With the criminal law’s duty to advance social justice at the site of culpability evaluation established, Chapter 2 provides the substance of that duty and offers a conceptual tool to aid in its fulfilment, in the form of the Real Person Approach (RPA). The chapter introduces the target of the RPA as the dominant construct of personhood represented by excuse doctrine, and identifies its contribution to both moral and social injustice, through the subversion of core criminal law principles of proportionality and parsimony, respectively. The RPA responds by offering a guiding framework which helps to identify and explain these injustices, and aids with the challenge of holding people to account for wrongdoing in a way that advances social justice. Finally, the chapter explains the core features of the RPA in terms of acknowledging agency as vulnerable, responding with recognitive justice, and maintaining conceptual feasibility.

“Everyone has a price at which he sells himself”: Immanuel Kant quotes this remark in the 1793 Religion within the Bounds of Reason Alone, attributing it to “a member of English Parliament.” This chapter argues, however, that the context of the quotation in the Religion alludes to the arresting pedagogical practices of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who famously said that “different people sell themselves at different prices.” The chapter argues that there are two sides of Epictetus’ pedagogical strategies: a jolting side meant to expose self-deception and practical inconsistency; and an uplifting side meant to arouse the resources by which it is possible to progress towards virtue – specifically, our sense of kinship with the divine insofar as we are rational. This chapter argues that Kant develops a conception of self-respect in later practical works that plausibly draws on Epictetus, and his distinctive version of the traditional Stoic account of rational agency.

Chapter 3 connects Kierkegaardian critiques of amoralism to discussions of wantonness and Humeanism in action theory. By discussing the cultivation of love (and higher-order motives), it is argued that practical rational agency requires moral normativity. The chapter then presents and discusses Kierkegaard’s strong views about the inescapability of morality, interpreting it as a form of constitutivism concerning moral normativity, which tries to derive practical normativity from practical agency itself. However, Kierkegaard seems to combine such constitutivism with the theological view that moral obligations depend on us belonging to God as his creation. Still, he is not a divine command theorist who sees divine commands as necessary and sufficient for moral obligations. Rather, he sketches a form of moral realism and criticizes subjectivism in ethics.

This chapter explains the etiology of disorders of memory content and why they are often intractable. It considers different therapeutic interventions. Psychotherapeutic and behavior techniques, as well as certain drugs, can weaken the emotional content of pathological fear memories but allow their reactivation. The chapter considers hypothetical scenarios of erasing memories. Protein synthesis inhibitors might block reconsolidation and erase pathological fear memories. High-frequency deep brain stimulation and high-intensity focused ultrasound may be more effective than drugs in erasing these memories because of their more direct effects on nuclei constituting the memory trace. It is not known how drugs and techniques will affect normal and abnormal memories and how selective they would be in their modulating or erase effects. The chapter also considers how erasing memories would affect identity, authenticity and rational and moral agency.