
Fair Opportunity and Responsibility
David O. Brink(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 28. February 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
448 pages
978-0-19-896194-9 (ISBN)
Description
Fair Opportunity and Responsibility lies at the intersection of moral psychology and criminal jurisprudence and analyzes responsibility and its relations to desert, culpability, excuse, blame, and punishment. It links responsibility with the reactive attitudes but makes the justification of the reactive attitudes depend on a prior and independent conception of responsibility. Responsibility and excuse are inversely related; an agent is responsible for misconduct if and only if it is not excused. As a result, we can study responsibility by understanding excuses. We excuse misconduct when an agent's capacities or opportunities are significantly impaired, because these capacities and opportunities are essential if agents are to have a fair opportunity to avoid wrongdoing. This conception of excuse tells us that responsibility itself consists in agents having suitable cognitive and volitional capacities - normative competence - and a fair opportunity to exercise these capacities free from undue interference - situational control. Because our reactive attitudes and practices presuppose the fair opportunity conception of responsibility, this supports a predominantly retributive conception of blame and punishment that treats culpable wrongdoing as the desert basis of blame and punishment. We can then apply the fair opportunity framework to assessing responsibility and excuse in circumstances of structural injustice, situational influences in ordinary circumstances and in wartime, insanity and psychopathy, immaturity, addiction, and crimes of passion. Though fair opportunity has important implications for each issue, treating them together allows us to explore common themes and appreciate the need to take partial responsibility and excuse seriously in our practices of blame and punishment.
Reviews / Votes
Brink's book is a triumph. It is valuable because it is the most complete and comprehensive articulation of responsibility and excuses, and because every chapter contains insights as to particular excuses themselves * Philosophical Review * I cannot help but marvel at Brink's accomplishment. I cannot think of another writer who has so systematically worked through so many moral and legal intricacies. It has a rightful place on the shelf of all theorists interested in responsibilityand the criminal law * Philosophical Review * David Brink has been writing about responsibility for almost two decades. He has now written a splendid book, Fair Opportunity & Responsibility, that sums up and expands the themes that he has been so fruitfully pursuing. It is an excellent blend of theory and practical arguments for law reform. It is also stunningly polite, fair-minded and humane. ... Every criminal law scholar should read Fair Opportunity & Responsibility * Criminal Law and Philosophy * David Brink has done an extraordinary job identifying, defending, and applying what might be called a master principle of culpability [fair opportunity]. He has written a wonderful book, full of nuance and philosophical sophistication * Criminal Law and Philosophy *
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 232 mm
Width: 159 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
699 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-896194-9 (9780198961949)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
David O. Brink, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
David O. Brink is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His research is in ethical theory, history of ethics, moral psychology, and jurisprudence. He is the author of Moral Realism and The Foundations of Ethics (CUP 1989), Perfectionism and the Common Good (OUP 2003), and Mill's Progressive Principles (OUP 2013). He received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from the University of Minnesota (1980) and a PhD in Philosophy from Cornell University (1984). He served as Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University and as Assistant and Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining UC San Diego in 1994. He gave the 2013 Lindley Lecture.
David O. Brink is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His research is in ethical theory, history of ethics, moral psychology, and jurisprudence. He is the author of Moral Realism and The Foundations of Ethics (CUP 1989), Perfectionism and the Common Good (OUP 2003), and Mill's Progressive Principles (OUP 2013). He received a BA in Philosophy and Political Science from the University of Minnesota (1980) and a PhD in Philosophy from Cornell University (1984). He served as Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University and as Assistant and Associate Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before joining UC San Diego in 1994. He gave the 2013 Lindley Lecture.
Author
Distinguished Professor of PhilosophyDistinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of California, San Diego
Content
1: Prolegomena
2: The Reactive Attitudes and Responsibility
3: The Fair Opportunity Conception of Responsibility
4: Fair Opportunity, Capacities, and Possibilities
5: Fair Opportunity and History
6: Blame, Punishment, and Predominant Retributivism
7: The Nature and Significance of Culpability
8: Affirmative Defenses: Principles and Puzzles
9: Structural Injustice and Fair Opportunity
10: Situationism and Fair Opportunity
11: Incompetence, Psychopathy, and Fair Opportunity
12: Immaturity and Fair Opportunity
13: Addiction and Fair Opportunity
14: Battered Persons, Provocation, and Fair Opportunity
15: Partial Responsibility and Excuse
2: The Reactive Attitudes and Responsibility
3: The Fair Opportunity Conception of Responsibility
4: Fair Opportunity, Capacities, and Possibilities
5: Fair Opportunity and History
6: Blame, Punishment, and Predominant Retributivism
7: The Nature and Significance of Culpability
8: Affirmative Defenses: Principles and Puzzles
9: Structural Injustice and Fair Opportunity
10: Situationism and Fair Opportunity
11: Incompetence, Psychopathy, and Fair Opportunity
12: Immaturity and Fair Opportunity
13: Addiction and Fair Opportunity
14: Battered Persons, Provocation, and Fair Opportunity
15: Partial Responsibility and Excuse