I’ve just spent a few days at the Danish Academy of Arts and Sciences with other criminal law scholars to discuss managing crime by exclusion. Thanks to Thomas Søbirk Petersen, Sebastian Jon Holmen and Jesper Ryberg of Roskilde University for putting the workshop together and working to secure a book contract for the papers generated by the workshop. I will post my paper, on the use of selective exclusionary rules as punishment, here in due course.

Some new publications: First, I’m very pleased with this paper in Criminal Law & Philosophy about the impact structural injustice can have on criminal responsibility. Many thanks to David Brink for inspiring my argument.

I also have a recent paper in the same journal discussing the purely retributivist understanding of criminal blame and punishment articulated in the work of Michael S. Moore. I claim that both informal and formal blame and punishment hold persons responsible in the same sense, and that directed moral blame in both forms aim to communicate something to the the wrongdoer and generate a retributive good. However, contra Moore, I argue that instrumental aims are also important to justifying methods and degree of punishment. Michael has written a nice response to my paper, and I will link to it as soon as it goes live.

Philosopher Anneli Jefferson (Cardiff) and I have a paper out in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice that discusses McGeer’s (2015, 2019) scaffolded reasons-responsiveness account in the light of two concerns: (1) that some agents may be less attuned to feedback from their social environment but are nevertheless morally responsible agents – for example, autistic people; and (2) that moral audiences can actually work to undermine reasons-responsiveness if they espouse the wrong values. We argue that McGeer’s account can be modified to handle these problems. Once we understand the specific roles that moral feedback plays for recognizing and acting on moral reasons, we can see that autistics frequently do rely on such feedback, although it often needs to be more explicit. Furthermore, although McGeer is correct to highlight the importance of moral feedback, audience sensitivity is not all that matters to reasons-responsiveness; it needs to be tempered by a consistent application of moral rules.

Finally, in the past few years I’ve completed several papers on the topic of rape. First, I published a paper arguing that many rape cases may sit in a moral blindspot. I also published a chapter articulating the reasons rapists deserve criminal treatment in the Palgrave Handbook on Philosophy of Punishment. Finally, Anneli Jefferson and I published a recent paper that explores whether moral culpability can justify criminal verdicts and punishment in cases of reckless rape, where recklessness is widely construed as “couldn’t care less” whether a person consents. Although clearly such rapes constitute moral wrongdoing, moral culpability is less than it is for a crime committed “purposely” or “knowingly.” Instrumental ends, including making the norms regarding sexual conduct more salient, may justify criminal verdicts and punishment in reckless rape.