Proportionality, Constraint, and Culpability

Vigilantism, Culpability and Moral Dilemmas

■ The recent resurgence of vigilantism in India connects both to the neo-liberal project of outsourcing security, as well as to a longer history of porous boundaries between states and powerful elements in society. When practiced by subaltern groups, it also reflects the failure of the judicial system. This article explores the moral plurality evoked by different forms of vigilantism and their ...

Privacy and Proportionality

Equality and Proportionality

Contemporary moral egalitarians hold that all people have equal moral standing and that we deserve this standing in virtue of satisfying some descriptive criterion. These two claims appear to be in tension, however, as none of the proposed criteria are attributes that all people possess equally. Many egalitarians have hoped to eliminate this tension by holding that the descriptive criterion of ...

“Broad” Culpability and the Retributivist Dream

The criminal law is centrally concerned with culpability or mens rea— roughly, the mental (or quasi-mental) components of blame. But culpability has at least two dimensions. Narrow culpability involves the purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or negligence required by statute for each material element. What Joshua Dressler aptly calls broad culpability involves the other mental (or quasi-mental) c...

Affine Transformations, Polynomials, and Proportionality

In the articles [1] and [3], standard tools and techniques of calculus are used to establish a variety of proportionality results concerning areas defined by the lines tangent to a cubic curve, and by the lengths of certain arcs of a parabola, where the arcs themselves are determined by an area-proportionality criterion. We demonstrate here that these results can be viewed as consequences of so...