PUNISHMENT - A TALE OF TWO ISLANDS

An imaginary desert island scenario provides the setting for a story which is designed to expose the shortcomings of deterrence, reform and restitution theories of punishment, and to emphasize the intuitive appeal of Kant's strong retributivist insistence that there is a positive obligation to punish offenders just qua offenders, and not merely an automatic right to do so (weak retributivism). Nevertheless, it is urged that though the fact that an offence has been committed can in itself suffice to establish that punishment is in some sense required, this requirement at most supports a position that is intermediate between Kantian retributivism and weak retributivism.     

THE PASSIONS OF PUNISHMENT

I criticize an increasingly popular set of arguments for the justifiability of punishment. Some philosophers try to justify punishment by appealing to what Peter Strawson calls the reactive attitudes – emotions like resentment, indignation, remorse and guilt. These arguments fail. The view that these emotions commit us to punishment rests on unsophisticated views of punishment and of these emotions and their associated behaviors. I offer more sophisticated accounts of punishment, of these emotions and of their associated behaviors that are consistent with Abolitionism, the view that punishment is unjustified.     

程序公正的测量及研究操纵

程序公正是指处理管理事务所依据的原则是否公正。普遍认可的程序公正原则包括一致性、避免偏见、准确性、可修正、代表性、道德与伦理原则。程序公正研究主要有测量和实验操纵两种研究范式。对程序公正的测量主要以单维为主,亦有少数多维测量量表;对程序公正的实验操纵主要以发言权为主,有少数研究对准确性、无偏性或综合几项原则进行操纵。未来研究应考虑程序公正的结构问题,对程序公正的操纵范围进行扩展、操纵方法考虑情景性,还需关注程序公正与程序不公正的差异。     

DEDUCTIVE CLOSURE,SCEPTICISM AND THE PARADOXES OF CONFIRMATION1

To undermine much of what we ordinarily claim to know, sceptics have often appealed to a principle (known as the principle of closure) according to which knowledge (justification) is closed under known entailment. In this paper after expounding the views of Stein, Klein and others, I shall argue that they all fail to take note of different contexts in which the principle of closure is applied. The relevance of the principle of closure for scepticism is then analyzed in the light of, what I call, the ‘infectious’ character of epistemic contexts. I shall also highlight the similarities in the behaviour of the concepts of justification and confirmation and appeal to certain solutions to the paradoxes of confirmation to provide a comprehensive account of the different instances of the principle of closure.     

GLOBAL JUSTICE AND THE LIMITS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

To a great extent, recent discussion of global obligations has been couched in the language of human rights. I argue that this is a mistake. If, as many theorists have supposed, a normative theory applicable to obligations of global justice must also respect the needs of justice internal to recipient nations, any such theory cannot take human rights as an important moral notion. Human rights are inapplicable for the domestic justice of poor nations, and thus cannot form a plausible basis for international justice. Instead, I propose an alternative basis, a form of welfarist maximizing consequentialism. My alternative is superior to rights-based theories in dealing with the special problems of justice found in poor nations.