MORAL INNOCENCE AND THE CRIMINAL LAW: NON-MALA ACTIONS AND NON-CULPABLE AGENTS

According to an influential view, using the criminal law against innocent actions or agents is wrong. In this paper, I consider four related arguments against this view: a debunking argument that suggests that the intuitive appeal of this view may be due to a conflation of different ideas; a counterexamples argument that points out that there are many cases in which using the criminal law against innocent actions or agents is justified; a theoretical argument, according to which the force of the reasons for and against using the criminal law is a matter of degree and it is therefore implausible to hold that the latter always defeat the former; and an analogy argument, which holds that it is implausible to maintain that harming innocents is often justified in other contexts but (almost) never in the context of the criminal law.

Mormonism and White Supremacy

This book examines the role of white American Christianity in fostering and sustaining white supremacy. It draws from theology, critical race theory, and American religious history to make the argument that predominantly white Christian denominations have served as a venue for establishing white privilege and have conveyed to white believers a sense of moral innocence without requiring moral reckoning with the costs of anti-Black racism. To demonstrate these arguments, the book draws from Mormon history from the 1830s to the present, from an archive that includes speeches, historical documents, theological treatises, Sunday school curricula, and other documents of religious life.

Conquered Bodies in the Roman Bedroom

This chapter examines tales of beautiful Jewish men and women taken captive by Rome. In these stories, beauty performs potent cultural work. Through sexualized narratives that portray the captive Jew as victim of Roman greed, Bavli Gittin makes use of a common Roman moral trope—concern for luxuria, an insatiable desire for luxury that is also expressed in lust and licentiousness—to critique elite Roman decadence and moral degradation. These stories also reveal a striking departure from the conventional beauty politics of rabbinic culture. Elsewhere, the Babylonian Talmud frequently portrays women’s beauty as a source of spiritual danger to rabbinic men. By contrast, Bavli Gittin portrays the beautiful woman as a victim, not a threat. Amidst situations of overt Roman violence, Bavli Gittin affirms the moral innocence of violated men and women who are subjected to the conqueror’s lust.

The relative innocence of child soldiers

This article concerns the portrayal of childhood innocence — both moral and legal — in the child soldier narrative, a predominantly African genre of writing. I begin with an analysis of how these stories establish the moral innocence of their young characters through prevailing narratological structures that culminate in the loss of this innocence, usually by means of scenes in which child soldiers kill or sexually assault other characters. The purpose of these scenes and subsequent reflections on them by some child soldier characters is not to disabuse readers of their notions of childhood innocence, but rather to heighten awareness of it by drawing explicit attention to it during moments of duress. The narratives do not present innocence prosaically as an abstraction or a plainly-stated character trait (Shklovsky, 2015). Instead, they invite readers to viscerally perceive it (and its inevitable loss) through disturbing portrayals of violence. Scenes of lost innocence also serve an integral plot function in the genre as prerequisites for the rehabilitation of former child soldiers after their decommission. This narrative trajectory emphasizes the essential innocence of the characters in their roles as victimized children. However, in the process it also downplays concerns about their possible culpability as soldiers.

Innocence and Responsibility in War

Innocence is a notion that can prove controversial. Claims of innocence typically support not imposing burdens on the innocent when their conduct is relevantly unobjectionable. This paper examines innocence in the context of violent conflict between states or groups. Many thinkers about the morality of such violence want to establish a principle that would protect innocent civilians. Yet the common view in just war theory does not affirm the moral innocence of civilians. Similarly, the common view that soldiers have an equal right to kill does not affirm their equal moral culpability.Talk of innocence usually Starts from the idea that a kind of moral appraisal makes sense. We assume that persons can be innocent or not by virtue largely of the choices they have made. I will accept this assumption and set aside metaphysical doubts about our capacity for freedom. There is, of course, no issue of moral innocence if in fact we cannot be morally responsible for our actions.

The Decline of Innocence

The criminological positivists at the turn of the century started a good deal of creative rethinking about the criminal law. Some of their proposals have gained widespread acceptance in the criminal law as we know it today. Others made no headway at all. One particular proposal, and a very fundamental one indeed, began a controversy which has ebbed and flowed regularly since. That is the proposal to eliminate from the criminal law the whole apparatus of substantive principles, or at least some of them, such as the legal insanity defence, which owe their presence to the law's traditional concern for distinguishing the guilty and the innocent in terms of their blameworthiness. The essence of the proposal is that innocence in this sense, moral innocence, if you will, should not disqualify a person from the consequences of the penal law. Moral innocence should, it is urged, give way to social dangerousness as the basis for a criminal disposition.