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This book addresses the problem of justifying the institution of criminal punishment. It examines the "paradox of retribution" the fact that we cannot seem to reject the intuition that punishment is morally required, and yet we cannot (even after two thousand years of philosophical debate) find a morally legitimate basis for inflicting harm on wrongdoers. The book comes at a time when a new "abolitionist" movement has arisen, a movement that argues that we should give up the search for justification and accept that punishment is morally unjustifiable and should be discontinued immediately....

This book compares two competing theories of human nature: the more traditional theory espoused in different forms by centuries of western philosophy and the newer, Darwinian model. In the traditional view, the human being is a hybrid being, with a lower, animal nature and a higher, rational or spiritual component. The competing Darwinian account does away with the idea of a higher nature and attempts to provide a complete reduction of human nature to the evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction. Whitley Kaufman presents the case that the traditional conception, regardless...

Legal Positivism has been the dominant school of legal philosophy for much of the last century, despite its many critics. Its central tenet has long been that there is no necessary connection between law and morality. This book provides a broad but clear and jargon-free account of the central objections to the theory and why those objections are sufficient to show that legal positivism is no longer tenable. This includes a broad critique of the purported distinction method of legal positivism, the idea of ‘conceptual analysis,’ as well as a detailed assessment of the most influential...