In his paper “Public Reason and the Justification of Punishment,” Zachary Hoskins develops and defends an idea of “public reason” that might be applicable to debates over punishment in the Western world. This short reply takes issue with some of Hoskins’ conclusions (while agreeing with many of his premises), and suggests that contra Hoskins, many versions of retribution are not compatible with the ideal of public reason as Rawls articulated it. Instead, debates over criminal justice and punishment should properly revolve (...) around the goods of public safety and harm reduction—rather than around any of the supposed metaphysical goods achieved by retributive punishment. (shrink)

Plausible retributivist justifications for punishment assert that the commission of a moral wrong creates a pro tanto reason to punish the person who committed it. Yet there are good case-based and theoretical reasons to believe that not all moral wrongs are the proper subjects of criminal law or that they are within the proper domain of the state. This article provides these reasons, which suggest that a plausible retributivist justification for punishment must make distinctions between state-relevant and non-state-relevant moral wrongs (...) and state-relevant and non-state-relevant desert. The article makes the case for Rawlsian public reason as a plausible method for making these distinctions. (shrink)

In Partisanship and Political Liberalism in Diverse Societies I examine political parties and partisanship within the context of John Rawls’s theory of political liberalism. I argue that parties and partisanship are vital to Rawls’s political liberalism, since they offer a distinctive and crucial contribution to the process of public justification that is central to it, which combines the articulation of public reasons with the channelling into the public political realm of the particular values and conceptions of the good emerging from (...) parties’ specific constituencies. Furthermore, I argue, partisanship generates a special kind of political obligations, and this further contributes to state legitimacy under conditions of reasonable pluralism. In this paper, I respond to three commentators who have raised important criticisms against my argument. More specifically, Section 1 provides a response to Lea Ypi’s argument that my normative account of partisanship wrongly presupposes that existing liberal societies are reasonably just. Section 2 answers Daniel Weinstock’s concerns regarding the plausibility and internal consistency of my account of partisan political obligations. Finally, Section 3 addresses Kevin Vallier’s criticisms, which challenge my account of public reason and propose an alternative one. (shrink)