Volume 29, Number 2
January 2025
ARTICLE

Crime, Public Health, and Inhumane Objectivity

Volume 29, Number 2, January 2025, Pages 188–218
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v29i2.3376
PDFPDF
MP3

Abstract

The suggestion that crime be treated as a public health problem instead of being treated retributively provokes unease for two reasons. Firstly, it is thought to foster impersonal treatment, which is “objectifying” or “dehumanizing.” I argue that practices are problematically impersonal when they bypass or undermine an agent’s ability to take responsibility. However, there is a difference between taken responsibility and retributive responsibility. Skepticism about the latter does not entail skepticism about the former. Skeptics about retributive desert still have strong moral reasons to condemn practices that undermine taken responsibility, so it need not have these dehumanizing implications. Secondly, the association of medicine and crime has a dark history. While this is true, this is largely because medicine has a dark history. Instead of striving to limit things that fall within the boundaries of public health, I argue that the solution is to take a more ethical approach to public health.
Copyright © 2025 Nadine Elzein
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

Must States Do It Themselves? A Rights-Based Theory of Delegating State Coercion

Vincent Chiao

Responsibility and the Social Dimension of Addiction

Keyao Yang

Introducing Discord

Mark Schroeder

The Point of Blaming ai Systems

Hannah Altehenger and Leonhard Menges

Inclusive Blameworthiness and the Wrongfulness of Causing Harm

Evan Tiffany

Personal Reactive Attitudes and Partial Responses to Others: A Partiality-Based Approach to Strawson’s Reactive Attitudes

Rosalind Chaplin

It’s a Fine Line Between Sadism and Horror

Scott Woodcock

Is Morality Open to the Free Will Skeptic?

Stephen Morris

Don’t Be Cruel: Building the Case for Luck in the Law

Alexander Sarch

Quality of Will Accounts and Non-Culpably Developed Mental Disorders

Matthew Lamb

Law and Violence

Alexander Guerrero

Forgiveness and the Significance of Wrongs

Stefan Riedener

Portico