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The traditional understandings that structure the relationships between public servants and the wider political system are said to have undergone considerable change. But what are these formalized and implicit understandings? What are the key dimensions of such bargains? In what conditions do bargains rise and fall? And has there been a universal and uniform change in these bargains? This book offers a distinct perspective to answer these questions. It develops a unique analytical perspective to account for diverse bargains within systems of executive government. Drawing on comparative experiences from different state traditions, it examines ideas and contemporary developments along three key dimensions of any Public Service Bargain: reward, competency, and loyalty and responsibility. The book points to diverse and differentiated developments across national systems of executive government, and suggests how different ‘bargains’ are prone to cheating by their constituent parties. It explores the context in which managerial bargains — widely seen to be at the heart of contemporary administrative reform movements — are likely to catch on and considers how cheating is likely to destabilize such bargains.

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book’s most important conclusion is that blame is inseparable from morality itself — that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation of those who violate the principles. Because blame has not received much sustained attention, the book works its way toward its conclusions by first raising, and then seeking to resolve, a series of conceptual and normative questions. These questions include: How are blameworthy acts related to the characters of the agents who perform them? Can agents deserve blame for their bad traits as well as their bad acts? Is blame best understood as a kind of action, a kind of belief, a kind of feeling, a combination of these elements, or something entirely different? What sort of moral concept is blameworthiness? How do blame and blameworthiness — correlative concepts — fit together? Although the book draws both on Hume’s treatment of the relation between character and blame and Strawson’s landmark discussion of the “reactive attitudes”, the theory that emerges is neither Humean nor Strawsonian. It is a new theory that seeks to do more justice than its predecessors to the indispensable role that blame plays in our moral lives.

Husak reprints 15 of his earlier essays in the philosophy of criminal law (and add two previously unpublished pieces) collected from philosophy journals, law reviews, and book chapters. These articles cover a broad range of topics about the nature of penal liability, criminal law culpability, defences, and the justification of punishment. Together, these essays present a desert-based analysis of issues in criminal theory that resist the consequentialist approach more familiar among legal scholars. The author's foremost concern is to ensure that the principles and doctrines of the criminal law preserve justice and do not sacrifice individuals for the common welfare. Although Husak draws equally from existing criminal law and contemporary moral and political philosophy, readers need neither a Ph.D. in philosophy nor a J.D. in law to understand and assess his essays.

When the noted political philosopher Iris Marion Young died in 2006, her death was mourned as the passing of “one of the most important political philosophers of the past quarter-century” (Cass Sunstein) and as an important and innovative thinker working at the conjunction of a number of important topics: global justice; democracy and difference; continental political theory; ethics and international affairs; and gender, race and public policy. This book discusses our responsibilities to address “structural” injustices in which we among many are implicated (but for which we are not to blame), often by virtue of participating in a market, such as buying goods produced in sweatshops, or participating in booming housing markets that leave many homeless. The book argues that addressing these structural injustices requires a new model of responsibility, which it calls the “social connection” model. The book develops this idea by clarifying the nature of structural injustice; developing the notion of political responsibility for injustice and how it differs from older ideas of blame and guilt; and finally how we can then use this model to describe our responsibilities to others no matter who we are and where we live.

To be responsible for their acts, agents must both act voluntarily and in some sense know what they are doing. Of these requirements, the voluntariness condition has been much discussed, but the epistemic condition has received far less attention. This book seeks to remedy that imbalance: it first criticizes a popular but inadequate way of understanding the epistemic condition and then seeks to develop a more adequate alternative. The popular but inadequate view asserts that agents are responsible only for what they are consciously aware of doing or bringing about. (Because this view takes an agent's responsibility to extend only as far as the searchlight of his consciousness, the book refers to it as the searchlight view.) By contrast, on the proposed alternative, even agents who unwittingly act wrongly or foolishly can be responsible if (1) they have information that supports the conclusion that their acts are wrong or foolish, and (2) their failure to draw that conclusion on the basis of that information falls short of meeting some appropriate standard, and (3) the failure is caused by the constellation of psychological and/or physical features that makes them the persons they are. Because it integrates first- and third-personal elements, this alternative account is well suited to capture the complexity of responsible agents, who at once have their own private perspectives and live in a public world.

This book presents a positive theory of moral worth. Chapter 1 examines the complexities of moral life that appear to differ from the paradigmatic cases of moral psychology. Chapter 2 argues against the common assumption that akrasia is always irrational, or at least, always less rational than the corresponding self-controlled action. The theory is presented in Chapter 3 — that people are praiseworthy for acts of good will and blameworthy for acts of ill will or absence of good will, and the amount of praise or blame they deserve varies with the depth of their motivation or extent of their indifference. Chapter 4 and 5 defend this theory against potential objections to the effect that there is something wrong with its failure to invoke autonomy, and clarifies the theory’s implications about some issues in moral responsibility often associated with autonomy (i.e., responsibility of kleptomaniacs, drug addicts, makers of Freudian slips, and persons driven to murder by hypnotists).

This book affirms the value of obligations and of rights, of forgiveness, of consent and refusal, of promise and request. These are all instruments by which we exercise control over our normative environment. Philosophers from Hume to Scanlon have supposed that when we make promises, give our consent, etc. our real interest is in controlling (or being able to anticipate) what people will actually do and that our interest in rights and obligations is a by-product of this more fundamental interest. In fact, we value for its own sake the ability to decide who is obliged to do what, to determine when blame is appropriate, to settle whether an act wrongs us. This book describes how we control the rights and obligations of ourselves and of those around us. We do so by making friends and thereby creating the rights and obligations of friendship. We do so by making promises and so binding ourselves to perform. We do so by consenting to medical treatment and thereby giving the doctor the right to go ahead. The normative character of our world matters to us on its own account. To make sense of promise, consent, friendship, and other related phenomena we must acknowledge that normative interests are amongst our fundamental interests. We must also rethink the psychology of human agency and the nature of social convention.

A collection of fifteen new papers on themes from the philosophy of T. M. Scanlon. The contributions include discussions of issues in metaethics and the theory of value (reasons and reasoning, valuing, desire and action); normative ethics (contractualism, aggregation, promising, tolerance); political philosophy (conservatism, global justice, freedom of expression, distribution), and the theory of responsibility (psychopathy, blame, and opprobrium). Contributors: Christine M. Korsgaard, Samuel Scheffler, Niko Kolodny, Michael Smith, Pamela Hieronymi, Rahul Kumar, Seana Valentine Shiffrin, Angela M. Smith, G. A. Cohen, Charles R. Beitz, Joshua Cohen, Aaron James, Gary Watson, Susan Wolf, and R. Jay Wallace. Together, the papers contribute to a deeper understanding of Scanlon’s views, while advancing the discussion of the important issues addressed in his ground-breaking work.