Philosophers of criminal punishment widely agree that criminal punishment should be “proportional” to the “seriousness” of the offense. But this apparent consensus is only superficial, masking significant dissensus below the surface. Proposed proportionality principles differ on several distinct dimensions, including: regarding which offense or offender properties determine offense “seriousness” and thus constitute a proportionality relatum; regarding whether punishment is objectionably disproportionate only when excessively severe, or also when excessively lenient; and regarding whether the principle can deliver absolute judgments, or only (...) comparative ones. This essay proposes that these differences cannot be successfully adjudicated, and one candidate proportionality principle preferred over its rivals, in the abstract; a proportionality principle only makes sense as an integrated part of a more complete justificatory theory of criminal punishment. It then sketches a proportionality principle that best fits the responsibility-constrained pluralist theories of criminal punishment that currently predominate. The proportionality principle it favors provides that punishments should not be disproportionately severe, in noncomparative terms, relative to an agent’s culpability in relation to their wrongdoing. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about whether outcome luck can affect an agent's “moral responsibility.” Focusing on responsibility's “negative side,” some maintain, and others deny, that an action's results bear constitutively on how “blameworthy” the actor is, and on how much blame or punishment they “deserve.” Crucially, both sides to the debate assume that an actor's blameworthiness and negative desert are equally affected—or unaffected—by an action's results. This article challenges that previously overlooked assumption, arguing that blameworthiness and desert are distinct moral notions that (...) serve distinct normative functions: blameworthiness serves aliabilityfunction (removing a bar to otherwise impermissible treatments), whereas desert serves afavoringfunction (contributing new value to states of affairs, or providing new reasons for responsive treatments). Having distinguished (negative) desert from blameworthiness, the article proposes a novel resolution to the outcome‐luck debate: that results do not affect an agent's liability to blame, but do affect the amount and severity of blame to which the agent is justly liable, including by affecting the severity of blame that the agent deserves. (shrink)

What are the objects of science? Are they just the things in our scientific experiments that are located in space and time? Or does science also require that there be additional things that are not located in space and time? Using clear examples, these are just some of the questions that Scott Berman explores as he shows why alternative theories such as Nominalism, Contemporary Aristotelianism, Constructivism, and Classical Aristotelianism, fall short. He demonstrates why the objects of scientific knowledge need (...) to be not located in space or time if they are to do the explanatory work scientists need them to do. The result is a contemporary version of Platonism that provides us with the best way to explain what the objects of scientific understanding are, and how those non-spatiotemporal things relate to the spatiotemporal things of scientific experiments, as well as everything around us, including even ourselves. (shrink)

Celebrating the remarkable career of jurist Harold J. Berman, the essays in this volume demonstrate that Berman's contributions to Russian studies, international trade law, legal history, philosophy of law, and law and religion have firmly established him as part of the tradition of our greatest American jurists.

Homo Juridicus focuses on the normative foundations underlying all socio-cultural formations. The book uses the concept of ''normativity'' in an inclusive sense. It includes law, but it is not limited to it. As such, it explores the various social and cultural forces that persuade, incite, seduce, influence, direct, restrain, repress or control behavior. It is a major interdisciplinary study cutting across several disciplines of social science, such as law, anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics and philosophy. Its primary audience is law students, (...) as well as the scholarly community across law and the social sciences. ''Isaak Dore is one of the very few scholars who straddles a broad range of legal and nonlegal disciplines. This important book deconstructs the idea of normativity in culture and illuminates it through various strains of thought in anthropology, sociology, psychology, linguistics and philosophy. Its grasp of these disciplines is impressive in terms of nuance, breadth, particularity and lucidity. It is a unique work, brilliantly executed, providing a rich background against which the promotion of social order through legal and nonlegal norms can be evaluated. It both provokes and compels one to think outside of the conventional structures and assumptions of law and social order. I know of no other work that offers the broad intellectual reach that this ambitious book presents.'' - Laura S. Underkuffler, J. DuPratt White Professor of Law, Cornell Law School. (shrink)

This review essay of Victor Tadros’s new book, “The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law,” responds to Tadros’s energetic and sophisticated attacks on retributivist justifications for criminal punishment. I argue, in a nutshell, that those attacks fail. In defending retributivism, however, I also sketch original views on two questions that retributivism must address but that many or most retributivists have skated past. First, what do wrongdoers deserve – to suffer? to be punished? something else? Second, what does (...) it mean for them to deserve it? That is, what is the normative force or significance of valid desert claims, either with respect to retributivist desert in particular or with respect to all forms of desert? Because the answers that this essay offers are preliminary, the essay also serves as a partial blueprint for further work by criminal law theorists with retributivist sympathies. (shrink)

Set aside fanciful doomsday speculations about AI. Even lower-level AIs, while otherwise friendly and providing us a universal basic income, would be able to do all our jobs. Also, we would over-rely upon AI assistants even in our personal lives. Thus, John Danaher argues that a human crisis of moral passivity would result However, I argue firstly that if AIs are posited to lack the potential to become unfriendly, they may not be intelligent enough to replace us in all our (...) jobs. If instead they are intelligent enough to replace us, the risk they become unfriendly increases, given that they would not need us and humans would just compete for valuable resources. Their hostility will not promote our moral passivity. Secondly, the use of AI assistants in our personal lives will become a problem only if we rely on them for almost all our decision-making and motivation. But such a (maximally) pervasive level of dependence raises the question of whether humans would accept it, and consequently whether the crisis of passivity will arise. (shrink)

Focusing on the rise of the mechanistic idea that we can know the natural world only by distancing ourselves from it, Berman shows how science acquired its ...

The totalizing and absolutizing tendencies of metaphysics can undermine our essential ethical relationality. Is there a metaphysics that is robust enough and conducive to preserving this intuition? In answer, this paper will draw upon Martin Buber and Justus Buchler. Buber’s seminal work, I and Thou, explores the nature of the ethical encounter. Buchler’s Metaphysics of Natural Complexes develops a general ontology, which can be described as an ordinal metaphysics. Encounters are thoroughly relational for Buber. Buchler’s metaphysics is also thoroughly relational. (...) A phenomenological approach to relationality establishes the medium for this dialogue and provides a common ground for these texts. Not only is there a way to account for Buber’s encounter, but there is also an inherent moral understanding in Buchler’s metaphysics that preserves and is conducive to ethical relationality. Buchler’s metaphysics avoids the totalizing and absolutizing tendencies derided by Buber, while simultaneously promotes a version of the encounter. (shrink)

In Aristotle’s writings regarding the biology of embryology, especially in the Generation of Animals, he contends that the mother’s menstrual fluids provide the material for the generation of the offspring, and the father’s form determines its formation as a member of that species (e.g. human). The katamenia (menstrual fluids) of the mother are said to be potentially all the body parts of the offspring, though actually none of them. So, the fluids are potentially the offspring. But are they a first (...) potentiality or second potentiality (first actuality) of a human, in the terminology of De Anima II? In this paper I will argue that katamenia are a first potentiality of a human. My first argument is that katamenia do not have the potential for human activities such as thinking, but rather the potential of becoming something having the potential for those activities. I answer the objection that katamenia are not even a first potentiality, by appealing to an important text contending that for any x whose source of becoming is external, x is potentially y if nothing in x with respect to matter needs to be changed in order for an external principle to make x into y. Keywords: Aristotle, katamenia, potentiality, actuality, Generation of Animals. (shrink)

Green Logic seeks to highlight the key questions regarding entrepreneurship and sustainability in terms of motivation, government intervention and ethics. This new book aims to examine how 'Green Logic' works, how it differs from other logics and how green thinking can be targeted in order to create environmentally responsible businesses in an era of rapid change. In short, what does it really take to motivate entrepreneurs to design and start up green businesses? Green Logic is suitable for both business and (...) academic audiences and significantly pushes forward the debate on environmental responsibility. (shrink)

Could Christians and Muslims be referring to the same God? Consider Gareth Evans’s causal theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in the name’s “dossier”. I argue that information about experiences, in which God is simply the object of acquaintance, can dominate the dossier. Thus, this "demonstrative" use of names offers a promising alternative avenue by which users of the divine names can refer to the same referent despite having different conceptions of God.

We argue that corporate social performance (CSP) has become a legitimizing identity (brand) for researchers in the business and society field, but it has not developed into a viable theoretical or operational construct. Because measuring CSP is contingent on the operational setting (industry, issues, etc.), it is difficult to produce worthwhile comparisons across studies or generalizing beyond the boundaries of a specific study. The authors suggest that researchers remove the CSP label from their operational variables, and instead narrowly define their (...) studies in operational terms. They provide aworking example of the proposed research direction by examining the theory underlying the popular CSP–financial performance (FP) debate. In the authors’ conceptualization, stakeholder action provides the underlying logic connecting CSP-FP, and we recast the research question to investigate the conditions under which stakeholders will take action to influence the focal organization and when those actions will influence the CSP-FP link. (shrink)

148 JM GUYAU I51 SMILE BOUTROUX 153 GABRIEL SEAILLES * . . . . l6l JEAN JAURES . ..... 163 ANDRE LALANDE 164 CHARLES DUN AN l6S HENRI BERGSON 1 69 THE ...

Le livre porte sur trois maisons de cisterciennes fondées par la famille des Haro, grands feudataires du royaume de Castille. Ces abbayes ne pouvaient rivaliser en nombre et en puissance avec celle de Las Huelgas, fondée en 1187 par le roi Alphonse VIII et sa femme Eléonore d’Angleterre, qui renfermait plus de cent moniales. Les trois maisons ici étudiées, Cañas, fondée en 1169, Vileña en 1222 et Herce en 1246, n’en hébergeaient qu’entre vingt et vingt-cinq, comme beaucoup d’autres abbayes ci...

The Heythrop Journal, Volume 63, Issue 4, Page 520-530, July 2022.

In this acclaimed exploration of the search for "authentic" individual identity, Marshall Berman explores the historical experiences and needs out of which this new radicalism arose. Focussing on eighteenth-century Paris, a time and place in which a distinctively modern form of society was just coming into its own, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity—of a self that could organize the individual's energy and direct it toward his own happiness—articulated eighteenth-century man's deepest responses to this brave new world, (...) and his most ardent hope for a new life in it. Exploring in particular the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, Berman shows how the ideal of authenticity was radically opposed to the bourgeois, capitalistic idea of "self-interest.". (shrink)

Probably no doctrine has excited as much horror and abuse as atheism. This first history of British atheism, first published in 1987, tries to explain this reaction while exhibiting the development of atheism from Hobbes to Russell. Although avowed atheism appeared surprisingly late – 1782 in Britain – there were covert atheists in the middle seventeenth century. By tracing its development from so early a date, Dr Berman gives an account of an important and fascinating strand of intellectual history.

Unlike nearly all studies of Berkeley, this book looks at the full range of his work and links it with his life--focusing in particular on his religious thought. While aiming to present a clear picture of his career, Berman breaks new ground on, among other topics, Berkeley's philosophical strategy, his account of immortality, his Jacobitism, his emotive theory of religious mysteries, and the motivation of his Siris (1744). Also distinctive is the attention paid to the Irish context of his (...) thought, his symbolic frontispieces and portraits, and recent discoveries concerning his life and writings. (shrink)

George Berkeley -- On missing the wrong target -- Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment in Irish philosophy -- The culmination and causation of Irish philosophy -- Francis Hutcheson on Berkeley and the Molyneux problem -- The impact of Irish philosophy on the American Enlightenment -- Irish ideology and philosophy -- An early essay concerning Berkeley's immaterialism -- Mrs. Berkeley's annotations in An account of the life of Berkeley (1776) -- Some new Bermuda Berkeleiana -- The good bishop : new letters -- Beckett (...) and Berkeley. (shrink)

In two important articles Denis Grey has argued that Berkeley’s philosophy develops in “two incompatible ways.” Grey calls these the “limerick view” and the “strict interpretation”—which he thinks is feasible. In the first, he finds Berkeley arguing that.