Education, civic empowerment, and race: commentary on Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind

Meira Levinson’s No Citizen Left Behind is a thoughtful, accessible, philosophically rich look at civic education in U.S. schools. The book’s central claims are, on the whole, quite persuasive. In the interests of fostering further discussion, this essay raises some questions about the book’s accounts of racial microaggressions in schools, the extent of authenticity in student experiences, and the practice of code-switching

The Moral Permissibility of Punishment

This dissertation offers an account of the moral permissibility of criminal punishment. Punishment presents a distinctive moral challenge in that it involves a community’s inflicting harm on individuals, treating them in ways that would typically be morally wrong. We can distinguish a number of different questions of punishment’s permissibility. This dissertation focuses on four central questions:: 1) Why may we punish? Why is it in principle permissible to inflict harm on criminal offenders?: 2) Why should we punish? Is there a compelling reason to do so?: 3) How may we punish? What principles should constrain impositions of punishment? And finally,: 4) who is properly subject to punishment? Rather than expect to answer all of these questions by appeal to the same moral principle, this dissertation contends that the questions should be seen as distinct, and thus as appropriately answered by appeal to distinct moral considerations. Ultimately, the dissertation concludes that an institution of punishment that aims at deterrence, constrained by considerations of retribution and reform, is permissible insofar as the institution is among the mutually beneficial practices with which community members have reciprocal, fairness-based obligations to comply

Criminalization and the collateral consequences of conviction

Convicted offenders face a host of so-called “collateral” consequences: formal measures such as legal restrictions on voting, employment, housing, or public assistance, as well as informal consequences such as stigma, family tensions, and financial insecurity. These consequences extend well beyond an offender’s criminal sentence itself and are frequently more burdensome than the sentence. This essay considers two respects in which collateral consequences may be relevant to the question of what the state should, or may, criminalize. First, they may be relevant according to specific accounts of criminalization, including plausible versions of the harm principle and legal moralism. Second, they may be relevant to the legitimacy of state criminalization more generally. Thus for legal theorists concerned with the issue of legitimate criminalization, normative questions raised by collateral consequences are of central importance

Punishment's Burdens on the Innocent

Critics of state punishment have frequently pointed out that its imposition sometimes involves the infliction of burdens on innocent people: namely, those falsely convicted of crimes and punished. Punishment also creates significant burdens for innocent children and other dependents of those punished (social stigma, financial stress, direct abuse, and so on). But these burdens on innocents have received much less philosophical attention than the burdens created for the falsely convicted. This paper examines five lines of argument that might lead one to the conclusion that the burdens punishment creates for the falsely convicted are more morally troubling than the burdens it creates for innocent dependents of those punished. I offer reasons to be sceptical about each of these arguments. I contend that we should regard the burdens state punishment creates for innocent dependents of those punished as no less morally troubling than the burdens it creates for innocent, falsely convicted people. In the paper’s final section, I discuss some implications of my account

Public Reason and the Justification of Punishment

Chad Flanders has argued that retributivism is inconsistent with John Rawls’s core notion of public reason, which sets out those considerations on which legitimate exercises of state power can be based. Flanders asserts that retributivism is grounded in claims about which people can reasonably disagree and are thus not suitable grounds for public policy. This essay contends that Rawls’s notion of public reason does not provide a basis for rejecting retributivist justifications of punishment. I argue that Flanders’s interpretation of public reason is too exclusionary: on it, public reason would rule out any prominent rationale for punishment. On what I contend is a better interpretation of public reason, whether retributivism would be ruled out as a rationale for punishment depends on whether a retributivist account can be constructed from shared political commitments in a liberal democracy. Some prominent versions of retributivism meet this requirement and so are consistent with public reason

Myeloid neoplasm with histiocytosis and spleen tyrosine kinase fusion responds to fostamatinib

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