Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held on Tuesday 4th November at *2.30pm* (see below for more on the time change) in the Sidgwick Hall in Newnham College (see http://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.newnham.local/uploads/files/About-Newnham/college_map_08.pdf for a map). Our speakers are Nicola Lacey (LSE) and Hanna Pickard (Oxford) who will be giving a talk entitled "To blame or to forgive? Reconciling punishment and forgiveness in criminal justice". An abstract is attached below.
Please note: we've decided to change the time of the meetings from 2.15-4pm to *2.30-4.15pm*. This is because Newnham have a weekly fire alarm test between 2-2.30pm every Tuesday (as attendees of the first two meetings may well have noticed). So to avoid disruption, we are shifting the meeting start time to *2.30pm *and this will be the new time from now on*.* We apologise for the inconvenience this may cause. We look forward to seeing you at the meeting on Tuesday. Best wishes, Mat Simpson and Ali Boyle To blame or to forgive? Reconciling punishment and forgiveness in criminal justice Nicola Lacey* and Hanna Pickard** Abstract What do you do when faced with wrongdoing – do you blame or do you forgive? Especially when confronted with offenses that lie on the more severe end of the spectrum and cause terrible psychological or physical trauma or death, nothing can feel more natural than blame. Indeed, in the UK and the US, increasingly vehement and righteous public expressions of blame and calls for vengeance have become commonplace; correspondingly, contemporary penal philosophy has witnessed a resurgence of the retributive tradition, in the modern form usually known as the ‘justice’ model. On the other hand, people can and routinely do forgive others, even in cases of severe crime. Evolutionary psychologists argue that both vengeance and forgiveness are universal human adaptations that have evolved as alternative responses to exploitation, and, crucially, strategies for reducing risk of re-offending. We are naturally endowed with both capacities: to blame and retaliate, or to forgive and seek to repair relations. Which should we choose? Drawing on evolutionary psychology, we offer an account of forgiveness and argue that the choice to blame, and not to forgive, is instrumentally counter-productive to reducing the risk of future re-offending and inconsistent with the political values of a liberal society. We then sketch the shape of penal philosophy and criminal justice policy and practice with forgiveness in place as a guiding ideal. * Departments of Law and Social Policy and Gender Institute, London School of Economics ** All Souls College and Department of Philosophy, University of Oxford -- Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
