Patrick Tomlin

Prevention and the Limits of the Criminal Law

Introduction 1. The Ubiquity of Prevention 2. Preventionism and Criminalization of Nonconsummate Offences 3. Preventive Justice: The Quest for Principle 4. Responsibility to Protect and Preventive Justice 5. Preventive Justice and the Rule-of-Law Project 6. Pre-Trial Detention and the Presumption of Innocence 7. Controlling Risk 8. Restraining Orders, Liberty, and Due Process 9. Preventive Detention as Punishment? Some Possible Obstacles 10. Proportionality as a Limit on Preventive Justice: Promises and Pitfalls 13. Democratic Limits to Preventive Criminal Law 14. On Preventive Justice 15. Punitive Preventive Justice: A Critique 16. The Politics of Mass Preventive Justice

On Fairness and Claims

Perhaps the best-known theory of fairness is John Broomes: that fairness is the proportional satisfaction of claims. In this article, I question whether claims are the appropriate focus for a theory of fairness, at least as Broome understands them in his current theory. If fairness is the proportionate satisfaction of claims, I argue, then the following would be true: fairness could not help determine the correct distribution of claims; fairness could not be used to evaluate the distribution of claims; fairness could not guide us in distributing claims (or unowed goods); we could not have a claim to be treated fairly; and we would not be wronged when treated unfairly. These entailments mean that it is questionable that fairness is concerned with claims in the way Broome suggests. At the very least, the relationship between fairness and claims appears to be more complex than the picture painted by Broome.

Should Kids Pay Their Own Way

Children are expensive to raise. Ensuring that they are raised in such a way that they are able to lead a minimally decent life costs time and money, and lots of both. Who is responsible for bearing the costs of the things that children are undoubtedly owed? This is a question that has received comparatively little scrutiny from political philosophers, despite children being such a drain on public and private finances alike. To the extent that there is a debate, two main views can be identified. The Parents Pay view says that parents, responsible for the existence of the costs, must foot the bill. The Society Pays view says that a next generation is a benefit to all, and so to allow parents to foot the bill alone is the worst kind of free-riding. In this article, I introduce a third potentially liable party currently missing from the debate: children themselves. On my backward-looking view, we are entitled to ask people to contribute to the raising of children on the basis that they have benefited from being raised themselves.

Moral uncertainty and permissibility: evaluating option sets

Abstract In this essay, we explore an issue of moral uncertainty: what we are permitted to do when we are unsure about which moral principles are correct. We develop a novel approach to this issue that incorporates important insights from previous work on moral uncertainty, while avoiding some of the difficulties that beset existing alternative approaches. Our approach is based on evaluating and choosing between option sets rather than particular conduct options. We show how our approach is particularly well-suited to address this issue of moral uncertainty with respect to agents that have credence in moral theories that are not fully consequentialist.