Collective Agents and Communicative Theories of Punishment

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this paper I argue that a communicative theory of punishment of the sort advocated by Anthony Duff – cannot be extended to cover corporate bodies, such as corporations and nations. The problem does not arise from the fact that on the communicative view the point of punishment is to induce regret or remorse, and that corporate bodies cannot be the subject of such emotions. This problem can be solved. A more difficult problem arises when we ask why we should care that certain agents feel and feeland express remorse or regret. The sorts of answers to this question that the communicative theorist can appeal to when the punishment of individuals is in question do not have any obvious analogue on the collective level

Must Punishment Be Intended to Cause Suffering?

Cataloged from PDF version of article.t It has recently been suggested that the fact that punishment involves an intention to cause suffering undermines expressive justifications of punishment. I argue that while punishment must involve harsh treatment, harsh treatment need not involve an intention to cause suffering. Expressivists should adopt this conception of harsh treatment

Cognitive Individualism and the Child as Scientist Program

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In this paper, I examine the charge that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s ‘Child as Scientist’ program, outlined and defended in their 1997 book Words, Thoughts and Theories is vitiated by a form of ‘cognitive individualism’ about science. Although this charge has often been leveled at Gopnik and Meltzoff’s work, it has rarely been developed in any detail. I suggest that we should distinguish between two forms of cognitive individualism which I refer to as ‘ontic’ and ‘epistemic’ cognitive individualism (OCI and ECI respectively). I then argue - contra Ronald Giere – that Gopnik and Meltzoff’s commitment to OCI is relatively unproblematic, since it is an easily detachable part of their view. By contrast, and despite their explicit discussion of the issue, their commitment to ECI is much more problematic

Non-paradigmatic punishments

This review article argues for a better acknowledgement by penal philosophers of the diversity of subjects, agents, and practices of punishment. Much current penal philosophy has an unhelpful hyper-focus on the criminal punishment of culpable adults, by states, often through imprisonment. This paradigmatic case is important, but other subjects, agents, and practices of punishment are not statistically insignificant side-issues, and a comprehensive account of punishment should address them. Our understanding of punishment as a whole can be enhanced by considering non-paradigmatic punishment, with implications for whether and when punishment is justified, how we should understand appropriate authority, and how we should understand and engage with abolitionist arguments. We explore non-paradigmatic penal practices (community punishments, suspended prison sentence, restorative justice, and alternative jurisprudence), non-paradigmatic punishing agents (International judicial bodies, schools, and religious communities; with practices such as boycotts, shaming and shunning) and non-paradigmatic subjects of punishment (collective agents, corporations and children)

Making the lightness of being bearable: Arithmetical platonism, fictional realism and cognitive command

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Is folk psychology a Lakatosian research program?

It has often been argued, by philosophers and more recently by developmental psychologists, that our common-sense conception of the mind should be regarded as a scientific theory. However, those who advance this view rarely say much about what they take a scientific theory to be. In this paper, I look at one specific proposal as to how we should interpret the theory view of folk psychology-namely, by seeing it as having a structure analogous to that of a Lakatosian research program. I argue that although the Lakatosian model may seem promising-particularly to those who are interested in studying the development of children's understanding of the mind-the analogy between Lakatosian research programs and folk psychology cannot be made good because folk psychology does not possess anything analogous to the positive heuristic of a Lakatosian research program. I also argue that Lakatos' account of theories may not be the best one for developmental psychologists to adopt because of the emphasis which Lakatos places on the social embeddedness of scientific theorising

Pre-punishment, communicative theories of punishment, and compatibilism

Saul Smilansky holds that there is a widespread intuition to the effect that pre-punishment - the practice of punishing individuals for crimes which they have not committed, but which we are in a position to know that they are going to commit - is morally objectionable. Smilanksy has argued that this intuition can be explained by our recognition of the importance of respecting the autonomy of potential criminals. (Smilansky, 1994) More recently he has suggested that this account of the intuition only vindicates it if determinism is false, and argues that this presents a problem for compatibilists, who, he says, are committed to thinking that the truth of determinism makes no moral difference (Smilansky, 2007). In this paper I argue that the intuitions Smilansky refers to can be explained and vindicated as consequences of the truth of a communicative conception of punishment. Since the viability of the communicative conception does not depend on the falsity of determinism, our intuitions about pre-punishment do not clash with (what Smilanksy calls) compatibilism. And if the communicative theory of punishment is - as Duff (2001) suggests - a form of retributivism, the account also meets New's (1992) challenge to retributivists to explain what is wrong with pre-punishment. © 2012 The Author

Rethinking expressive theories of punishment: why denunciation is a better bet than communication or pure expression

Many philosophers hold that punishment has an expressive dimension. Advocates of expressive theories have different views about what makes punishment expressive, what kinds of mental states and what kinds of claims are, or legitimately can be expressed in punishment, and to what kind of audience or recipients, if any, punishment might express whatever it expresses. I shall argue that in order to assess the plausibility of an expressivist approach to justifying punishment we need to pay careful attention to whether the things which punishment is supposed to express are aimed at an audience. For the ability of any version of expressivism to withstand two important challenges, which I call the harsh treatment challenge’ and the ‘publicity challenge’ respectively. will depend on the way it answers them. The first of these challenges has received considerable discussion in the literature on expressive theories of punishment; the second considerably less. This is unfortunate. For careful consideration of the publicity challenge should lead us to favor a version of the expressive theory which has been under-discussed: the view on which punishment has an intended audience, and on which the audience is society at large, rather than—as on the most popular version of that view—the criminal. Furthermore, this view turns out to be better equipped to meet the harsh treatment challenge, and to be so precisely because of the way in which it meets the publicity challenge. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

Collective action and the peculiar evil of genocide

There is a common intuition that genocide is qualitatively distinct from, and much worse than, mass murder. If we concentrate on the most obvious differences between genocidal killing and other cases of mass murder it is difficult to see why this should be the case. I argue that many cases of genocide involve not merely individual evil but a form of collective action manifesting a collective evil will. It is this that explains the moral distinctiveness of genocide. My view contrasts with one put forward by Claudia Card, though we both agree that the notion of "social death" plays a significant role here. © 2006 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd

War crimes and expressive theories of punishment: Communication or denunciation?

In a paper published in 2006, I argued that the best way of defending something like our current practices of punishing war criminals would be to base the justification of this practice on an expressive theory of punishment. I considered two forms that such a justification could take-a 'denunciatory' account, on which the purpose of punishment is supposed to communicate a commitment to certain kinds of standard to individuals other than the criminal and a 'communicative' account, on which the purpose of the punishment is to communicate with the perpetrator, and argued for a denunciatory account which I developed at some length. In this paper I would like to reconsider the plausibility of a communicative account. One difficulty that such accounts face is that the punishment of war criminals often involves the inflicting of harsh treatment on them by individuals who are members of states other than their own. On a communicative account this is problematic: on such an account-or at least on the version of it proposed by Duff (2000)-it is essential that those who are punish and those who punish them belong to a single community. When this requirement is not satisfied harsh treatment does not constitute punishment. Duff has argued that the problem can be solved by regarding all human beings as members of a single moral community: here I argue that this suggestion is unsatisfactory and propose an alternative. One consequence of my account is that if it is correct there may limitations on the range of kinds of war criminal that can legitimately be punished by international tribunals. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V