Leo Zaibert | University of Cambridge (original) (raw)

Books by Leo Zaibert

The age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become deadlocked. Retributivists c... more The age-old debate about what constitutes just punishment has become deadlocked. Retributivists continue to privilege desert over all else, and consequentialists continue to privilege punishment's expected positive consequences, such as deterrence or rehabilitation, over all else. In this important intervention into the debate, Leo Zaibert argues that despite some obvious differences, these traditional positions are structurally very similar, and that the deadlock between them stems from the fact they both oversimplify the problem of punishment. Proponents of these positions pay insufficient attention to the conflicts of values that punishment, even when justified, generates. Mobilizing recent developments in moral philosophy, Zaibert offers a properly pluralistic justification of punishment that is necessarily more complex than its traditional counterparts. An understanding of this complexity should promote a more cautious approach to inflicting punishment on individual wrongdoers and to developing punitive policies and institutions.

Guest Edited Volume for The Monist (Forthcoming: see http://www.themonist.com/calls-for-papers, f... more Guest Edited Volume for The Monist (Forthcoming: see http://www.themonist.com/calls-for-papers, for the call for papers)

This book provides close examination of ontology and the work of Professor Barry Smith, one of th... more This book provides close examination of ontology and the work of Professor Barry Smith, one of the most prolific philosophers of the modern day. In this book numerous scholars who have collaborated with Smith explore the various disciplines in which the impact of his work has been felt over the breadth of his career, including biology, computer science and informatics, cognitive science, economics, genetics, geography, law, neurology, and philosophy itself. While offering in-depth perspectives on ontology, the book also expands upon the breadth of Smith’s influence. With insights from renowned and influential scholars from many different countries, this book is an informative and enlightening celebration of all Smith has contributed to numerous academic schools of thought.

Guest Edited Volume for The Monist

Papers by Leo Zaibert

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2014

Contemporary criminal justice systems are extraordinarily unfair. Focusing on Hyman Gross's Crime... more Contemporary criminal justice systems are extraordinarily unfair. Focusing on Hyman Gross's Crimes and Punishment: A Concise Moral Critique, however, I identify ways in which scholarly criticisms of these criminal justice systems tend to miss their target. In particular, I argue against the assumption that in order to criticize these criminal justice systems we need to cast doubt on the very practice of blaming people and on the notion of desert, or that we need to reject wholesale retributive rationales for punishment. Quite the contrary: an important reason why contemporary criminal justice systems are unfair is that they punish many people undeservedly.

Topoi, Dec 1, 2001

The thesis that an analysis of property rights is essential to an adequate analysis of the state ... more The thesis that an analysis of property rights is essential to an adequate analysis of the state is a mainstay of political philosophy. The contours of the type of government a society has are shaped by the system regulating the property rights prevailing in that society. Views of this sort are widespread. They range from Locke to Nozick and encompass pretty much everything else in between. Defenders of this sort of view accord to property rights supreme importance. A state that does not sufficiently respect property rights is likely to be a totalitarian state, and will ...

Shadows and Socio-Economic Units. …, 1996

There are, across the world, radically different institutions of landed property, radically diffe... more There are, across the world, radically different institutions of landed property, radically different ways of dividing up the space in which we live, and radically different ways in which land and property rights interact with other legal, economic and social institutions. These differences are found not only when contrasting the treatment of landed property in industrialized nations with those prevailing in, say, tribal cultures. They come to light also when one pays attention to the sometimes subtle differences in policies regarding landed ...

Philosophical Explorations, 2000

Searle's tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute rea... more Searle's tool for understanding culture, law and society is the opposition between brute reality and institutional reality, or in other words between: observerindependent features of the world, such as force, mass, and gravitational attraction, and observer-relative features of the world, such as money, property, marriage and government. The question posed here is: under which of these two headings do moral concepts fall? This is an important question because there are moral facts��for example pertaining to guilt and responsibility��which ...

University of Toronto Law Journal, 2012

In this review essay, I welcome the publication of this much-needed Handbook. Comparative crimina... more In this review essay, I welcome the publication of this much-needed Handbook. Comparative criminal law has not received, in the anglophone traditions, the attention that it deserves, and this Handbook is an important corrective. But I also take the opportunity to discuss some dangers inherent in any comparativist enterprise, and suggest that some of these dangers are present in the editor approach to comparative criminal law.

Suppose you own a garden-variety object such as a hat or a shirt. Your property right then follow... more Suppose you own a garden-variety object such as a hat or a shirt. Your property right then follows the age-old saw according to which possession is nine-tenths of the law. That is, your possession of a shirt constitutes a strong presumption in favor of your ownership of the shirt. In the case of land, however, this is not the case. Here possession is not only not a strong presumption in favor of ownership; it is not even clear what possession is.

For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of no... more For much of the first fifty years of its existence, analytic philosophy shunned discussions of normativity and ethics. Ethical statements were considered as pseudo-propositions, or as expressions of pro-or con-attitudes of minor theoretical significance. Nowadays, in contrast, there are prominent analytic philosophers who pay close attention to normative problems and important books written by such philosophers on topics in law and social justice and on social and institutional ontology.

Punishment is punishment even if it is not (perceived by the punisher to be) deserved. But punish... more Punishment is punishment even if it is not (perceived by the punisher to be) deserved. But punishment which is not (perceived by the punisher to be) fitting is not punishment. This paper explores the differences between desert and fittingness, and argues that incorporating fittingness into the definition of punishment is not problematic, whereas incorporating desert in such definition is, in contrast, infamously problematic. The main difference between these two notions turns on the interesting differences between two types of normativity. Fittingness is exclusively concerned with aesthetic normativity, whereas desert is more directly concerned with moral normativity. When something is fitting, then it is, to an extent, intrinsically good, and, to an extent, it is also beautiful. The notion of fittingness has largely been ignored in discussions of punishment, yet it helps us better to understand the phenomenon of punishment, and in particular the thorny relationship between this phenomenon and desert.