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One of the main issues in the discussion on standard deontic logic (SDL) is the representation of contrary-to-duty (CTD) obligations. A well-known example is Forrester’s (1984) paradox of the gentle murderer: it is forbidden to kill, but if one kills, one ought to kill gently. Intuitively, one would feel that these sentences are consistent, but in SDL no (obvious) consistent formalisation is av...

The interpretation of MMPI (Hathaway & McKinley, 1943) profiles has emphasized a language of pathological attribution that often serves the interests of clinical description and actuarial prediction better than those of individual case formulation and an understanding of the adaptive forces involved in the production of symptomatic behavior. In this article, I illustrate a contrasting approach,...

Under the U.S. Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Stanford v. Kentucky, the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishments clause does not shield minors 16 or 17 years of age from the death penalty. Holding, astonishingly, that Stanford is no longer the law of the land, the Missouri Supreme Court recently reversed the death sentence of a 17-year-old murderer in Simmons v. Roper. The U.S. Suprem...