Steven David Sverdlik

Southern Methodist University | SMU · Department of Philosophy

In Introduction Bentham considers a difficulty. If the immediate aim of punishment is to deter agents considering breaking the law, then the severity of the threat of punishment must increase if they are strongly tempted to offend. But it seems intuitively that some people who were strongly tempted to offend should be punished leniently. Bentham ar...

Many philosophers argue that it is morally objectionable in principle to punish people in order to deter others from committing crimes. Such punishment is said to treat the offender simply as a means to benefit others. This Kantian argument rests on a certain reading of the Formula of Humanity. However, the central concept in that formula is not “t...

I examine two related ideas about the role of desert judgments which say, roughly, that, if a punishment is undeserved, it is impermissible to impose it. These can both be taken to claim that desert is a ‘limiting condition’ on the pursuit of consequentialist aims. I discuss what considerations are supposed to support an offender’s desert claim. I...

Retributivist approaches to the philosophy of punishment are usually based on certain claims related to moral desert. I focus on one such principle: Censuring Principle (CP): There is a moral reason to censure guilty wrongdoers aversively. Principles like CP are often supported by the construction of examples similar to Kant’s ‘desert island’. Thes...

Reformist ideas in the philosophy of punishment can be traced back to Plato. However, it is only in the late 19th century that explicitly reformist ‘theories’ are discussed by philosophers, and in the 20th century that they are worked out at length. The conception of reform has recently undergone important changes. Contemporary writers who are appa...

The concept of intentional action occupies a central place in commonsense or folk psychological thought. This paper describes two psychological experiments designed by the author and Joshua Knobe. The experiments investigate further some questions that arose from Knobe's work on responsibility and intentionality beliefs in folk psychology. They sho...

Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 13-14 DAVID WARD CONTENDS that Kant cannot explain why people perform evil acts, in the special sense that Ward attaches to the term. He suggests that if we utilize a notion of the unconscious acceptance of certain sorts of principle then a plausible explanation—that still draws on some Kantian ideas—...

Contemporary Kantians who defend Kant''s view of the superiority of the sense of duty as a form of motivation appeal to various ideas. Some say, if only implicitly, that the sense of duty is always ``available'''' to an agent, when she has a moral obligation. Some, like Barbara Herman, say that the sense of duty provides a ``nonaccidental'''' conne...

Philosophers traditionally have been concerned both to explain intentional behavior and to evaluate it from a moral point of view. Some have maintained that whether actions (and their consequences) properly count as intended sometimes hinges on moral considerations specifically, considerations of moral responsibility. The same claim has been made a...

This book investigates the deontic relevance of motives. That issue is formulated in this question: can the motive of an action ever be the reason, or part of the reason, that it is morally right or wrong? It is argued that the answer is 'yes.' Various arguments in the literature, found in deontological writers like Kant, and Ross, as well as in ut...

What is the relation between the intention to A and doing A intentionally? It is natural to suppose that the latter entails the former. That is, it is natural to accept what Michael Bratman has called the ‘Simple View’ of the relation between acting intentionally and having an intention. Bratman is one noteworthy writer who has denied that the Simp...

The main previous analyses of punishment by Hart, Feinberg and Wasserstrom are considered and criticized. One persistent fault is the neglect of the idea that in punishment the person subjected to it is represented as having no valid excuse for wrongdoing. A new analysis is proposed which attempts to specify in what sense punishment by its very nat...

Photocopy of typescript original. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1981. Bibliography: p. 213-218.