In American legal journals over the last decade there were hundreds of pages of articles worrying over threats to justice and freedom arising from the power to withhold benefits. Government officials have tremendous discretion to offer or withhold foreign aid, ration-books, government contracts and jobs, welfare subsidies, public housing, tariff protection, academic grants, alien resident status, paroles, or exemption from conscription or combat, from arrest or prosecution or imprisonment. Right-wing economists have worried about welfare-state emphasis on administrative discretion rather than (...) the rule of law. And left-wing economists have worried about the rich man's power to intimidate the poor man by threatening to cut off his productive work. (shrink)

A dozen philosophers have recently groped for a formula to pick out coercive offers: when P proposes to give a benefit or withhold a harm for Q’s compliance, when does p’s proposal count as coercive? Five formulae are analyzed here. One account is completely “moralized,” claiming that we can’t pick out coercive offers without first settling questions of rights. Two accounts are completely “non-moral,” using as criterion a baseline of “What would in fact have happened” if P had not wanted (...) Q’s compliance. Finally, two accounts offer “two-baseline” accounts, asking “What should have happened?” and/or “What would have happened otherwise?” four accounts are found quite inadequate; the fifth account (my own earlier formula) is threatened by two odd counter cases. Finally, an alternative to “defining coercion” is sketched. (shrink)

H. L. A. Hart's new book of essays rejects any theory of the classic retributive type for justifying legal punishment. Hart denies that useless punishments can be justified even of fully guilty men; he rejects as the justifying aim of punishment the hope of crowning wickedness with the suffering it deserves; he denies that great guilt could justify a more severe punishment than utility-considerations would call for. We will be concerned here with only one of his arguments supporting this rejection: (...) the objection that mere human judges cannot measure wickedness accurately enough to see that each degree of wickedness gets the appropriate amount of suffering. And of course modern fashions of determinist thinking have brought home to us even more vividly the absurdity of trying to measure wickedness, since determinism makes us wonder if we know how much any offender could have helped doing what he did. (shrink)

A dozen philosophers have recently groped for a formula to pick out coercive offers: when P proposes to give a benefit or withhold a harm for Q’s compliance, when does p’s proposal count as coercive? Five formulae are analyzed here. One account is completely “moralized,” claiming that we can’t pick out coercive offers without first settling questions of rights. Two accounts are completely “non-moral,” using as criterion a baseline of “What would in fact have happened” if P had not wanted (...) Q’s compliance. Finally, two accounts offer “two-baseline” accounts, asking “What should have happened?” and/or “What would have happened otherwise?” four accounts are found quite inadequate; the fifth account (my own earlier formula) is threatened by two odd counter cases. Finally, an alternative to “defining coercion” is sketched. (shrink)