Alexander Pruss's Blog

This seems a bit plausible: It is unjust to punish someone for a feature that is not intrinsic to them. If presentism is true, then havin...

There is an interesting philosophical literature on whether it is appropriate to punish someone who has amnesia with respect to the wrong th...

I want to argue for this thesis: For a punishment P for a fault F to be right, P must stand in a causal-like relation to P . What is ...

I’ve always found punishment and (to a lesser extent) reward puzzling. Why is it that when someone does something wrong is there moral reaso...

Alice and Bob are both bad people, and both believe in magic. Bob believes that he lives in an infinite universe, with infinitely many senti...

Traditional formulations of the Principle of Double Effect deal with things that are said to have absolute prohibitions against them, like k...

In recent posts I’ve been exploring the idea that wrongdoing imposes on us a debt of a normative burden. This yields this argument: Whene...

If I have done you a serious wrong, I bear a burden . I can be relieved of that burder by forgiveness. What is the burden and what is the re...

I have long found promises to punish puzzling. The problem with such promises is that normally a promisee can release the promisor from a pr...

Corruptionists hold that our souls survive death, but we are not our souls, and we do not survive death. All the corruptionists I know are C...

Suppose Alice deserves a punishment of degree d , and Bob and Carl each impose on her a different punishment of degree d . Who unjustly puni...

Mill thinks that: An action is unjust if society has a utility-based reason to punish that actions of that type. An action is wrong if th...

Here’s a valid argument: It is only permissible to punish a person for doing what is morally wrong. It is permissible for the state to pu...

When people learn that some apparently really decent person was a hypocrite who secretly practiced execrable vices, that tends to shake peop...

When we talk of something as an unforgivable offense, we usually mean it is really a terrible thing. But if God doesn’t exist, then some ver...

It is always unjust to punish without the right kind of authority over those that one punishes. Sometimes that authority may be given to us...

Sometimes when bad things happen to bad people, we feel like they deserve them. Suppose Alice has broken into Bob’s house to poison his belo...

The worst part of being in hell is separation from God. But Jesus did not become separated from God. So how could his suffering atone in pla...

There is no strict duty to reward a person who has done a supererogatory thing. Otherwise, engaging in generosity would be a way of imposing...

John Stuart Mill famously wrote: We do not call anything wrong, unless we mean to imply that a person ought to be punished in some way or ...