out of competition with my colleague Seth Vannatta, I set out to give a final presentation on the dimensions of the course. This is the presentation I wrote. Introduction Our task was to explore the role of ethics in the law,…
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Status Emotions and Punishment
I haven’t written much about status emotions, recently, but I came across one of my favorite Facebook memes and remembered again how central it seems. I don’t endorse the misogyny here, but it perfectly describes the way that fundamental attribution bias transforms resentment into contempt, and thus leads, in my view, to both epistemic and…