Antony Duff’s The Realm of Criminal Law offers an appealing moral reconstruction of the criminal law. I agree that the criminal law should be understood to predicate punishment upon sufficient proof that the defendant has committed a public wrong for which she is being held to account and censured. But the criminal law is not only about censoring people for public wrongs; it must serve other purposes as well, such as preventing people from committing serious crimes and more generally from (...) violating reasonable regulations. These purposes, and perhaps retributive justice, require the criminal law also to mete out harsh treatment, but only insofar as such treatments are proportional to the culpable wrong committed. The problem for the criminal law is that many mala prohibita crimes consist of a minor wrong but also call for a relatively severe punishment. To accommodate that mismatch, it is necessary to complement the criminal law, as Duff and I conceive of it, with what I call “penal law.” Penal law relies on forfeiture to explain why hard treatment is permissible. The forfeiture must be fair, and it comes with its own proportionality limits. But those limits are not as strict as the limits implicit in the criminal law. It allows for penalties that are harsher than the punishments that could justifiably be meted out for many mala prohibita offenses. One and the same act can count as a crime and a penal infraction, and one and the same criminal justice system can and should handle both crimes and the penal infractions. It is, I think, only in that way that we can accommodate both the need to prevent public wrongdoing and the distinct importance of holding people accountable for the commission of public wrongs. (shrink)

According to an appealing and common view, the moral status of an action – whether it is wrong, for example – is sometimes important in itself in terms of the moral status of other actions – especially those that respond to the original action. This view is especially influential with respect to the criminal law. It is accepted not only by legal moralists but also by adherents of the harm principle, for example. In this paper, I argue against this view. (...) The main arguments emphasize the distinctions between the moral status of actions, consequences, and agents. I argue that what matters, in terms of other actions, is not the moral status of the original action but rather other factors that may be confused with it, such as the moral status of its consequences – whether they are good or bad – and the moral status of the agent – whether she is praiseworthy or blameworthy. The intuitive appeal of the common view is, I argue, at least partly due to a conflation of these factors. Most importantly, once we recall the distinctions between these factors, we can see more clearly that this view lacks a compelling rationale. Or, at least, that it is based on assumptions that, first, are much more controversial than their conclusion, and, second, do not support every aspect of this view – and thus do not offer a unified foundation for this view. (shrink)

Some claim that criminalisation is morally permissible only when the conduct criminalised is morally wrong. This claim can be disambiguated into at least three principles which differ according to whether, and how, wrongness is dependent on details of the law: the strong constraint, the moderate constraint, and the weak constraint. In this paper I argue that the weak wrongness constraint is preferable to the strong and moderate constraints. That is, we should prefer the view that conduct criminalised must be morally (...) wrong, but qualifying wrongness can depend on criminalising the conduct first. Further, I will show that my arguments in support of the weak wrongness constraint have wider implications. Favouring the weak wrongness constraint implies that condemning wrongs cannot be the only legitimate reason in favour of criminalisation. Those who think condemnation can justify criminalisation should be pluralists. (shrink)

The philosophy of criminalisation has been a neglected topic for some time now. A considerable amount of modern criminal justice literature is dedicated to preventing crime and punishing crime, but precious little attention is dedicated to the preliminary question: what should be a crime? Over the last decade, five editors and dozens of authors published a four-part series of edited essays in an attempt to answer that question. The present article is a hybrid of sorts: in one sense, it is (...) a review of the essays in that series; but in another sense, this article also makes its own unique contribution by answering two key questions. First, what is criminalisation? And second, how should lawmakers decide what to criminalise? Most importantly, this article suggests a new criminalisation decision-making process in order to ensure the criminal law is a justifiable framework of prohibitions and sanctions. (shrink)