Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Series -- The Healing Virtues -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 Psychotherapy and Virtue Ethics -- 1.2 Chapter Synopsis -- 1.3 Psychotherapy and the Art of Living Well by Being Well -- 2 Psychotherapy and the Moderate Skeptic's Challenge -- 2.1 Introduction -- 2.2 The Secular Confessional -- 2.3 Psyche and Life -- 2.4 A Tincture of Pyrrhonism -- 2.5 Conclusion -- 3 Epistemic Virtues in Psychotherapy: A Response to the Moderate Skeptic's Challenge -- 3.1 Introduction -- 3.2 Definitional Parameters

We are said to face a crisis of over-criminalization: our criminal law has become chaotic, unprincipled, and over-expansive. This book proposes a theory of criminal law, as an institution that can play an important but limited role in the civil order of a political community: it shows how criminal law could be ordered, principled, and restrained.

The question "What can justify criminal punishment?" becomes especially insistent at times, like our own, of penal crisis, when serious doubts are raised not only about the justice or efficacy of particular modes of punishment, but about the very legitimacy of the whole penal system. Recent theorizing about punishment offers a variety of answers to that question-answers that try to make plausible sense of the idea that punishment is justified as being deserved for past crimes; answers that try to identify some beneficial consequences in terms of which punishment might be justified

This Essay sketches an ideal of criminal law—of the kind of criminal law that we can call our own as citizens of a democratic republic. The elements of that ideal include a republican theory of liberal democracy, as the kind of polity in which we can aspire to live; an account of the role of criminal law in such a polity, as defining a set of public wrongs and providing an appropriate formal, public response to the commission of such wrongs through the criminal process of trial and punishment; and a discussion of how the citizens of such a polity will relate to their criminal law and of the various active roles that they will be ready to play in the law's enterprise. This account does not aim to describe, or to justify, our existing systems of criminal law. Instead, it offers a normative ideal against which we can judge our existing institutions, and towards which we can strive to reform them.