The compensatory desert argument is an argument that purports to justify inequalities in (some) incomes generated by a free labour market. It holds, first, that the principle of compensation is a principle of desert; second, that a distribution justified by a principle of desert is just; and third, that (some) rewards people reap on a free labour market are compensation for costs they incur. It concludes that therefore, a distribution of (some) rewards generated by a free (...) labour market is just. In this chapter I criticise the first two premises of this argument. I argue that the principle of compensation is not a principle of desert (sections 3 and 4), and that a distribution of deserved compensatory payments may be unjust (sections 5 and 6). Before developing my critique of the compensatory desert argument, I start by illustrating further that argument in the version of it which has been defended by Julian Lamont (section 1), and to dispel two objections that have been moved against the view that compensation is a principle of desert. (shrink)

In the context of state educational institutions, young white males are owed a duty to respect their interest or desert tokens. Not all white males have waived this duty since many white males have not performed the relevant types of culpable wrongdoing. Merely having benefitted from an unjust injury act or being a member of a community that owe a debt of compensation to racial minorities and women are not sufficient grounds to override the duty owed to the white (...) male. Since the three most plausible attempts to provide a compensatory justice justification for strong affirmative action programs at state educational institutions fail, I conclude that the following is false. (1) Other things being equal, a state educational institution may choose to hire a less qualified candidate over a more qualified candidate because the weight given to the race or gender of the less qualified candidate relates to the elimination of a debt of compensatory justice. Hence, unless strong affirmative action programs at state educational institutions can be justified by reference to some other value, such as the value of diversity, the state ought to eliminate such programs. (shrink)

Le temps est venu de tourner le regard vers la ville de Sarajevo, l’œil cette fois apaisé : exit les discours idéologiques, les surenchères journalistiques dans la qualification de l’horreur et la pollution intellectuelle des années 1990. Et que voit-on ?Sarajevo n’est ni cette ville d’Europe, martyre des Temps modernes, martyre d’un..

If the ground of punishment is a culpable wronging, what is it about a culpable wrongdoing that allows it to morally justify deserved punishment? In particular, we want to know what it is about a culpable wrongdoing that accounts for the intrinsic value of punitive desert or the punitive-desert-related duties that comprise retributivism. I analyze both together in the context of seeking a justification for The Principle of Deserved Punishment, (1). (1) The Principle of Deserved Punishment. A person (...) deserves punishment because, and only because, she has performed a culpable wrongdoing. One approach is that more general moral principles justify it. On this approach, these moral principles support the claim that deserved punishment is morally justified and the claim that it is justified on the ground of a culpable wrongdoing. In this article, I argue against this approach. Elsewhere I argue for the truth of retributivism (which focuses on deserved punishment) based on its being the best explanation of our considered moral judgments. This latter account allows punitive desert and retributivism to function as more fundamental normative entities than is suggested by theories that attempt to derive it from other moral principles. (shrink)

This article endeavors to establish the moral force behind the worker’s claim to a compensatory wage in return for the labor burdens she endures. The apparent incompatibility between compensation and voluntary losses suggests that the only reason for providing a compensatory wage is the need to entice a valued service. In response, the article considers and rejects attempts to ground the compensatory wage on duress, mutual trade, and desert. Instead, it argues that the worker is not (...) responsible for her loss of well-being because she would not have incurred it in the absence of the employer’s promise to compensate. Key Words: compensatory wage • contributory wage • detrimental reliance • desert • labor burdens • promises • responsibility. (shrink)

Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that the inegalitarian invocation of reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker's contribution depends on what others (...) only together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous. (shrink)

Justice requires giving people what they deserve. Or so many philosophers – and according to many of those philosophers, everyone else – thought for centuries. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, however, perhaps under the influence of Rawls’s (1971) desert-less theory, desert was largely cast out of discussions of distributive justice. Now it is making a comeback. In this chapter I consider recent research on the concept of desert, arguments for its requital, and connections between desert and (...) other distributive ideals. I suggest that desert-sensitive theories of distributive justice, though they face obstacles, have a promising future. (shrink)

The description for this book, Desert, will be forthcoming.

Several theories, both ancient and recent, suggest that having the time to contemplate a decision should increase moral awareness and the likelihood of ethical choices. Our findings indicated just the opposite: greater time for deliberation led to less ethical decisions. Post-hoc analyses and a followup experiment suggested that decision makers act as if their previous choices have created or lost moral credentials: after an ethical first choice, people acted significantly less ethically in their subsequent choice but after an unethical first (...) choice, people acted significantly more ethically in their subsequent choice. These findings provide the basis for a model of compensatory ethics. (shrink)

Are inequalities of income created by the free market just? In this book Serena Olsaretti examines two main arguments that justify those inequalities: the first claims that they are just because they are deserved, and the second claims that they are just because they are what free individuals are entitled to. Both these arguments purport to show, in different ways, that giving responsible individuals their due requires that free market inequalities in incomes be allowed. Olsaretti argues, however, that neither argument (...) is successful, and shows that when we examine closely the principle of desert and the notions of liberty and choice invoked by defenders of the free market, it appears that a conception of justice that would accommodate these notions, far from supporting free market inequalities, calls for their elimination. Her book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in political philosophy, political theory and normative economics. (shrink)

I will argue that a desert-based justification for treating a person in a certain way is a justification that holds this treatment to be justified simply by what the person is like and what he or she has done, independent of (1) the fact that treating the person in this way will have good effects (or that treating people like him or her in this way will have such effects); (2) the fact that this treatment is called for by (...) some (justified) institution or practice; or (3) the fact that the person could have avoided being subject to this treatment by choosing appropriately, and therefore cannot complain of it. I will explore the implications of this understanding of desert for the role of desert-based justifications of blame, punishment, and economic reward. (shrink)

Some thinkers argue that our best scientific theories about the world prove that free will is an illusion. Others disagree. The concept of free will is profoundly important to our self-understanding, our interpersonal relationships, and our moral and legal practices. If it turns out that no one is ever free and morally responsible, what would that mean for society, morality, meaning, and the law? Just Deserts brings together two philosophers – Daniel C. Dennett and Gregg D. Caruso – to debate (...) their respective views on free will, moral responsibility, and legal punishment. In three extended conversations, Dennett and Caruso present their arguments for and against the existence of free will and debate their implications. Dennett argues that the kind of free will required for moral responsibility is compatible with determinism – for him, self-control is key; we are not responsible for becoming responsible, but are responsible for staying responsible, for keeping would-be puppeteers at bay. Caruso takes the opposite view, arguing that who we are and what we do is ultimately the result of factors beyond our control, and because of this we are never morally responsible for our actions in the sense that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward. These two leading thinkers introduce the concepts central to the debate about free will and moral responsibility by way of an entertaining, rigorous and sometimes heated philosophical dialogue. What emerges is a clear account of the latest thinking on free will, and what is at stake for our moral and legal practices. (shrink)

Jeff McMahan rejects the relevance of desert to the morality of self-defense. In Killing in War he restates his rejection and adds to his reasons. We argue that the reasons are not decisive and that the rejection calls for further attention, which we provide. Although we end up agreeing with McMahan that the limits of morally acceptable self-defense are not determined by anyone’s deserts, we try to show that deserts may have some subsidiary roles in the morality of self-defense. (...) We suggest that recognizing this might help McMahan to answer some unanswered questions to which his own position gives rise. (shrink)

Debates about individual responsibility for climate change revolve mainly around individual mitigation duties. Mitigation duties concern future impacts of climate change. Unfortunately, climate change has already caused important harms and it is foreseeable that it will cause more in the future, in spite of our best efforts. Thus, arguably, individuals might also have duties related to those harms. In this paper, I address the question of whether individuals are obligated to provide compensation for climate related harms that have already occurred. (...) I explore two possible strategies to answer that question. The straightforward strategy answers in the affirmative. Two approaches embrace this strategy: the ‘ecological citizenship’ approach and the benefits-based approach. I challenge those two approaches and rule out an affirmative answer. The alternative strategy answers in the negative but provides a way to respond to why currently living individuals should pay for burdens created for past individuals. Two possible approaches embrace this alternative: the community-based approach and my own state-based benefits approach. I will argue that individual duties do not fall under the realm of compensatory justice, but they have nonetheless a duty to bear compensatory burdens allocated to their states. (shrink)

Jakovljevic and Crnčevic review the concept of comorbidity in relation to mental disorders, which is timely. Yet they seem to ignore a longstanding and important notion of comorbidity, highlighted in psychiatry particularly by Sigmund Freud. The ignored notion is that of compensatory comorbidity. Compensatory comorbidity is a special case of compensatory phenomena in relation to disrupted health.

In this paper, I take it for granted both that there are two types of blameworthiness—accountability blameworthiness and attributability blameworthiness—and that avoidability is necessary only for the former. My task, then, is to explain why avoidability is necessary for accountability blameworthiness but not for attributability blameworthiness. I argue that what explains this is both the fact that these two types of blameworthiness make different sorts of reactive attitudes fitting and that only one of these two types of attitudes requires having (...) been able to refrain from φ-ing in order for them to be fitting. (shrink)

Desert-realists maintain that those who do wrong without an excuse deserve blame. Desert-skeptics deny this, holding that though we may be responsible for our actions in some sense, we lack the kind of responsibility needed to deserve blame. In two recent papers, Randolph Clarke advances an innovative defense of desert-realism. He argues for deserved-guilt, the thesis that the guilty deserve to feel guilt. In his 2013 paper, Clarke suggests two strategies for defending deserved-guilt: the fitting-guilt strategy and (...) the good-guilt strategy. In his 2016 paper, Clarke issues a challenge to the desert-skeptic: he calls on them to provide a non-desert based account of guilt’s fittingness. In the first two thirds of the paper, I respond to Clarke’s challenge to the desert-skeptic, showing that guilt felt by the guilty is alethic-fitting, reason-fitting, and value-fitting. None of these notions of fittingness, I argue, are desert based. In the last third of the paper, I show how the work done in previous sections affords us the tools to finely diagnose the failures of both the fitting-guilt and the good-guilt strategies. Here, I draw on one of Clarke’s own insights—namely, that desert is intimately connected to the value of justice. I propose that showing that guilt is fitting, or again non-instrumentally good, fails to show that it is deserved because to show that it is deserved one must show that guilt is fitting or good in a sense that implicates justice. (shrink)

The blameworthy deserve blame. So runs a platitude of commonsense morality. My aim here is to set out an understanding of this desert claim (as I call it) on which it can be seen to be a familiar and attractive aspect of moral thought. I conclude with a response to a prominent denial of the claim.

In this paper I offer from a source compatibilist's perspective a critical discussion of "Four Views on Free Will" by John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas. Sharing Fischer's semi-compatibilist view, I propose modifications to his arguments while resisting his coauthors' objections. I argue against Kane that he should give up the requirement that a free and morally responsible agent be able to do otherwise (in relevant cases). I argue against Pereboom that his famed manipulation argument be (...) resisted by contending that the agents in it are free and responsible. And I also argue against Vargas by challenging the sense in which his revisionist thesis differs from a position like Fischer's and mine. I close by reflecting on the nature of desert. All seem to assume it is central to the debate, but what is it? (shrink)

Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility argues that the normative basis of moral responsibility is anchored in the effects of responsibility practices. Further, the capacities required for moral responsibility are socially scaffolded. This article considers criticisms of this account that have been recently raised by John Doris, Victoria McGeer, and Michael Robinson. Robinson argues against Building Better Beings’s rejection of libertarianism about free will, and the account of desert at stake in the theory. considers methodological questions that (...) arise from the account of desert, providing some additional resources for thinking about these issues within the framework of the account. McGeer objects to the particular mode of justification used to motivate the prescriptive aspect of the account. This article presents replies to each of these lines of response. (shrink)

Does justice require that individuals get what they deserve? Serena Olsaretti brings together new essays by leading moral and political philosophers examining the relation between desert and justice; they also illuminate the nature of distributive justice, and the relationship between desert and other values, such as equality and responsibility.

In this paper, I explore the idea that someone can deserve resentment or other reactive emotions for what she does by attention to three psychological functions of such emotions – appraisal, communication, and sanction – that I argue ground claims of their desert. I argue that attention to these functions helps to elucidate the moral aims of reactive emotions and to distinguish the distinct claims of desert, as opposed to other moral considerations.

In May 1969, James Foreman interrupted a religious service at Riverside Church in New York to deliver “The Black Manifesto,” which included a stunning “demand” of $500 million in “reparations” for black Americans from the white religious establishment. In the period since that date, The Manifesto has aroused rather less serious discussion than one might have thought it would. No doubt, the burden of The Manifesto has struck many whites and some blacks as so outrageous in its morality, so unrealistic (...) in its politics, so unfeasible in its economics, that intellectuals may have done a public service by consigning The Manifesto to relative neglect. Not that The Manifesto has had only unfavorable publicity, nor that the churches have ignored it; quite the contrary. What remains true, however, is that the crucial burden of The Manifesto, indeed, the precise argument it advances for reparations and compensatory justice, has not so far as I can tell received the thoughtful attention it deserves. Until it does, and is appraised with care and fairness, it is impossible either to support or to reject The Manifesto's “demands.” Let us try, then, however belatedly, to state and assess the argument of The Black Manifesto. (shrink)

This article traces John Rawls’s debt to Frank Knight’s critique of the ‘just deserts’ rationale for laissez-faire in order to defend justice as fairness against some prominent contemporary criticisms, but also to argue that desert can find a place within a Rawlsian theory of justice when desert is grounded in reciprocity. The first lesson Rawls took from Knight was that inheritance of talent and wealth are on a moral par. Knight highlighted the inconsistency of objecting to the inheritance (...) of wealth while taking for granted the legitimacy of unequal reward based on differential productive capacity. Rawls agreed that there was an inconsistency, but claimed that it should be resolved by rejecting both kinds of inequality, except to the extent they benefitted the worst off. The second lesson Rawls learned from Knight was that the size of one’s marginal product depends on supply and demand, which depend on institutional decisions that cannot themselves be made on the basis of the principle of rewarding marginal productivity. The article claims that this argument about background justice overstates its conclusion, because the dependence of contribution on institutional setup is not total. Proposals for an unconditional basic income may therefore have a strike against them, as far as a reciprocity-based conception of desert is concerned. If we follow Knight’s analysis of the competitive system, however, so too does the alternative of leaving determination of income up to the market. (shrink)

Compensatory lengthening occurs when the featural content of a nucleus or moraic coda is deleted, or becomes reaffiliated with a nonmoraic position — typically an onset — and the vacated mora, instead of being lost, is retained with new content (Hayes 1989).

It is sometimes claimed that those who succeed with the aid of enhancement technologies deserve the rewards associated with their success less, other things being equal, than those who succeed without the aid of such technologies. This claim captures some widely held intuitions, has been implicitly endorsed by participants in social-psychological research, and helps to undergird some otherwise puzzling philosophical objections to the use of enhancement technologies. I consider whether it can be provided with a rational basis. I examine three (...) arguments that might be offered in its favor and argue that each either shows only that enhancements undermine desert in special circumstances, or succeeds only under assumptions that deprive the appeal to desert of much of its dialectic interest. (shrink)

Persons with Parkinson’s disease are advised to use compensatory strategies such as external cues or cognitive movement strategies to overcome gait disturbances. It is suggested that external cues involve the processing of sensory stimulation, while cognitive-movement strategies use attention allocation. This study aimed to compare over time changes in attention allocation in PwP between prolonged walking with cognitive movement strategy and external cues; to compare the effect of cognitive movement strategies and external cues on gait parameters; and evaluate whether (...) these changes depend on cognitive function. Eleven PwP participated in a single-group pilot study. Participants walked for 10 min under each of three conditions: natural walking, using external cuing, using a cognitive movement strategy. Attention and gait variables were extracted from a single-channel electroencephalogram and accelerometers recordings, respectively. Attention allocation was assessed by the% of Brain Engagement Index signals within an attentive engagement range. Cognitive function was assessed using a neuropsychological battery. The walk was divided into 2-min time segments, and the results from each 2-min segment were used to determine the effects of time and condition. Associations between cognitive function and BEI signals were tested. Findings show that in the cognitive movement strategy condition, there was a reduction in the % of BEI signals within the attentive engagement range after the first 2 min of walking. Despite this reduction the BEI did not consistently differ from natural and metronome walking. Spatiotemporal gait variables were better in the cognitive movement strategy condition relative to the other conditions. Global cognitive and information processing scores were significantly associated with the BEI only when the cognitive movement strategy was applied. In conclusion, the study shows that a cognitive movement strategy has positive effects on gait variables but may impose a higher attentional load. Furthermore, when walking using a cognitive movement strategy, persons with higher cognitive function showed elevated attentive engagement. The findings support the idea that cognitive and attentional resources are required for cognitive movement strategies in PwP. Additionally, this study provides support for using single-channel EEG to explore mechanistic aspects of clinical interventions. (shrink)

In this critical review, I address two themes from Shelly Kagan’s path-breaking The Geometry of Desert. First I explain the so-called “bell motion” of desert mountains—a notion reflecting that, ceteris paribus, as people get more virtuous it becomes more important not to give them too little of whatever they deserve than not to give them too much. Having argued that Kagan’s defense of it is unsatisfactory, I offer two objections to the existence of the bell motion. Second, I (...) take up an unrelated issue—the relation between comparative and non-comparative desert. I argue that, given a certain disaggregationist view of comparative desert, it is possible that comparative desert is not satisfied, even if non-comparative desert is perfectly so. Unlike my objections to the bell motion, this possibility adds further complexity to an already complex Kaganian account of desert. (shrink)

Theories of moral desert focus only on the personal culpability of the agent to determine the amount of blame and punishment the agent deserves. I defend an alternative account of desert, one that does not focus only facts about offenders and their offenses. In this revised framework, personal culpability can do no more than set upper and lower limits for deserved blame and punishment. For more precise judgments within that spectrum, additional factors must be considered, factors that are (...) independent of the agent and the offense. I refer to this as the ‘partial conception’ of desert because takes facts about victims—their behavior, desires, and attitudes—into account for desert judgments. On my view, then, agents who are equally culpable may deserve different amounts of blame or punishment, depending on these victim-related factors. (shrink)

A fascinating anthology of texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. "One day, perhaps, this century will be Deleuzian," Michel Foucault once wrote. This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966, belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic. But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of (...) the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson. More surprising is his acknowledgement of Jean-Paul Sartre as his master. "The new themes, a certain new style, a new aggressive and polemical way of raising questions," he wrote, "come from Sartre." But the figure of Nietzsche remains by far the most seminal, and the presence throughout of his friends and close collaborators, Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault. The book stops shortly after the publication of Anti-Oedipus, and presents a kind of genealogy of Deleuze's thought as well as his attempt to leave philosophy and connect it to the outside—but, he cautions, as a philosopher. (shrink)

The first part of this chapter defends the claim that the over-incarceration of disadvantaged social groups is unjust. Many arguments for penal reform are based on the unequal distribution of punishment, most notably disproportionate punishment of the poor and people of color. However, some philosophers use a noncomparative conception of desert to argue that the justice of punishment is independent of its distribution. On this view, which has significant influence in 14th Amendment jurisprudence, unequal punishment is not unjust. After (...) detailing the “noncomparativist challenge,” this chapter argues that Levinasian conceptions of desert enable a theory of penal justice according to which comparative considerations are essential. In so doing, it shows that the noncomparativist challenge can be met. The chapter concludes by considering whether Levinasian conceptions of desert and responsibility show members of socially advantaged groups to be more blameworthy for their wrongdoing than members of disadvantaged groups. (shrink)

The all-or-nothing problem, formulated by Joe Horton, presents us with a situation in which you can do nothing or save one child or save two. It is dangerous to save any, making doing nothing morally permissible, but there is no extra danger in saving two, so it seems wrong to just save one. But then doing nothing is morally better than saving one. I present a solution in response to this problematic result, which is that doing nothing is not an (...) accurate description of a permissible option. (shrink)

Much government and personal conduct is premised on the idea that a person made thereby to suffer deserves that suffering thanks to prior wrongdoing by him. Further, it often appears that one kind of suffering is more deserved than another and, in light of that, conduct inflicting the first is superior, or closer to being justified than conduct inflicting the second. Yet desert is mysterious. It is far from obvious what, exactly, it is. This paper offers and argues for (...) a theory of comparative desert. It offers an account of the conditions under which one harm is more deserved for past wrongdoing than another. The theory offered here can be stated, roughly, like so: One harm is more deserved for a wrongful act than another if, in light of it more than the other, the act is supported by reasons for the agent in a way similar to the way it ought to have been supported by reasons for him. The central task of the paper is to explain, elaborate and offer an argument for this theory. The paper also shows that, under the theory, differences in culpability—as between, for instance, intentionally rather than knowingly bringing about a harm—make a difference to desert. And the paper shows that under the proposed theory it is easier for the state to justify inflicting a punishment that is more deserved than it is to justify inflicting a punishment that is less deserved. (shrink)

During the last half of the twentieth century, legal philosophy (or legal theory or jurisprudence) has grown significantly. It is no longer the domain of a few isolated scholars in law and philosophy. Hundreds of scholars from diverse fields attend international meetings on the subject. In some universities, large lecture courses of five hundred students or more study it. The primary aim of the Law and Philosophy Library is to present some of the best original work on legal philosophy from (...) both the Anglo-American and European traditions. Not only does it help make some of the best work avail able to an international audience, but it also encourages increased awareness of, and interaction between, the two major traditions. The primary focus is on full-length scholarly monographs, although some edited volumes of original papers are also included. The Library editors are assisted by an Editorial Advisory Board of internationally renowed scholars. Legal philosophy should not be considered a narrowly circumscribed field. (shrink)

Modern political philosophers have been notoriously reluctant to recognize desert in their theories of distributive justice.2 A large measure of the philosophical resistance to desert can be attributed to the fact that much of what people possess ultimately derives from brute luck. If a person’s assets come from brute luck, then she cannot be said truly to deserve those assets. John Rawls suggests that this idea is “one of the fixed points of our considered judgments;”3 Eric Rakowski calls (...) it “uncontroversial;”4 Serena Olsaretti claims that a theory must accept it to be “defensible;”5 Peter Vallentyne, to be “plausible.”6 But there is dissent. Two prominent liberal political philosophers, David Miller and David Schmidtz, have recently denied that brute luck nullifies claims of desert and, in turn, articulated.. (shrink)

Philosophers disagree about whether outcome luck can affect an agent's “moral responsibility.” Focusing on responsibility's “negative side,” some maintain, and others deny, that an action's results bear constitutively on how “blameworthy” the actor is, and on how much blame or punishment they “deserve.” Crucially, both sides to the debate assume that an actor's blameworthiness and negative desert are equally affected—or unaffected—by an action's results. This article challenges that previously overlooked assumption, arguing that blameworthiness and desert are distinct moral (...) notions that serve distinct normative functions: blameworthiness serves aliabilityfunction (removing a bar to otherwise impermissible treatments), whereas desert serves afavoringfunction (contributing new value to states of affairs, or providing new reasons for responsive treatments). Having distinguished (negative) desert from blameworthiness, the article proposes a novel resolution to the outcome‐luck debate: that results do not affect an agent's liability to blame, but do affect the amount and severity of blame to which the agent is justly liable, including by affecting the severity of blame that the agent deserves. (shrink)

Desert theories of distributive justice have been attacked on the grounds that they attempt to found large inequalities on morally arbitrary features of individuals: desert is usually classified as a meritocratic principle in contrast to the egalitarian principle that goods should be distributed according to need. I argue that there is an egalitarian version of desert theory, which focuses on effort rather than success, and which aims at equal levels of well‐being; I call it a ‘well‐being (...) class='Hi'>desert’ theory. It is argued that this egalitarian conception of desert is preferable to a meritocratic conception, and that its adoption would encourage greater clarity in arguments over wage differentials and in debates about criteria for job and educational competitions. (shrink)

In some cases, harming another gives rise to a duty to compensate for harm done. This paper argues that the influential explanations of such duties of compensation—that they are somehow derived from rights intrusions, or breaches of duties not to harm—fail. I offer and defend an alternative explanation for why certain harms and not others give rise to compensatory duties, an explanation that seeks to derive them from wide-scope duties not to harm or to compensate for harm done.

Nirbhaya, Asifa, Manisha Valmiki, and the list of victims, (be it women, children or men) in India goes on. There is myriad of legislations enacted in the past to curb the offences, but the crimes in the society seem to be unstoppable. During the COVID time, in the lockdown too, the crimes continued to take place. There were several instances of domestic violence and rapes heard in news. Many instances of suicides were reported. It is really difficult to understand what (...) place in the country is safe for the existence and peaceful survival of any person? The question that arises is whether a victim who comes before the court is provided with the adequate relief? Has the Judiciary or the Parliament done something with this regard? Does the concept of compensatory jurisprudence exist in India? What more is required to be done to enhance the position of victims and rehabilitate them? The research article shall look into the concept of compensatory jurisprudence with respect to India and other nation states as well. There are prevailing enormous laws which discuss about the punishment to be given to the accused person guilty to have committed crime, but unfortunately, there is no specific law regarding the steps to be taken to rehabilitate a victim who has been the subject matter of any crime. The research paper shall deal with various aspects and try to analyse laws or rules, if any, existing with regard to the protection of victims in India or around the globe. It shall also try to look into the role that the States play in rehabilitating and compensating the sufferers and victims of various crimes. The article shall conclude with suggestions as to how the research gaps related to victim reparation be filled. (shrink)