If conduct must be wrongful in order to be justifiably criminalised, how should its wrongfulness be established? I examine a conception of wrongfulness put forward by A. P. Simester, which makes wrongfulness turn on whether the reasons favouring the performance of an action are, all things considered, defeated by the reasons against its performance. I argue that such a view can only generate appropriate substantive constraints in the context of criminalisation if it can distinguish between the sorts of reasons that (...) a verdict of wrongfulness, as a concept distinct from stupidity or selfishness, should attend to, and the sorts of reasons it should leave out. Assuming that this conception of wrongfulness should operate as a constraint on criminalisation in a liberal-democratic state, the only reasons it should include are other-regarding reasons. What matters is whether the agent commits an other-regarding wrong. This conception of wrongfulness helps us further to resolve fundamental questions concerning mala prohibita and the legitimate reach of any duty to obey the law. (shrink)

If conduct must be wrongful in order to be justifiably criminalised, how should its wrongfulness be established? I examine a conception of wrongfulness put forward by A. P. Simester, which makes wrongfulness turn on whether the reasons favouring the performance of an action are, all things considered, defeated by the reasons against its performance. I argue that such a view can only generate appropriate substantive constraints in the context of criminalisation if it can distinguish between the sorts of reasons that (...) a verdict of wrongfulness, as a concept distinct from stupidity or selfishness, should attend to, and the sorts of reasons it should leave out. Assuming that this conception of wrongfulness should operate as a constraint on criminalisation in a liberal-democratic state, the only reasons it should include are other-regarding reasons. What matters is whether the agent commits an other-regarding wrong. This conception of wrongfulness helps us further to resolve fundamental questions concerning mala prohibita and the legitimate reach of any duty to obey the law. (shrink)

The exploration of penal censure in this book is inspired by the fortieth anniversary in 2016 of the publication of Andreas von Hirsch's Doing Justice, which opened up a fresh set of issues in theorisation about punishment that eventually led von Hirsch to ground his proposed model of desert-based sentencing on the notion of penal censure. Von Hirsch's work thus provides an obvious starting-point for an exploration of the importance of censure for the justification of punishment, both within von Hirsch's (...) theory of just deserts and from the perspectives of other theoretical approaches. It also provides an opportunity for engaging with censure more broadly from philosophical, sociological-anthropological and individual-psychological perspectives. The essays in this collection map the conceptual territory of censure from these different perspectives, address issues for desert theory that arise from fuller understandings of censure, and consider afresh the role of censure within the jurisprudence of punishment. They show that analyses of censure from different vantage points can significantly enrich punishment theory, not least by providing a conceptual basis for perceiving common ground between and thus connecting different strands of penal theory. (shrink)

This book considers the way that Cesare Beccaria's slim 1764 volume On Crimes and Punishments influenced policy developments worldwide and over decades, if not centuries, after its publication. For those who turn to Beccaria's work today, the encounter is shaped by that knowledge. Appreciative of his book's dual nature as historical document and repository of ideas, the contributions in this collection address different aspects of the criminal justice theory Beccaria offered his readers and face up to methodological questions raised by (...) meeting a historical text of this kind - unsystematic and by modern standards often under-argued - with modern scholarly conventions in mind. Contributions in the first part of the book engage with Beccaria's 'political theory of criminal justice' through the lenses of political and penal philosophy. How do we get from Beccaria's blending of social-contractarian foundations and proto-utilitarian policy analysis to the concrete set of criminal justice practices Beccaria presents as justified? This leads across to the second part where contributors approach Beccaria's ideas with present-day reforms and developments in mind. Many of his policy proposals and arguments remain significant from our contemporary perspective, their limitations and omissions proving as instructive for the contemporary scholar as their more prescient elements. The third part offers those looking at Beccaria's work today a glimpse into the practical difficulties facing the firebrand author turned public servant during his long career in the Habsburg-Lombardian administration. It puts his work into the broader context of pathways to criminal justice reform in northern Italy, Habsburgian Lombardy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Beccaria's day. (shrink)

This book celebrates Andreas (Andrew) von Hirsch's pioneering contributions to liberal criminal theory. He is particularly noted for reinvigorating desert-based theories of punishment, for his development of principled normative constraints on the enactment of criminal laws, and for helping to bridge the gap between Anglo-American and German criminal law scholarship. Underpinning his work is a deep commitment to a liberal vision of the state. This collection brings together a distinguished group of international authors, who pay tribute to von Hirsch by (...) engaging with topics on which he himself has focused. The essays range across sentencing theory, questions of criminalisation, and the relation between criminal law and the authority of the state. Together, they articulate and defend the ideal of a liberal criminal justice system, and present a fitting accolade to Andreas von Hirsch's scholarly life. (shrink)

What responsibilities, if any, do we have towards our genetic offspring, before or after birth and perhaps even before creation, merely by virtue of the genetic link? What claims, if any, arise from the mere genetic parental relation? Should society through its legal arrangements allow 'fatherless' or 'motherless' children to be born, as the current law on medically assisted reproduction involving gamete donation in some legal systems does? Does the possibility of establishing genetic parentage with practical certainty necessitate reform of (...) current legal regimes of parenthood? And what limits, if any, should we set on parental procreative choices in the interests of future children, particularly with regard to genetic engineering and related techniques? These are the questions explored in this book by some of the foremost legal, bioethical and biomedical thinkers. Assembled with a view to assisting the reader to reflect critically on the ongoing social experiment which medically assisted reproduction is today, the essays in this collection highlight what are - and what else might in the nearby future become - possible reproductive options and respond to the difficulties we encounter in assessing these practices and possibilities from our traditional ethical vantage points. Contributions by: Andrew Bainham, Thomas Baldwin, Lisa Bortolotti, John Harris, Martin H. Johnson, Judith Masson, Martin Richards, Alison Shaw, Sally Sheldon, Bonnie Steinbock and Mary Warnock. (shrink)

Review of Du Bois, Francois and Antje du Bois-Pedain (eds.) Justice and Reconciliation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

This paper responds to Antje du-Bois Pedain’s discussion of the wrongfulness constraint on the criminal law. Du-Bois Pedain argues that the constraint is best interpreted as stating that φing is legitimately criminalised only if φing is wrongful for other-regarding reasons. We take issue with du-Bois Pedain’s arguments. In our view, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of legitimate criminalisation that φing is wrongful in du-Bois Pedain’s sense. Rather, it is a necessary condition of (...) legitimate criminalisation that φing is what we call bare wrongful —that is, that the reasons in favour of φing are defeated by the reasons against. Though du-Bois Pedain is critical of this view, we argue that her criticisms do not convince. (shrink)

In the recently published collection, Criminal Law and the Authority of the State, two contributions allude to an analogy with parental authority as a means to a better understanding of the institution of criminal punishment, but reach different conclusions. Malcolm Thorburn uses the parental authority analogy to justify the institution of state punishment as an assertion of robust authority over offenders. Antje du Bois-Pedain uses the same analogy to advocate the idea of punishment as an inclusionary practice, designed (...) to reintegrate offenders into society. I argue that Thorburn’s theory of robust authority is inconsistent if not self-contradictory when it tries to assume a liberal posture, and that du Bois-Pedain’s reintegrative model provides a better account of the justification and objectives of state punishment. (shrink)

In this paper we develop a novel propositional semantics based on the framework of branching time. The basic idea is to replace the moment-history pairs employed as parameters of truth in the standard Ockhamist semantics by pairs consisting of a moment and a consistent, downward closed set of so-called transitions. Whereas histories represent complete possible courses of events, sets of transitions can represent incomplete parts thereof as well. Each transition captures one of the alternative immediate future possibilities open at a (...) branching point. The transition semantics exploits the structural resources a branching time structure has to offer and provides a fine-grained picture of the interrelation of modality and time. In addition to temporal and modal operators, a so-called stability operator becomes interpretable as a universal quantifier over the possible future extensions of a given transition set. The stability operator allows us to specify how and how far time has to unfold for the truth value of a sentence at a moment to become settled and enables a perspicuous treatment of future contingents. We show that the semantics developed along those lines generalizes and extends extant approaches: both Peirceanism and Ockhamism can be viewed as limiting cases of the transition approach that build on restricted resources only, and on both accounts, stability collapses into truth. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Paragrana Jahrgang: 25 Heft: 1 Seiten: 346-360.

The article takes up J. P. Arnason's basic theoretical assumption that the western trajectory to modernity marks only one possibility of the modern constellation and that modernity has to be pluralized. Arnason's differentiation between a civilizational paradigm and a civilizational horizon allows us to acknowledge the ambivalent perceptions of modernity prevalent in the colonial and postcolonial encounter and gives space for counter-paradigms of modernity. Through a brief discussion of Indian reflections on modernity (P. Chatterjee, J. Alam) I want to argue (...) that the aspect of agency, marginalized in the philosophical and sociological debate on multiple modernities, has to be integrated into the theory. Examples from the Indian Himalayas should show how in everyday life as well as in the course of a social movement for regional autonomy `preferred futures' are negotiated on the basis of a reflexive balancing of `traditional' and `modern' elements which are articulated and joined in a self-made present. The article ends with a plaidoyer for an anthropology of modernity. (shrink)

A central challenge of Amartya Sen’s comparative view of justice is to bring cultural diversity to bear on conceptualizing global justice, which includes building bridges across cultures that enable effective action, and rendering compatible the most beneficent of Rawlsian (or transcendental) intentions with irreducible cultural diversity. For social scientists meeting this challenge requires, first, taking account of variation of social practices in the social construction of meaning, and second, uncovering invisible frontiers of global justice that remain hidden due to conceptual (...) or empirical oversight. The latter is especially true for contemporary International Relations (IR) theory, which assumes state actors to be the main interlocutors in the global realm, and thus precludes consideration of micro-level forms of inter-national relations (understood as interaction among all types of actors that takes place across country borders and that bears traits of national identity). Alternatively, Sen’s micro-perspectival approach offers a welcome support for pluralist approaches that both appreciate non-state access to contestation in the international arena, and account for the meaning-in-use of fundamental norms (democracy, rule of law, human rights) in different cultural and inter-national contexts. (shrink)

The globalization of production and trade has contributed to the rise in complex global value chains where the reach of state regulation is limited. As an alternative, private regulation, developed and administered by companies, industry associations, and nongovernmental organizations, has emerged to safeguard economic, environmental, and social sustainability in producer countries and along the value chain. The academic literature on private regulation in global value chains has grown over the last decade, but currently few major reviews of the research have (...) been undertaken. This paper examines peer-reviewed research in the relevant disciplines published in academic journals up to December 2011. Our goal is to identify and classify the topics and theories in the global value chain literature. We conclude that the number of articles explicitly examining private regulation, in a global value chain context, is relatively small when considering the importance and growth of these chains in the world’s economy. We also conclude that agriculture, forestry, and apparel manufacturing are the most often studied economic sectors; in contrast, other sectors, such as the information, communication and technology, with their complex global value chains, and often problematic environmental and social conditions, are understudied. (shrink)

Applied philosophy is experiencing its “golden days,” as Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen says in his insightful introduction to A Companion to Applied Philosophy. Applied philosophy seems to be distinguished from its opposite, pure philosophy, usually understood as traditional philosophy, which deals with subjects such as free will, consciousness, or knowledge in philosophical subdisciplines like ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. To embrace applied philosophy could thus mean to advocate for a philosophy that deals with questions “relevant to ‘the important questions of everyday life,’” as (...) Leslie Stevenson puts it, as opposed to questions that arise from within the subdisciplines of pure philosophy. (shrink)

"As a 'rhetoric of the mean' (mesotes ideal), sensibility provides a positive catalog of emotionalization. This is because ethos as an emotional level is viewed as being able, through gentle emotions, to please, placate and achieve sympathy and virtue (Quintilian). Sensibility in literature creates a bridge between an 'art of the soul' that developed into a major subjective and personal factor in the 18th century and a sense of sociability that aimed to integrate the individual into the community. The goal (...) of this study is to provide, through a structural linking of the ethos of virtue and the 'rhetoric of the mean', a reading of literature of sensibility based on rhetoric and cultural history that can explain both its public success 'with the people' and the reasons for why it failed to meet its own claims."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

How is it possible to develop an identity that lives from the meaningful relationship to a concrete tradition without falling into fundamentalist self-closure when trying to maintain this relationship? The present study addresses this question by interpreting Alasdair MacIntyre's traditional concept in response to the lack of orientation in contemporary society. The American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre assumes that modern societies can only convey identity through the traditions they contain. He defines "tradition" as a discussion about the correct interpretation of the (...) traditional content. MacIntyre sees coexistence in plural societies as a permanent encounter of different, traditional identities that struggle to convince each other of the truthfulness of their own worldview. The consequence is not blind conflict, but rather the acquisition of cultural language skills: Real encounters occur when a tradition learns to understand its counterpart from its genuine perspective. In this way, MacIntyre makes communicative competence the guiding factor of its model. In conversation with Karl Barth's theology, the study further develops this model from a Protestant perspective. Barth is received as the 20th century theologian who most consistently thought of Christian identity in particular terms. Even more than for Barth, the self-assurance of Christian tradition is being put to the test today. The study develops a model of Christian orientation in pluralism, which is based on the interplay of cultural competence and trust in the sustainability of one's own religious identity. (shrink)

One of the most robust findings in psychopathology is the fact that specific phobias are more prevalent in women than in men. Although there are several theoretical accounts for biological and social contributions to this gender difference, empirical data are surprisingly limited. Interestingly, there is evidence that individuals with stereotypical feminine characteristics are more fearful than those with stereotypical masculine characteristics; this is beyond biological sex. Because gender role stereotypes are reinforced by parental behavior, we aimed to examine the relationship (...) of maternal gender stereotypes and children’s fear. Dyads of 38 mothers and their daughters were included. We assessed maternal implicit and explicit gender stereotypes as well as their daughters’ self-reported general fearfulness, specific fear of snakes, and approach behavior toward a living snake. First, mothers’ fear of snakes significantly correlated with their daughters’ fear of snakes. Second, mothers’ gender stereotypes significantly correlated with their daughters’ self-reported fear. Specifically, maternal implicit gender stereotypes were associated with daughters’ fear of snakes and fear ratings in response to the snake. Moreover, in children, self-reported fear correlated with avoidance of the fear-relevant animal. Together, these results provide first evidence for a potential role of parental gender stereotypes in the development and maintenance of fear in their offspring. (shrink)

In einer gesteigerten Form der Memento-mori-Dichtung des Barock wurde die menschliche Sterblichkeit durch den Einsatz performativer Strategien für die Zeitgenoss*innen bereits zu Lebzeiten erfahrbar. So waren mahnende und tröstende Tote, die scheinbar direkt aus dem Jenseits zu den Lebenden sprechen, in Begräbnisgedichten und Grabinschriften allgegenwärtig. Ebenso waren Gedichte und Sterbelieder verbreitet, in denen der Sterbeakt performativ durchlebt werden konnte. In der Gegenwart, die sich nach Norbert Elias durch eine Verdrängung der menschlichen Vergänglichkeit zugunsten von Unsterblichkeitsphantasien, und somit einer Vermeidung von (...) Erfahrungen mit der Vergänglichkeit, auszeichnet, gestalten einige deutschsprachige Lyriker*innen moderne Variationen dieses gesteigerten memento mori. In den untersuchten Gedichten von Özlem Özgül Dündar und Günter Kunert werden durch performative Verfahren Konfrontationen mit der eigenen Endlichkeit inszeniert, welche als moderne, säkulare Vergänglichkeitsmahnungen verstanden werden können. (shrink)

Geographisches Denken hat zu jeder Zeit die Vorstellungen der Menschen von der Welt geprägt. Im weiten Spektrum von Landschafts- und Länderkunde, Regional-, Stadt-, Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeographie sind die Zeitebenen allerdings ineinander verschlungen und beeinflussen sich gegenseitig. "Weltbildwechsel" ist eine zeitgemäße Einführung in diese spannende Geschichte des Fachs Geographie.

The internet could be an efficient political instrument if it were seen as part of a democracy where free and open discourse within a vital public sphere plays a decisive role. The model of deliberative democracy, as developed by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib, serves this concept of democracy best. The paper explores first the model of deliberative democracy as a ‘two-track model’ in which representative democracy is backed by the public sphere and a developing civil society. Secondly, it outlines (...) the normative concept of the public sphere and its basic ideas, namely the uncoerced communication of equal participants with equal access and equal rights to intervene or propose themes. The third part for discussion shows how the internet could fit into this concept of public sphere and influence the quality of political debates, and emphasizes the important role it can play in the political process. (shrink)

What moral claims do undocumented immigrants have to membership? Joseph Carens has argued that illegal migrants with long-term residence have a claim to national membership because they already are de facto members of local communities. This article builds on the linkage between illegality, residence, and rights, but shifts the focus from the migrant to the state, and from membership-based arguments to the rule of law. I argue that the rule of law, as expressed in the principle of legal certainty, provides (...) an alternative justification for the regularization of resident undocumented migrants. The principle of legal certainty recognizes the right of individuals to make long-term plans for their lives by requiring that state action be reasonably predictable and nonarbitrary. Thus, as an expression of legal certainty, both civil and criminal codes have statutes of limitation that place a time limit beyond which most crimes and misdemeanors can no longer be prosecuted, and individuals can move on with their lives. Not only do these statutes recognize the individual’s right to be free from arbitrary state control, they also demand that the state cut its losses and accept the consequences of its failure to act in a timely manner. I contend that, in the absence of a statute of limitation on illegal entry, the deportation of settled migrants constitutes an arbitrary act of state power. The article explores a number of judicial rulings to illustrate the argument’s normative logic. (shrink)

This article explores the possibility of resistance under conditions of extreme state power in liberal democracies. It examines the strategies of migrants without legal status who, when threatened with one of the most awesome powers of the liberal state—expulsion—shed their legal identity in order to escape the state’s reach. Remarkably, in doing so, they often succeed in preventing the state from exercising its sovereign powers. The article argues that liberal states are uniquely constrained in their dealing with undocumented migrants. Not (...) only are they forced to operate within the constraints of the international legal order—making repatriation contingent on the possession of identity documents—but the liberal state is also constitutionally limited in its exercise of coercion against the individual. The article concludes that it is those individuals who have the weakest claims against the liberal state that are most able to constrain its exercise of sovereignty. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a thorough discussion and reconstruction of Bernard Bolzano’s theory of grounding and a detailed investigation into the parallels between his concept of grounding and current notions of normal proofs. Grounding (Abfolge) is an objective ground-consequence relation among true propositions that is explanatory in nature. The grounding relation plays a crucial role in Bolzano’s proof-theory, and it is essential for his views on the ideal buildup of scientific theories. Occasionally, similarities have been pointed out between Bolzano’s (...) ideas on grounding and cut-free proofs in Gentzen’s sequent calculus. My thesis is, however, that they bear an even stronger resemblance to the normal natural deduction proofs employed in proof-theoretic semantics in the tradition of Dummett and Prawitz. (shrink)