Pleas and Excuses

This past year Anneli Jefferson, Jan-Hendrick Heinrichs and I had a paper published in Topoi about the ways the environment can make moral agents worse off. The paper is titled Scaffolding Bad Moral Agents and in it we claim that the way individuals are embedded into a specific social environment changes the moral considerations they are sensitive to in systematic ways because of how these environments scaffold affective and cognitive processes, specifically those that concern the perception and treatment of ingroups and outgroups. We argue that gangs undermine reasons responsiveness to a greater extent than incel communities because gang members are more thoroughly immersed in the gang environment.

My Elmhurst colleague Ty Fagan and I have just published a paper titled Psychiatric Diagnoses and Criminal Responsibility: An Argument for the Relevance of Intellectual Disability in Criminal Justice Ethics. In it we argue that a psychiatric diagnosis carries information about the mental differences or symptoms a person with that diagnosis might experience. Because of this, we argue that they are relevant to responsibility when they pick out symptoms or differences that are likely to undermine the specific capacities that matter for responsibility. We claim that where there is enough empirical evidence about the impact of a diagnosis on legal agency, a criminal court must investigate whether a defendant ought to be fully or partially excused. Intellectual disability is this sort of diagnosis. Evidence that a person has intellectual disability at the time of their wrongful act does not automatically settle the question of their responsibility, but this diagnosis requires that the court investigate the nature and degree of responsibility-relevant differences and symptoms experienced by that person at the time of the act in question.

I also recently had this paper on exclusionary rules published in an excellent book about Crime Prevention by Exclusion, edited by Sebastian Jon Holmen, Thomas Søbirk Petersen, and Jesper Ryberg. I’m currently working on another paper about preventative exclusion as a means to control crime. This paper will discuss whether speed control technology that can be placed in individual cars wrongfully limits moral agency.

Over the past academic year I have working on a book for Bloomsbury press titled “Why Punishment Matters.” It could also be titled “The Goods of Punishment.” In short, I argue that both informal and formal, criminal directed blame and punishment generates goods for creatures like us, which is one reason why they are such prevalent and important human practices. (Yes, of course I’m going to say current criminal justice practices, especially U.S. practices, are extremely problematic. We need to substantially revise these practices to generates the goods at which blame and punishment aim.) I do indeed have a book contract – now the question is just whether I can write fast enough to meet its deadlines.

I’m planning to provide a summary of bits of the book, and possibly the handout of the talk I have at the Law and Society Association meeting in May, on my “recent works” page found on this website. At the LSA meeting I gave a quick overview of the first few chapters during a panel discussion with Gregg Caruso, Eddy Nahmias, and John Lemos.