Liberal criminal justice
systems try to analyse responsibility in terms of whether or not
individuals deliberately cause bad events. That is fine for most crime -
the kind that doesn't cause too much harm or lead to very severe
punishment. But deep down it doesn't really fit with liberalism's
thoughtfulness and fairness. Liberals take the responsibility of
assigning responsibility seriously and once you do that it's obvious
that this rough and ready legal approach doesn't rest on very firm
foundations. Three such problems - fractional responsibility, corporate
responsibility, and collective responsibility - make clear the
compelling need for innovative new legal concepts, norms, and
procedures.
Sunday 13 November 2011
Thursday 3 November 2011
The cult of victimhood
Victims are everywhere these days, whining about one thing or
another. Sometimes they are still complaining about things that happened
decades ago (or even hundreds of years ago to other people with the
same skin colour); sometimes they seem to be 'status-victims' who feel
entitled to oppress others because of their special personal sense of oppression. Very few
seem to be complaining justifiably, or even comprehensibly, about some
genuinely significant injustice being done to them right now that others
should address. This is not healthy. Much of the limited space for
morality in politics is being taken over by the study and art of
victimhood at the expense of proper moral reasoning. It has a
deleterious effect on public discourse and behaviour, with people
seeming to compete more about their degrees of victimhood than the
rights and wrongs of their case.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)