Social Contracts, Fair Play, and the Justification of Punishment

In recent years, the counterintuitive claim that criminals consent to their own punishment has been revived by philosophers who attempt to ground the justification of punishment in some version of the social contract. In this paper, I examine three such attempts—“contractarian” essays by Christopher Morris and Claire Finkelstein and an essay by Corey Brettschneider from the rival “contractualist” camp—and I find all three unconvincing. Each attempt is plausible, I argue, but its plausibility derives not from the appeal to a social contract but from considerations of fair play. Rather than look to the social contract for a justification of punishment, I conclude, we would do better to rely on the principle of fair play

Jean Hampton’s Theory of Punishment: A Critical Appreciation

Jean Hampton’s work first came to my attention in 1984, when the summer issue of Philosophy & Public Affairs appeared in my mailbox. Hampton’s essay in that issue, “The Moral Education Theory of Punishment,” did not persuade me—or many others, I suspect—that “punishment should not be justified as a deserved evil, but rather as an attempt, by someone who cares, to improve a wayward person” (Hampton 1984, 237). The essay did persuade me, though, that moral education is a plausible aim of punishment, even if it is not the “full and complete justification” Hampton claimed it to be (Hampton 1984, 209). It also persuaded me that I would do well to keep an eye out for further work by this gifted philosopher

Restitution, Punishment, and Debts to Society

Of the many developments in the area of criminal justice over the last twenty years or so, the rediscovery of the victim may well be the most heartening. This rediscovery has produced both a new field of study, victimology, and a number of interesting programs and proposals that aim to redress the injuries suffered by the victims of crime. To this point, however, the rediscovery of the victim has not worked a fundamental transformation of our system of criminal justice. The question I wish to address here is whether it should do so

Current, December 05, 1968

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Autonomy, Domination, and the Republican Challenge to Liberalism

Like Sunstein and other advocates of \u27republican\u27 or \u27civic\u27 liberalism, I believe that it is historically unsound and politically unwise to insist on a sharp distinction between liberalism and republicanism. Others disagree, however, and there is much to be learned from their position even if, ultimately, we should not adopt it. Those who take this more radical neo-republican view advance two main lines of argument: first, that the liberal emphasis on neutrality and procedural fairness is fundamentally at odds with the republican commitment to promoting civic virtue; and, second, that republicans and liberals conceive of liberty or freedom in incompatible ways. This second line of argument is my particular concern here, for it raises the question of whether republicans may attach the same value to autonomy that liberals do. My claim is that they may, and they must as republicanism and liberalism in the end are both theories of self-government. Before setting out and supporting that claim, though, it is necessary to examine briefly the first line of argument

Current, March 07, 1968

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Current, December 12, 1968

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Current, February 23, 1968

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Comment on Benhabib\u27s Dismantling the Leviathan : A Republican-LiberaI Perspective

Those who think of themselves as republican or civic liberals, as I do, will surely be of two minds about Seyla Benhabib\u27s Dismantling the Leviathan: Citizen and State in a Global World [Spring 2001 ]. In some respects, Professor Benhabib\u27 s thoughtful essay is quite congenial to republican liberalism. She insists on the importance of human rights, for instance, and she looks for ways to expand political participation. Her indictment of civic republicanism, however, requires a republican-liberal response

Authority, Legitimacy, and the Obligation to Obey the Law

According to the standard or traditional account, those who hold political authority legitimately have a right to rule that entails an obligation of obedience on the part of those who are subject to their authority. In recent decades, however, and in part in response to philosophical anarchism, a number of philosophers have challenged the standard account by reconceiving authority in ways that break or weaken the connection between political authority and obligation. This paper argues against these revisionist accounts in two ways: first, by pointing to defects in their conceptions of authority; and second, by sketching a fair-play approach to authority and political obligation that vindicates the standard account