Moral Puzzles And Legal Perplexities

Engages with the life and work of Larry Alexander to explore puzzles and paradoxes in legal and moral theory.

Criminal Law: Historical, Ethical, and Moral Foundations, 3rd edition, blends legal and moral reasoning in the examination of crimes and explores the history relating to jurisprudence and roots of criminal law. In order to fully grasp criminal law concepts, students must go beyond mere rote memorization of the penal code and endeavor to understand where the laws originate from and how they have developed. This book fosters discussions of controversial issues and delivers abridged case law decisions that target the essence of appellate rulings. Grounded in the Model Penal Code, making the text national in scope, this volume examines: Why the criminal codes originated, and the moral, religious, spiritual, and human influences that led to our present system How crimes are described in the modern criminal justice model The two essential elements necessary for criminal culpability: actus reus (the act committed or omitted) and mens rea (the mind and intent of the actor) Offenses against the body resulting in death, including murder, manslaughter, felony murder, and negligent homicide Non-terminal criminal conduct against the body, including robbery, kidnapping, false imprisonment, assault, and hate crimes Sexual assault, rape, necrophilia, incest, and child molestation Property offenses, such as larceny/theft, bribery, forgery, and embezzlement Crimes against the home, including burglary, trespassing, arson, and vandalism The book also examines controversial public morality issues such as prostitution, drug legalization, obscenity, and pornography. The final two chapters discuss inchoate offenses, where the criminal act has not been completed, and various criminal defenses, such as legal insanity, entrapment, coercion, self-defense, and mistake of fact or law. Important keywords introduce each chapter, and discussion questions and suggested readings appear at the end of each chapter, prompting lively debate and further inquiry into a fascinating subject area that continues to evolve. Updated to include the latest developments in the law, this book is appropriate for undergraduate students in criminal law and related courses.

Advances in new neuroscientific research tools and technologies have not only led to new insight into the processes of the human brain, they have also refined and provided genuinely new ways of modifying and manipulating the human brain. The aspiration of such interventions is to affect conative, cognitive, and affective brain processes associated with emotional regulation, empathy, and moral judgment. Can the use of neuroscientific technologies for influencing the human functioning brain as a means of preventing offenders from engaging in future criminal conduct be justified? In Neurointerventions, Crime, and Punishment, Jesper Ryberg considers various ethical challenges surrounding this question. More precisely, he provides a framework for considering neuroethical issues within the criminal justice system and examines a set of procedures which the criminal justice system relies on to deal with criminal offending. To do this, Ryberg addresses the following questions, among others: Is it morally acceptable to offer more lenient sentences to offenders in return for participation in neuroscientific treatment programs? Or would such offers be unacceptably coercive? Is it possible to administer neurointerventions as a type of punishment? Would it be acceptable for physicians to participate in the administration of neurointerventions on offenders? What is the moral significance of the sordid history of brain interventions for the present or future use of such treatment options? As rehabilitation comes back into fashion after many decades and as neuroscientific knowledge and technology advance rapidly, these intricate and controversial topics become increasingly more urgent. Ryberg argues that many of the in-principle objections to neuroscientific treatment are premature, but given the way criminal justice systems currently function, such treatment methods should not be put into practice.

Fair Opportunity and Responsibility lies at the intersection of moral psychology and criminal jurisprudence and analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. It links responsibility with the reactive attitudes but makes the justification of the reactive attitudes depend on a prior and independent conception of responsibility. Responsibility and excuse are inversely related; an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused. As a result, we can study responsibility by understanding excuses. We excuse misconduct when an agent's capacities or opportunities are significantly impaired, because these capacities and opportunities are essential if agents are to have a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This conception of excuse tells us that responsibility itself consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities - normative competence - and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities free from undue interference - situational control. Because our reactive attitudes and practices presuppose the fair opportunity conception of responsibility, this supports a predominantly retributive conception of blame and punishment that treats culpable wrongdoing as the desert basis of blame and punishment. We can then apply the fair opportunity framework to assessing responsibility and excuse in circumstances of structural injustice, situational influences in ordinary circumstances and in wartime, insanity and psychopathy, immaturity, addiction, and crimes of passion. Though fair opportunity has important implications for each issue, treating them together allows us to explore common themes and appreciate the need to take partial responsibility and excuse seriously in our practices of blame and punishment.

Jeffrey Goldsworthy is a renowned constitutional scholar and legal theorist whose work on the powers of Parliament and the interpretation of constitutional and statute laws has helped shape debates on these topics across the English-speaking world. The importance of democratic constitutionalism is central to Professor Goldsworthy's work: it lies at the heart of his defence of Parliamentary supremacy and shapes his approach to both constitutional and statutory interpretation. In honour of Professor Goldsworthy's retirement, this collection provides new perspectives from a range of leading public law scholars and theorists on the legal and philosophical principles that govern the making and interpretation of laws in a constitutional democracy. It also addresses some of the challenges to democratic constitutionalism that have arisen in light of contemporary developments in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Understood one way, the branch of contemporary philosophical ethics that goes by the label "metaethics" concerns certain second-order questions about ethics-questions not in ethics, but rather ones about our thought and talk about ethics, and how the ethical facts (insofar as there are any) fit into reality. Analogously, the branch of contemporary philosophy of law that is often called "general jurisprudence" deals with certain second order questions about law- questions not in the law, but rather ones about our thought and talk about the law, and how legal facts (insofar as there are any) fit into reality. Put more roughly (and using an alternative spatial metaphor), metaethics concerns a range of foundational questions about ethics, whereas general jurisprudence concerns analogous questions about law. As these characterizations suggest, the two sub-disciplines have much in common, and could be thought to run parallel to each other. Yet, the connections between the two are currently mostly ignored by philosophers, or at least under-scrutinized. The new essays collected in this book are aimed at changing this state of affairs. Dimensions of Normativity collects together works by metaethicists and legal philosophers that address a number of issues that are of common interest, with the goal of accomplishing a new rapprochement between the two sub-disciplines.

This handbook consists of essays on contemporary issues in criminal law and their theoretical underpinnings. Some of the essays deal with the relationship between morality and criminalization. Others deal with criminalization in the context of specific crimes such as fraud, blackmail, and revenge pornography. The contributors also address questions of responsible agency such as the effects of addiction or insanity, and some deal with punishment, its mode and severity, and the justness of the state’s imposition of it. These chapters are authored by some of the most distinguished scholars in the fields of applied ethics, criminal law, and jurisprudence.