Book Review: Judging Evil: Rethinking the Law of Murder and Manslaughter
| Author | Andrew Halpin |
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390000900408 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
actions, but we also depend on it, and we are not separate from the nature world. So
far so good. They then proceed to articulate two principles of ecological justice: ‘[t]he
first principle of ecological justice is that every natural entity is entitled to enjoy the
fullness of its own form of life . . . The second principle is that all life forms are mutu-
ally dependent and dependent upon non-life forms’ (p. 156).
The problem as far as this reader is concerned relates to whether the ‘principles’
outlined are necessarily those of justice, as opposed to some other moral idiom. My
point is that one of the basic definitions of justice is ‘To give each their due’, yet it is
not clear what it is that we ‘owe’ the non-human world. However, given that the
authors recognize that we as a species must ‘use’ (consume, kill, eat, develop) the non-
human world, then the implicit ‘non-interference’ contained in the two principles is
hardly helpful. In this reader’s view the attempt to extend or create principles of justice
to cover our relations with the non-human world is unnecessary since we have at our
disposal a range of moral principles, perspectives, idioms and discourses other than
justice with which to establish the ‘rules of engagement’ between the human and non-
human worlds. Given that the most pressing issue is to establish the moral content of
human–nature relations and to prevent excessive and unjustifiable (as opposed to
‘unjust’) human uses/abuses of the non-human world, attempting to ground it in
justice is, in my opinion, unnecessary and difficult to establish convincingly.
JOHN BARRY
Department of Politics, Keele University, UK
SAMUEL H. PILLSBURY, Judging Evil: Rethinking the Law of Murder and Manslaugh-
ter. New York/London: New York University Press, 1998, 264 pp., $50.00.
There are two particularly engaging features of this book: the honesty with which the
author confronts difficult issues and a determination to reject general solutions where
individual circumstances are at stake. Doubtless these features draw on the author’s
former experiences as a journalist and federal prosecutor. As an academic he has pro-
duced a stimulating approach to doctrines that lie at the heart of the criminal law, com-
bining critique of conventional learning with his own proposals for reform, motivated
by the conviction that ‘we should look harder at the many forms of human evil’
(p. 100).
The book is about criminal responsibility. The first section undertakes an enquiry
into the basis for deserved punishment. The second section applies Pillsbury’s general
approach to the definition of specific offences of culpable homicide. The core of Pills-
bury’s approach is an individual choice to disregard the worth of another.
It is precisely because the individual has chosen that we can have individual culpa-
bility, and because what the individual has chosen offends against society’s values in
holding all its members of worth, that it is appropriate for society to punish (pp. 42–3).
In punishing the individual for the offence, society should not degenerate to the point
of holding the offender of no worth: society should punish the conduct while respect-
ing the worth of the offender’s character (pp. ix–x, 73, 108). Nor should society fail
to acknowledge its collective responsibility for criminal conduct, but this should be
addressed alongside the culpable individual choice (chapter 4). In general, causal
determinism is avoided as operating at a mechanical level, to which the evaluative sig-
nificance of individual choice cannot be reduced (chapters 2 and 3).
When considering specific substantive offences Pillsbury’s approach holds two
attractions. First, it focuses on the particular reason for the individual’s action, thus
opening up consideration of motives that are lost in the crude assessment of cogni-
tive states. This renders cognitive states traditionally employed, such as intention,
588 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 9(4)
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