Re’eM Segev

Consider the following argument: (1) Whether, or the degree, persons are morally culpable ultimately depends on the (final) reasons that motivate their actions; (2) The degree to which persons are morally culpable should be a central concern of criminal law; (3) Criminal law in many countries focuses more on the beliefs and intentions of agents and less on their motivating reasons; therefore (4) Criminal law in many countries is unjust and should be revised. The premises of this argument are appealing and widely accepted, yet its conclusion is radical. Therefore, the argument is interesting and important. However, the argument is not entirely clear in several respects, and the attempt to clarify it reveals several significant (although not necessarily decisive) doubts regarding its soundness. In this paper, I examine these doubts as well as a related, more general, lesson concerning normative arguments about the law.

Should the input data of artificial intelligence (AI) systems include factors such as race or sex when these factors may be indicative of morally significant facts? More importantly, is it wrong to rely on the output of AI tools whose input includes factors such as race or sex? And is it wrong to rely on the output of AI systems when it is correlated with factors such as race or sex (whether or not its input includes such factors)? The answers to these questions are controversial. In this paper, I argue for the following claims. First, since factors such as race or sex are not morally significant in themselves, including such factors in the input data, or relying on output that includes such factors or is correlated with them, is neither objectionable (for example, unfair) nor commendable in itself. Second, sometimes (but not always) there are derivative reasons against such actions due to the relationship between factors such as race or sex and facts that are morally significant (ultimately) in themselves. Finally, even if there are such derivative reasons, they are not necessarily decisive since there are sometimes also countervailing reasons. Accordingly, the moral status of the above actions is contingent.

What is the relation between desert and other values such as equality, priority for the worse off, and utility? According to the common (pluralist) view, desert and these other values reflect distinct concerns: some are about distributive justice, some about retributive justice, and some (most clearly, utility) are not concerned with justice at all. However, another (monistic) view holds that while desert is a basic value, other values are merely derived from it. This controversy is relevant, for instance, to allocative decisions and criminal punishment, where we need to know if other values should be balanced against desert. Yet, despite its theoretical significance and practical importance, this topic is underexplored. Aiming to fill this gap, we consider the arguments for and against the competing views. We demonstrate that the interaction between desert and other values raises a difficult dilemma: there are powerful arguments for and against both the pluralistic and the monistic accounts of desert. Indeed, we suggest that this dilemma is due to the unique nature of desert. Unlike other values, desert, especially its more robust forms, does not only sometimes conflict with competing considerations that favor different courses of actions, but rather seems to dispel other values even as pro tanto ones.

According to a common view, criminal law should be structured in a way that allocates the conditions of criminal liability to different types of legal rules, given the content of the condition and the nature of the rule. This view classifies some conditions as elements of offenses and others as (part of) justificatory defenses or of excusatory defenses. While this view is attractive, I argue that it should be rejected, since it is incompatible with two plausible propositions about legal rules. The first is that foundational reasons are not concerned with the structure of the law as such. The second is that legal rules should be constructed in a way that reflects (the balance of) all the applicable reasons and not just some of them.

Luck Egalitarianism is an influential view, or, more accurately, a broad family of views. What these views have in common is the idea that distributive justice is sensitive to responsibility in the sense that inequality is unjust if the worse off person is not responsible for her position. In this paper, we consider the main ways to interpret the luck egalitarian idea and argue that none of them escapes the following dilemma: If LE is reducible to or reflects a familiar consideration or considerations, such as desert, priority for the worse off, or utility, or a simple balance of such familiar considerations, it is theoretically redundant and misleading; whereas if it is a distinct principle, which is not reducible to (a balance of) familiar considerations, it is false.