Symposium on Victor Tadros’ The Ends of Harm,
Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy
Rutgers University, School of Law –Camden
March 30-31, 2012
Participants
Vera Bergelson (Rutgers-Newark Law)
Mitch Berman (Texas Law)
Michelle Dempsey (Villanova Law)
Antony Duff (Minnesota Law and Stirling Philosophy)
Kim Ferzan (Rutgers-Camden Law)
Adil Haque (Rutgers-Newark Law)
Jeff McMahan (Rutgers, New Brunswick, Philosophy)
Victor Tadros (Warwick Law)
Alec Walen (Rutgers-Camden Law and Rutgers-New Brunswick Philosophy)
Leo Zaibert (Union College, Philosophy)
Registration is $35(faculty) and $15 (students). Please contact Carol Shaner [email protected] to register and for hotel information.
"Victor Tadros has produced a powerful and highly original moral justification for a practice of state punishment that would be more purposeful and humane than any presently existing system of criminal punishment. He argues with great cogency that the permissibility of punishment and the permissibility of self-defense have their common source in the enforcement of duties that wrongdoers owe to their victims. In the course of meticulously defending these comprehensive accounts of the right to punish and the right of self-defense, he illuminates a range of central issues in normative ethics, political philosophy, and legal theory. The Ends of Harm presents a profound and brilliant challenge both to our institutions of punishment and to our traditional ways of justifying them." - Jeff McMahan, Rutgers University
"Victor Tadros is one of the brightest, most inventive theorists working on the morality of punishment, and his admirable insight and creativity are on full display in this very impressive book." - Professor Christopher Heath Wellman, Washington University in St Louis
"Tadros's new book makes striking and original contributions not only to penal theory, but to moral philosophy more broadly. Starting from a vivid reminder of just how morally problematic the practice of state punishment is, he develops an instrumentalist account of punishment as general deterrence, but does so on the basis of a firmly non-instrumentalist, Kantian moral theory to which the idea of respect for persons (along with the 'means principle' that forbids treating people as means) is central. The key new idea here is that those who commit crimes acquire duties to their victims, including the duty to protect them against future harm; this, Tadros argues, can then justify the imposition of deterrent punishments as a way of enforcing those protective duties" - Professor R. A. Duff, University of Stirling and University of Minnesota