Sunday 13 November 2011

Criminal justice in the modern age

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.

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.