Responsible Agency in the Criminal Process

Abstract

First paragraph: I did not meet David Hodgson until 2003, at a legal and social philosophy congress in Sweden; but I had first come across his work when, as a postgraduate student, I read his first book in the 1960s (Hodgson 1967). The book offered a characteristically meticulous critique of utilitarianism (in both its “act” and its “rule” versions) as a decision procedure: We cannot efficiently serve utility, Hodgson argued, by thinking and acting either as act utilitarians or as rule utilitarians. That kind of critique has, of course, become familiar, as have various utilitarian responses to it; but Hodgson did much to show its significance, and to work out in detail just how it could be best articulated.