Welcome to the Journal of Practical Ethics, an open access journal in moral and political philosophy (and related areas), published by the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, located at the University of Oxford.
The United States Supreme Court announced its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization on June 24, 2022. The ruling overturned the court’s decision nearly 50 years prior in Roe v. Wade that women in the U.S. had a constitutional right to abortion, and several states immediately introduced legislation to ban abortions from conception on. Occurring as it did only a few months [...]
Read MoreI would like to begin by thanking Kelly McCormick and Raff Donelson for their thoughtful and challenging comments on my book, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (2021a). They have both given me much to think about. While Donelson generally agrees with the dual aims of my book—i.e., rejecting retributivism and replacing it with the public health-quarantine [...]
Read MoreIn his recent book, Rejecting Retributivism,[1] Gregg Caruso offers a rigorous set of arguments to unseat retributivism as the dominant justificatory theory of punishment and to institute in its place his own public health-quarantine response to criminal wrongdoing. In these two major ambitions, I am largely sympathetic, but I part ways with respect to certain arguments and certain ways of [...]
Read MoreIn Rejecting Retributivism Gregg Caruso offers ambitious arguments for thinking that our current retributive system of criminal punishment should be abandoned. First, Caruso offers six powerful reasons for rejecting retributivism itself, on the grounds that legal punishment cannot adequately be retributively justified. Second, Caruso proposes, develops, and defends the public health quarantine [...]
Read MoreWithin criminal justice systems one of the most prominent justifications for legal punishment, both historically and currently, is retributivism. The retributive justification of legal punishment maintains that, absent any excusing conditions, wrongdoers are morally responsible for their actions and deserve to be punished in proportion to their wrongdoing. Unlike theories of punishment that aim [...]
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