Criminal Justice Ethics articles from June 1994

Criminal Justice Ethics archives from June 1994

The lawyer as liar.
June 22, 1994... However defended we may have become against the ancient and still prevalent obloquy heaped upon our profession, we must all feel aggrieved to some extent by our low repute. The appropriate response is not, however, to rail against the popular...

Editor's introduction.(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... In The Moral Sense, James Q. Wilson advances an ambitious synthesis of work undertaken by philosophers, biologists, and social scientists on the foundations of human morality. Wilson outlines his aims in the preface to the book. "This effort,"...

The immoral sense.(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... In the preface of this book James Q. Wilson writes: "By a moral sense I mean an intuitive or directly felt belief about how one ought to act when one is free to act voluntarily (that is, not under duress). By 'ought' I mean an obligation...

Sentiments, evaluations, and claims. (James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... Sam Spade and his secretary, Effie Perine, possess, to put it mildly, different emotional natures, which lead them to judge Sam's lover, Bridget O'Shaughnessy, differently. Effie is sympathetic; Sam is driven not only by self-interest, but by a...

Universalism and individualism. (James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense is a wide-ranging and impressive study of the sources of human moral behaviour. Its attempt to rehabilitate the notion of natural human moral dispositions, by calling on the resources of the moral sense...

Moral sense and utopian sensibility. (James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... One of the oddest things about cultural relativism is its almost perverse obsession with the specific content of moral systems as opposed to their general form. The anthropologists I talk to who have done fieldwork in exotic societies and are...

Are moral intuitions self-evident truths?(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... Mr. Wilson's Heresies The Moral Sense is an intellectually courageous book that will have relatively few friends among anthropologists or moral philosophers. It is an intellectually courageous book because it commits many heresies, in...

Trapped in a metaphor.(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... I have no trouble accepting the major conclusions of James Q. Wilson that "there are aspects of our moral life that are universal"(1) and that these aspects can be called "fundamental dispositions"[226], which we might label sympathy,...

The moral sense: ancient and modern. (James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... Thrasymachus offers a definition of justice in the first Book of Plato's Republic. He, quite simply, asserts that justice is the advantage of the stronger. In other words, we are just when we obey the laws that have been decreed by those who...

Moral authority in law and criminal justice: some reflections on Wilson's 'The Moral Sense.' (James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... In his book The Moral Sense James Q. Wilson demonstrates the scope of people's moral concerns. His comments are striking for their range and for his compelling arguments about the centrality of moral concerns to people's lives. Wilson makes it...

How we acquire a sense of morality. (James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... Wilson fights a brave battle against political correctness (and factual incorrectness), the absurdities of moral relativity, and Marxist social enviromnentalism. It is difficult to see how anyone with an ounce of common sense could ever believe...

On morals and markets.(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... I Introduction The spirit of our age, James Q. Wilson asserts in the preface to The Moral Sense, is skepticism.(1) Skepticism dominates those in the natural and social sciences who attempt to establish objective truths about human...

Making sense of social experiences and moral judgments.(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... In a recent review of James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense,(1) Alan Ryan observed that the book "s astonishingly ambitious and at the same time disarmingly restrained."(2) I believe that most readers of The Moral Sense would readily agree with...

Moral innatism, connatural ideas, and impuissance in daily affairs: James Q. Wilson's acrobatic dive into an empty pool.(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... The idea that a moral vision is engraved in the human mind is "such a box of quicksilver that it abides nowhere; it dwells in no settled mansion; it is like a dove's neck, or a changeable taffeta; it looks to me otherwise than to you who do not...

Emotions, reason, and character.(James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense')
June 22, 1994... Three issues are central to any discussion of morality: the diversity of moral sentiments, the status of human reason, and the role of religious teachings. hi this journal, my critics have raised the first two issues but not the third (although...

Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality.
June 22, 1994... How should we philosophically understand and interpret the moral foundations of the criminal law under a constitutional democracy of the sort that exists in the United States and Great Britain? Two powerful philosophical traditions have tried...