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.
David O. Brink offers a reconstruction and assessment of John Stuart Mill's contributions to the utilitarian and liberal traditions. Brink defends interpretations of key elements in Mill's moral and political thought, and shows how a perfectionist reading of his conception of happiness has a significant impact on other aspects of his philosophy.
In Brink's study of T.H. Green's classic 'Prolegomena to Ethics' the author restores the work to its rightful place in the history of philosophy. Brink provides a prolegomenon to the 'Prolegomena' - one that situates the work in its intellectual context of classic British idealism.
In this work, David O. Brink analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. He argues that an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused, and that responsibility consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities, and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities.
David O. Brink offers a reconstruction and assessment of John Stuart Mill's contributions to the utilitarian and liberal traditions. Brink defends interpretations of key elements in Mill's moral and political thought, and shows how a perfectionist reading of his conception of happiness has a significant impact on other aspects of his philosophy.
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.
In Brink's study of T.H. Green's classic 'Prolegomena to Ethics' the author restores the work to its rightful place in the history of philosophy. Brink provides a prolegomenon to the 'Prolegomena' - one that situates the work in its intellectual context of classic British idealism.
This is a new edition of T. H. Green's Prolegomena to Ethics (1883), a classic of modern philosophy, in which Green sets out his perfectionist ethical theory. In addition to the text of the Prolegomena itself, this new edition provides an introductory essay, a bibliographical essay, and an index. Brink's extended editorial introduction examines the context, themes, and significance of Green's work and will be of special interest to readers working on the history of ethics, ethical theory, political philosophy, and nineteenth century philosophy.
This volume collects David Lyons's essays on Mill's moral theory and includes an introduction which relates the essays to prior and subsequent philosophical developments. The essays defend the beneficiary theory of rights and develop new interpretations of Mill's moral thought.
A systematic analysis considers the objectivity of ethics, the relationship between the moral point of view and a scientific or naturalist worldview and its role in a person's rational lifespan.
Everyday Law for Children provides an accessible introduction to laws that affect children and families and the dominant public debates that surround and drive these laws. Using real-world examples, the book exposes the tension between reliance on the private, autonomous family and the public's desire to secure child well-being. A look at some public systems, such as child welfare and juvenile delinquency, shows that an initial public aspiration to assist children and families is often frustrated by a lack of resolve and resources. In other areas, such as education and healthcare, the public shrinks from a commitment to comprehensive child well-being. Everyday Law for Children makes a case for the improvement of public systems by focusing on pragmatic goals related to child well-being. More immediately, it makes a case for zealous advocates for children who can have a dramatic impact on children's everyday lives. Accordingly, the book provides an annotated list of resources and contact information for parents and for service providers who need help addressing specific problems within complex public systems.
Only in the darkest of hours will a few seriously entertain the haunting possibility, almost unthinkable, that at the end of the day our best sense of the world, and of what is abidingly good, is an error." Does then the universe really have a guiding moral structure which is at once integral to the quality of human life? Empirical Realism is Clark's sustained, challenging and original argument for moral realism, one which not only provides the badly needed account of normativity--of what it is exactly that constitutes genuine moral obligation--but which also anchors that account within a comprehensive philosophical theory. The author's position, rigorously developed and defended, provides a trek through issues central to classical and contemporary philosophy. Masterfully navigating his readers through the global realism/antirealism debate in Parts I and II, his erudition--sensitive yet unflinching--knows no shortcuts. David Clark's first book goes on to show how intrinsic value, a value which is inherent and not conferred, is the independently real feature which both generates obligation and is the ground by which it is to be honored. This three-Part text has direct implications for metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, value theory, environmental ethics, and moral theory generally.
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