Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

  • Chapter 1 - Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society: An Overview

  • Edited by Elizabeth Shaw, University of Aberdeen, Derk Pereboom, Cornell University, New York, Gregg D. Caruso
  • Book:
    Free Will Skepticism in Law and Society
    Published online:
    26 August 2019
    Print publication:
    29 August 2019, pp 1-26

  • Summary

    “Free will skepticism” refers to a family of views that all take seriously the possibility that human beings lack the control in action – i.e. the free will – required for an agent to be truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. Critics fear that adopting this view would have harmful consequences for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and laws. Optimistic free will skeptics, on the other hand, respond by arguing that life without free will and so-called basic desert moral responsibility would not be harmful in these ways, and might even be beneficial. In this chapter, we attempt to provide a brief sketch of the traditional free will debate, define the various positions, and frame the debate over the practical implications of free will skepticism. We focus especially on the implications of free will skepticism for the criminal law and the retributive justification of punishment.

  • 6 - Punishment, retribution, and the coercive enforcement of right

  • Edited by Lara Denis, Agnes Scott College, Decatur
  • Book:
    Kant's Metaphysics of Morals
    Published online:
    10 January 2011
    Print publication:
    28 October 2010, pp 111-129

  • Summary

    Most philosophers who have considered legal punishment suppose that penal institutions, either as they exist or at least as they would exist if they lived up to some normative concept of them, can be morally justified. Kant is best known as a subscriber to the first of the justifications of punishment. Kant's insistence on retributivism, that it is a fundamental moral principle or categorical imperative that moral evil deserves punishment is clear enough. Punishment is justified as a form of coercion used to protect right. Kant occasionally tries to present God's providential apportionment of happiness in accordance with worthiness as a case of doing retributive justice. Whatever opinions Kant himself may have held or expressed in favor of retributivism, Kantian ethics is seriously lacking as long as it cannot justify them or even consistently include them.