National Endowment for the Humanities

With the generous support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, I spent the summer and early fall of 2011 enhancing a course on the Philosophy of Crime and Punishment that I have taught for several years.  As I wrote in my application for an NEH Teaching Development Fellowship, the value of this course lies not only in its consideration of pressing moral questions regarding the justification of punishment and various features of the general part of the criminal law, but also in its use of concrete examples from the criminal law to introduce students to abstract philosophical questions concerning the nature of morally right action, responsibility, and causation.

Per the terms of the grant, I make available here a copy of the syllabus for the course along with all of the assignments I have created for it.  I welcome feedback on any or all of this material.  I thank the NEH for its support of this project; any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations contained in these materials do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.