What makes sexual exploitation pro-tanto wrongful, even when it is mutually beneficial and non-coercive? This paper argues that the exploiter wrongs the exploitee by breaching two duties: not to take advantage of a person in a situation where he should not, and to treat her with the respect she deserves as a human being. Three conditions together explain when and why these duties are breached: vulnerability, unwantedness and degradation. Each is a necessary condition, but all three conditions together constitute the wrong of sexual exploitation. The exploiter takes advantage of the exploitee’s morally relevant vulnerability to obtain her consent to sexual acts that are unwanted as sexual acts. Those unwanted acts, chosen under conditions of vulnerability, degrade her. Degradation, on this account, is structural and contextual. The historical and continued use of sexual acts as instruments of domination and subordination in patriarchy imbues all sexual acts with the possibility of degradation. However, it is when unwanted sexual acts are chosen under conditions of morally relevant vulnerability that this possibility is actualised, and the wrong of sexual exploitation occurs. While sexual acts carry this possibility across patriarchal contexts, India’s caste-based patriarchy adds an additional dimension to the degradation of Indian women, due to their instrumentalisation and objectification for the maintenance of caste purity and honour.
In ancient Rome all magistrates or public authorities had potestas, i.e., powers to carry out their duties or civil responsibilities which was derived from a general and sometimes absolute power to rule called imperium. In most cases, the potestas granted to the various magistrates included coercitio, which could, but did not have to, include the power to punish. Similarly, our public authorities have the power to carry out their duties and the ability to compel obedience by force. Legal theory, however, often blurs these distinctions, advancing the idea that the power to punish is primarily what imperium consists of. This has entrenched two general ideas about criminal law. First, that legal punishment is a necessary feature of statehood. Second, that legal punishment is the most paradigmatic and troublesome instance of public force, thus requiring greater political control and procedural restrictions than other forms of coercion. This paper examines the distinction between punishment and enforcement to facilitate more constructive discussions about abolitionism and strengthen the case for greater normative scrutiny of other instances of state power.
What purpose does legal punishment serve when the offender is already enduring profound suffering as a consequence of the offence itself? This paper addresses that question through the concept of poena naturalis: the severe suffering that may result from a grave misfortune affecting the offender or those closely related to her, typically as an unintended consequence of her negligent, reckless, or even intentional criminal conduct. I argue that poena naturalis needs not to be conceptually contrasted with legal punishment. Rather, it is best understood as grounding a legal power to mitigate or even waive punishment. On this account, poena naturalis does not place forgiveness in opposition to justice; instead, it reveals their complementarity. The paper therefore defends a compatibilist account of natural punishment that provides a coherent normative framework for addressing the practical and doctrinal questions that must be confronted if the relevance of natural punishment is to be recognised in positive law.
This is the abstract of my dissertation, Theorising the Criminal Law’s Person: Perspectives on the Human Individual, Problems of Assumed Properties, and Normative Solutions, which was accepted by the Faculty of Law at the University of Helsinki on 23 September 2025.
In my book, Punishment for the Greater Good, I raised a question punishment theorists rarely address: if we seek a moral theory that speaks to real-world punishment today, which theory should we use? My thesis is that, in the here and now, the pure consequentialist approach yields more trustworthy determinations about the justifiability of incarceration than does the standard retributivist approach. In this surreply, I respond to insightful commentaries on the book from eight scholars: (1) Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, (2) Jesper Ryberg, (3) Doug Husak, (4) Michelle Dempsey, (5) Alec Walen, (6) Gideon Yaffe, (7) Erin Kelly, and (8) Gideon Rosen. Among the many topics covered, I argue against the traditional definition of punishment, against threshold deontology, and in favor of approaches to theory that are ready to use in the here and now.
This article offers a critical examination of penal pain in the context of carceral punishment. It draws upon empirical insights from criminology and social psychology to challenge the prevailing assumption that the deprivation of liberty constitutes the primary source of suffering in imprisonment. Instead, it argues that much of the suffering associated with incarceration arises from systematic threats to the human need to belong. On this basis, the article positions belonging not merely as a core human need but as a fundamental right that warrants meaningful protection within custodial settings. It further contends that recognizing the centrality of belonging in the penal context can inform sentencing practices and recalibrate the standards of “humane” imprisonment to better safeguard the social needs of system-impacted individuals. Ultimately, the article advances belonging as an additional conceptual framework for bridging the gap between theoretical models of punishment and the lived realities of incarceration, particularly in light of the criminal justice system’s professed commitment to upholding the dignity of those subject to its authority.
Victims are no longer mere spectators in legal proceedings. Nevertheless, their influence over how prosecutions should unfold remains limited. In this context, some scholars have proposed allowing victims to resort to alternative schemes, such as restorative justice conferences, though this proposal has faced skepticism. Against this backdrop, this paper pursues a twofold aim. First, drawing on Philip Pettit’s neo-republican theory, it argues for affording victims greater control in determining the appropriate response to crime. Second, it demonstrates that granting victims this right can be reconciled with the core values and safeguards embedded within contemporary criminal justice systems.
Correspondence is a relation that obtains between mens rea and actus reus that, in general, is necessary for the justifiable imposition of criminal liability. Theorists have disagreed about the right way to characterize the relevant relation. The dominant existent theories of correspondence are descriptive: they maintain that correspondence depends only on descriptive facts. But some theorists have raised the possibility that correspondence might, at least sometimes, be normative in nature: it may depend on a defendant’s failure to measure up to some normative standard. I here argue that descriptive theories of correspondence are more promising than normative theories. Conditioning correspondence on a determination of culpability begets explanatory circularity, but varieties of normative theory that condition correspondence on just one component of culpability—on either responsibility or wrongdoing—struggle to account for the intuition that punishing certain kinds of defendants would be unjust along multiple dimensions.
The criminalization of omissions is often controversial for several reasons. One concern is that omissions liability appears to violate the act requirement. Another involves the ambiguous causal status of omissions, especially in result crimes. In this paper, I examine a distinctive kind of omission—what I call “refrainings.” I argue that, unlike mere omissions, refrainings are actions. When an agent refrains from preventing harm to others, she does not merely allow the harm to occur but, in an important sense, brings it about. I aim to show that recognizing refrainings as a distinct category of omission has significant implications for the act requirement and for the justification of criminal liability in so-called “Bad Samaritan” cases.
This paper explores the legal relevance of delusions in determining criminal responsibility. We argue that although delusions may be relevant in assessing capacity for criminal responsibility, the specific content of delusional beliefs should not form the basis for judgments of blameworthiness. The analysis takes the Anglo-American criminal law tradition as its starting point, focusing on the general structure of the M’Naghten rules rather than jurisdiction-specific interpretations. Courts sometimes treat the content of delusional beliefs as legally significant, asking whether the defendant’s conduct would be justified if those beliefs were true. We show that this approach presents serious conceptual and practical difficulties. It requires counterfactual reasoning about imagined realities, thereby shifting the assessment of responsibility from the defendant’s actual impairments to a hypothetical reconstruction of their worldview. We argue that this method conflates justification with excuse, demands obscure counterfactual reasoning about fictional realities, and is ill-suited to bizarre delusions that lie outside any coherent legal or moral framework. It risks producing inequitable outcomes, favouring defendants whose delusions can be rendered intelligible within existing justificatory doctrines while disadvantaging those with more incomprehensible psychoses.
This essay is a contribution to a symposium on Adam Kolber’s Punishment for the Greater Good. As the title suggests, the essay focuses on the issues of punishment and regret. Its main thrust is a critique of Kolber’s failure to acknowledge the salience of retrospective normativity. This failure divorces Kolber’s attempt to justify punishment from our actual current carceral practices, which are fundamentally backward-looking responses to past (actual or supposed) wronging. It also limits Kolber’s ability to account for the normative reasons we have to regret these practices: mistaking regret as solely a matter of feeling and human psychology, while ignoring its backward-looking normative force.
In this article, I would like to map out a path towards a relationalaccount of criminal wrongdoing that is as comprehensive as possible. Specifically, I argue thatcrimes affecting individuals involve the violation of intersubjective, bipolar duties. In this regard,I will directly address the prevailing understanding of crimes as impersonal wrongs, which Iconsider an obstacle to this project (1): I will demonstrate how it is conceptually feasible tomove beyond this ‘impersonal’ paradigm towards a ‘relational’ one (2). This shift is not merelytheoretical: bipolar duties and relational wrongs are, in fact, embedded in the way substantivecriminal law functions (3). Importantly, this does not imply a loss of the public dimension ofcrime, but rather its enrichment through an intersubjective dimension of wrongdoing (4). Finally,I will propose potential avenues for future research within the framework of a relationalparadigm in criminal law theory (5).
