Policing Morality: Constitutional Law and the Criminalization of Incest

The constitutional morality of abortion.

The causal cognition of wrong doing: incest, intentionality, and morality

The paper concerns the role of intentionality in reasoning about wrong doing. Anthropologists have claimed that, in certain non-Western societies, people ignore whether an act of wrong doing is committed intentionally or accidentally. To examine this proposition, we look at the case of Madagascar. We start by analyzing how Malagasy people respond to incest, and we find that in this case they do...

Legal and Ethical Principles of Criminalization in Iran’s Criminal Law

Background: The criminal code is the rules that restrict the rights and freedoms of a person to ensure peaceful coexistence. What behavior should be prohibited and which one can be removed from the circle of legal acts. How can the word ethics in the world of law refer to ethical and literary means from the past, and is called the tradition of morality, in the sense of moral standards? On the b...

Intentionality, Morality, and the Incest Taboo in Madagascar

In a recent article (Astuti and Bloch, 2015), cognitive anthropologists Astuti and Bloch claim that the Malagasy are ambivalent as to whether considerations of intentionality are relevant to moral judgments concerning incest and its presumed catastrophic consequences: when making moral judgments about those who commit incest, the Malagasy take into account whether the incest is intentional or n...

Drugs, Morality and the Law

 Arguments for and against the legal prohibition of drugs are surveyed. Various kinds of argument are identified and analysed: arguments against prohibition from a moral right to personal liberty; utilitarian and contractualist arguments for a right to personal liberty; arguments for prohibition from liberty-limiting principles (the harm principle, legal paternalism, legal moralism, Kan...