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In this book, David Boonin examines the problem of punishment, and particularly the problem of explaining why it is morally permissible for the state to treat those who break the law in ways that would be wrong to treat those who do not? Boonin argues that there is no satisfactory solution to this problem and that the practice of legal punishment should therefore be abolished. Providing a detailed account of the nature of punishment and the problems that it generates, he offers a comprehensive and critical survey of the various solutions that have been offered to the problem and concludes by considering victim restitution as an alternative to punishment. Written in a clear and accessible style, The Problem of Punishment will be of interest to anyone looking for a critical introduction to the subject as well as to those already familiar with it.

David Boonin has written the most thorough and detailed case for the moral permissibility of abortion yet published. Critically examining a wide range of arguments that attempt to prove that every human fetus has a right to life, he shows that each of these arguments fails on its own terms. He then explains how even if the fetus does have a right to life, abortion can still be shown to be morally permissible on the critique of abortion's own terms. Finally he considers several pro-life arguments that do not depend on claims that the fetus has a right to life and concludes that these too are ultimately unsuccessful. This major book will be especially helpful to those teaching applied ethics and bioethics in philosophy departments or professional schools of law and medicine. It will interest students of women studies and general readers for whom abortion remains a high-profile issue.

In this book, David Boonin examines the problem of punishment, particularly the problem of explaining why it is morally permissible for the state to treat those who break the law differently from those who do not. Boonin argues that there is no satisfactory solution to this problem and that the practice of legal punishment should therefore be abolished. Providing a detailed account of the nature of punishment and the problems that it generates, he offers a comprehensive and critical survey of the various solutions that have been offered to the problem and concludes by considering victim restitution as an alternative to punishment. Written in a clear and accessible style, The Problem of Punishment will be of interest both to anyone looking for a critical introduction to the subject and to anyone who is already familiar with it.

This chapter considers and responds to some additional objections that can be raised against the book’s thesis. These include objections that claim that the Posthumous Harm Thesis has unacceptable implications; objections that even if posthumous harm is possible it is not a kind of harm that makes an act even prima facie wrong, or at least not in a non-trivial way; and objections that claim that it is morally irrelevant or insignificant. The chapter then concludes by discussing some of the ethical implications of the book’s thesis for such issues as posthumous organ and gamete removal, posthumous publication of private documents, posthumous damage to graves and corpses, and posthumous punishment and restitution.

Let me begin with a confession. My papers are often praised more for their titles than for their contents. At a job interview a few years ago, I was told that if I didn't have a future in philosophy (hardly the words one wants to hear during a job interview), the quality of my titles suggested that I could always pursue a career in advertising. What, I was asked, was my secret? I declined to reveal my secret at the time, for fear of appearing shallow (it didn't help; I didn't get the job). But I am going to go ahead and reveal my secret now: my approach to philosophical research has always been to start with a good title and then try to figure out what I would have to write about in order to use it. I have been planning for some time, for example, to write a paper on the phenomenology of insect abuse, just so that I could call it "What is it Like to Bat a Bee?" This paper is no exception. The title had been kicking around in the back of my head for some time, waiting for an appropriate topic to go with it, when inspiration arrived one day in the form of a letter from an animal welfare organization asking me for money. The letter made the following argument: two of the greatest sources of preventable animal suffering are factory farming and the overpopulation of cats and dogs. We could end the former by opposing the practice of meat eating, and we could end the latter by supporting the practice of spaying and neutering. But, the letter pointed out, there is tremendous and deeply-entrenched resistance to abolishing meat eating, both at the individual and the institutional level, while there is no such resistance to expanding the practice of spaying and neutering cats and dogs at either level. There is simply a lack of funding. So rather than use my somewhat meager means (since I did not, in the end, pursue a career in advertising) to oppose factory farming by supporting groups such as PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), the letter concluded, I should instead send my money to them to promote spaying and neutering. From a strictly utilitarian point of view, of course, the letter's argument was irreproachable. My duty, on such a view, is to prevent as much suffering 1 as I can, and if my contributing to pro-spaying efforts prevents more suffering than does my contributing to anti-factory farming efforts, then that is just what I should do. But I am not a utilitarian. I do not oppose factory farming on the utilitarian grounds that it fails to promote the most overall happiness for humans and nonhumans, though surely it does fail to maximize such happiness. Rather, I oppose it on the deontological grounds that animals have certain rights which practices such as factory farming violate. And I suspect that this is true for many people who support such groups as PETA. PETA's slogan, after all, is not that animals should be used so as to produce the greatest good for the greatest number of humans and nonhumans, but rather that "animals are not ours to eat, wear, or experiment on." So the letter's argument di...

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Most arguments against same-sex marriage rest at least in part on claims about the moral status of homosexuality: claims to the effect that homosexual behavior is morally objectionable in itself, or that homosexuals as a class are predisposed to commit acts (such as infidelity or child molestation) that are morally objectionable on independent grounds. In "Is It Wrong to Discriminate on the Basis of Homosexuality?" Jeff Jordan claims to produce an argument against same-sex marriage that makes no such assumptions. 1 Rather than relying on claims about the morality of homosexuality per se, Jordan attempts to show that it is morally permissible for the state to refuse to sanction same-sex marriages by appealing to the fact that marriage is a public rather than private institution, and that there is widespread public disagreement about the moral status of homosexuality. I will begin by presenting a brief summary of Jordan's principal argument for this claim and will then argue that it should be rejected for three distinct reasons: the argument itself is unsound, it is subject to a reductio ad absurdum that Jordan fails to overcome, and, contrary to Jordan's claim, it does in fact depend on claims about the morality of homosexuality, claims that stand in need of support and that Jordan has not defended.