Abstract
Erin Kelly’s The Limits of Blame offers a series of powerful arguments against retributivist accounts of punishment. Among these, I first focus on Kelly’s Inscrutability Argument, which casts doubt on our epistemic justification for making judgments of moral desert. I then discuss Kelly’s defense of the Just Harm Reduction account of punishment. I consider how retributivists might respond to and learn from these arguments.
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Notes
In places, Kelly seems to require something more than this.
Both contextualists (DeRose 2009) and relativists (Hawthorne 2004, Stanley 2005) insist that practical stakes are relevant in the epistemic domain. I am neutral here (as in Coates 2016) as to which of these explanations is more plausible.
William Blackstone 1760.
See P. F. Strawson 1962. Some moral responsibility skeptics (e.g., Derk Pereboom 2001 and Tamler Sommers 2007) argue that responsibility skepticism does not undermine the things I’ve listed here and so does not entail that we should adopt a more objective attitude towards others. However, these skeptics maintain this balance by arguing that although moral competence is insufficient for desert, it is the basis for these other things. So their skepticism doesn’t rest on skepticism about whether we are really morally competent agents.
We see this her last chapter, for example, which is very good on related points. I did not discuss that discussion only because this is an “author meets critics” session and not “author meets people telling her what they learned from her book” symposium (though no doubt that would have value as well).
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Coates, D.J. Extending the Limits of Blame. Criminal Law, Philosophy 15, 207–215 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-020-09545-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-020-09545-6