Brian Rosebury

The paper argues that our emotions in response to fictional representations are best explained, not as requiring a suspension of disbelief, but as resembling the emotions we feel when we propound a hypothetical case to ourselves, such as the imagined happiness or suffering of ourselves or another. In reading fiction we voluntarily participate in a hypothesis represented by the work. If this explanation is accepted, we can retain the view that beliefs always entail commitment to the reality of what is believed.

Comment pouvons-nous etre emus par une fiction par laquelle nous connaissons des comptes rendus ou des representations d'evenements qui ne sont pas reellement arrives? E. Schaper critique l'hypothese de Coleridge d'une "suspension volontaire de la non-croyance" de la part de l'auditeur ou du lecteur. L'A. montre que si sa solution est meilleure d'un point de vue psychologique que la precedente, elle ne resoud cependant pas le paradoxe.

Soulignant la valeur esthétique et la dimension contingente-historique des associations mentales que provoque la contemplation d'une oeuvre d'art, l'A. évalue le conflit entre les différentes conceptions kantienne, formaliste et consensuelle de l'expérience esthétique. Examinant la critique ...

THE OBJECTIVE of this paper is to explore the relevance of irrecoverable authorial intentions to the interpretation of texts, especially literary texts. By 'irrecoverable authorial intentions' I mean intentions of an author which cannot be inferred from the text or from any ...

In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private revenge are rare in moral philosophy. This article reviews some examples, from both classical and recent writers, finding uncertainty and equivocation over the ethical significance of acts of revenge, and in particular over their possible resemblances, in motive, purpose or justification, to acts of lawful punishment. A key problem for the coherence of our ethical conception of revenge is the consideration that certain acts of revenge may be just (at least in the minimal sense that the victim of revenge has no grounds for complaint against the revenger) and yet be generally agreed to be morally wrong. The challenge of explaining adequately why private revenge is morally wrong poses particular difficulty for purely retributive theories of punishment, since without invoking consequentialist reasons it does not seem possible adequately to motivate an objection to just and proportionate acts...

It is a still-influential characteristic of liberal thought since Mill that it advances moral arguments for limiting the authority of a democratic majority. This article suggests several reasons for thinking that a numerical majority nevertheless has some, though not necessarily decisive, moral weight. At the core of these reasons is the principle that every individual citizen has equal moral standing, even when he or she belongs to a numerical majority.

Mmal Appraisability is not quite such a good book as its confident and lucid introduction leads one to hope, but it is work of both substance and prom-ise. Ishtiyaque Haji's main project is to determine sufficient conditions for moral appraisability: that is, for the propriety of holding ...

Of the various arguments aimed at discrediting Tolkien's work a priori, one of the hardest to refute runs something like this. "Tolkien imagined himself to be creating a comprehensive body of myth and legend, fashioning the mythology that England lacked. But such an enterprise can ...

This paper has two purposes. The first (part 1) is to defend a distinctive account of moral responsibility; the second (part 2), to argue that "moral luck," understood as a susceptibility of moral desert to lucky or unlucky outcomes, does not exist. The strategy will be to show ...

The paper examines three aspects of the debate over the introduction of victim impact statements (VIS) in criminal cases. The first is the challenge VIS presents to the wholly public conception of criminal justice, in which the offender is prosecuted, tried and punished in the name of the state and not the individual victim. The second is the claim by supporters of VIS that the enhancement of victim input contributes to repairing an imbalance between offender and victim, created by the crime itself and exacerbated by existing criminal justice processes. The third is the claim that victim impact evidence is necessary to ensure that punishment is properly calibrated to the blameworthiness of the offender. In respect of each question, a key role is played in supporting VIS by two presuppositions: that criminal justice should be thought of as a field of conflict among individuals seeking their due, and that the courts suffer an institutional deficiency of human understanding that requires a special remedy. The paper argues that the case for VIS is seriously weakened if these presuppositions are not accepted, and draws attention to their derivation from a wider political culture characterised by the dominance of neo-liberalism or market individualism.

The paper considers acts of private (in the sense of individually motivated and extra-legal) revenge, and draws attention to a special kind of judgement we may make of such acts. While endorsing the general view that an act of private revenge must be morally wrong, it maintains that under certain special conditions (which include its being just) it is susceptible of a rational respect from others which is based on its standing outside morality, as a choice by the revenger not to act morally but to obey other compelling motives. This thesis is tested against various objections, notably those which doubt the intelligibility or application of such non-moral 'respect,' or would assimilate it to moral approval; and it is distinguished from various positions with which it might be confused, such as the 'admirable immorality' of Slote, or the Nietzschean critique of morality. I The thesis of this paper is that, under certain conditions, an act of private revenge may properly be the object of a special kind of positive judgement, even though it is at the same time rightly morally condemned. The name I propose for this positive judgement is 'non-moral respect.' I will suggest in passing that respect of this kind can be extended to various other kinds of acts which are morally wrong, but the main focus of the paper will be upon revenge. By 'private revenge,' I mean a deliberate injurious act or course of action against another person, motivated by resentment of an injurious act or acts performed by that other person against the revenger, or against some other person or persons whose injury the revenger resents. Both motive (vengeful resentment) and injurious act must be present to constitute revenge. Within the motive, we could distinguish further between the passive resentment that is a response to the injury received, and the active vengeful feeling that empowers the decision to strike back, but I will not pursue this distinction, since for revenge both components must be present: where only passive resentment is felt, we have not revenge but forbearance, or impotent embitterment.

In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private revenge are rare in moral philosophy. This article reviews some examples, from both classical and recent writers, finding uncertainty and equivocation over the ethical significance of acts of revenge, and in particular over their possible resemblances, in motive, purpose or justification, to acts of lawful punishment. A key problem for the coherence of our ethical conception of revenge is the consideration that certain acts of revenge may be just (at least in the minimal sense that the victim of revenge has no grounds for complaint against the revenger) and yet be generally agreed to be morally wrong. The challenge of explaining adequately why private revenge is morally wrong poses particular difficulty for purely retributive theories of punishment, since without invoking consequentialist reasons it does not seem possible adequately to motivate an objection to just and proportionate acts of revenge.

The purely retributive moral justification of punishment has a gap at its centre. It fails to explain why the offender should not be protected from punishment by the intuitively powerful moral idea that afflicting another person (other than to avoid a greater harm) is always wrong. Attempts to close the gap have taken several different forms, and only one is discussed in this paper. This is the attempt to push aside the 'protecting' intuition, using some more powerful intuition specially invoked by the situations to which criminal justice is addressed. In one aspect of his complex defence of pure retributivism, Michael S. Moore attempts to show that the emotions of well-adjusted persons provide evidence of moral facts which justify the affliction of culpable wrongdoers in retribution for their wrongdoing. In particular, he appeals to the evidential significance of emotions aroused by especially heinous crimes, including the punishment-seeking guilt of the offender who truly confronts the reality of his immoral act. The paper argues that Moore fails to vindicate this appeal to moral realism, and thus to show that intrinsic personal moral desert (as distinct from 'desert' in a more restricted sense, relative to morally justified institutions) is a necessary and sufficient basis for punishment. Other theories of the role of emotions in morality are as defensible as Moore's, while the compelling emotions to which he appeals to clinch his argument can be convincingly situated within a non-retributivist framework, especially when the distinction between the intuitions of the lawless world, and those of the world of law, is recognised. Keywords Justification of punishment Á Retributive theory Á Moral significance of emotions Á Desert Á Resentment Á Guilt I The purely retributive moral justification of punishment—the view that offenders should be punished because they deserve it, and that this moral desert is both a necessary and a

This paper challenges recent influential arguments which would encourage legislators and courts to give weight to an assessment of the " evaluative judgements " expressed by the emotions which motivate crimes. While accepting the claim of Kahan and Nussbaum and others that emotions, other than moods, have intentional objects (" the cognitive conception "), and are not mere impulses which bypass cognition (" the mechanistic conception "), it suggests the following criticisms of their analysis. First, the concept of an emotional " evaluative judgement " tends to elide the distinction between (misleadingly named) " judgements " that are merely the sense of an emotion, and do not have the character of acts, and deliberative emotional judgements that do resemble acts and so properly fall within the corrective scope of the law. Second, intentional emotions are empowered by pre-intentional psychological resources which are less amenable than intentional states to the agent's conscious supervision: The traditional recognition of " infirmity " in mitigation of crimes uncharacteristic of the criminal's overall conduct towards others is justified by the unpredictable action of these pre-intentional elements and can survive the abandonment of the mechanistic conception of emotion.