Socrates as One of the Well-known Philosophers Assignment

Socrates as One of the Well-known Philosophers - Assignment Example He was a member of the Athenian army and given the fact that he was always questioning the manner in which his community run is an issue that always got him in trouble. He pushed the youth to oppose the local government to a point that they had even lost trust in the local system and is one of the charges that he was set to face. Socrates was accused of collaborating with outside armies in a manner that he would even snitch on his local government. Socrates was very fast to defend himself against these changes. Regarding the first accusation, he responded by asking whether it was only he that had made the mistake of derailing the youth. He sought to show that the fact that he was the only person with the ability or rather the strength to speak aloud regarding these issues did not mean that he was the one on the wrong. It only showed how much fear that people had of the government that they did not have the attitude to handle this. The premise that he uses to explain this is by talking of the horse analogy (Barlette, 2010). When Socrates brought in the issue of horses, he made it as an analogy to explain his point. He seeks to prove that the majority may indeed be the ones responsible for a negative influence on the youth and that he is responsible for uplifting them. He shows this by stating that the trainer of the horse is the one person that does the animal well and that other people that ride the horse may harm it. In this case, the accuser, Maletus, states that he alongside the judges is the ones responsible for a positive influence on the youth. Socrates defines his role in the Athenian society appropriately. He states that it is his job to deliver these people. According to Socrates, the government at the time was using resources badly and not even appreciating the efforts made by the soldiers. He knew that this was his role from the fact that people feared the government.

Using relevant theories and examples, explain what the Hawthore Essay

Using relevant theories and examples, explain what the Hawthore Experiments demonstrated in relation to Group Norms, Motivations and Leadership - Essay Example Mayo found a general increase in production and in productivity per worker as well as of the group in general, completely independent of any of the changes he made in the experiments. His findings were not in accordance with the then prevalent theory of the worker as being motivated solely by self-interest. It did not make sense that productivity would continue to rise even when he cut out breaks and returned the workers to longer working hours. The segment of the Hawthorne experiments that emphasised the positive effects of benign supervision and concern for workers that made them feel like part of a team became known as the ‘Hawthorne Effect’. The studies were instrumental for the emergence of the human relations school of management and motivational and related theories of worker-behaviour, of participatory management, team building, etc. However, in a true sense the Hawthorne Effect is not just about "positive outcomes†, it is about the absence of any definite correlation (positive or negative) between productivity and the independent variables used in the experiments such as monetary incentive, rest pauses, etc While analyzing the â€Å"amazing† findings of his experiments, Mayo realised that the workers had exercised a freedom they did not have on the factory floor and which had created a social ambience that included the ‘supervisor’ also who tracked their productivity. ‘The talked, they joked, they began to meet socially outside of work’ It is as if Mayo had discovered a fundamental ‘fact’ that seems obvious today, that workplaces are ‘social environments’ and people there are motivated by much more than mere economic self-interest. He concluded that all features of that work environment had social value. This may be characterised as the ‘group dynamics’ of the experiment. When some workers were singled out from the rest of the factory workers, it raised their self-esteem; when they had a friendly

Research: Buying behaviour and culture

Research: Buying behaviour and culture Data Analysis The following chapter aims to provide the reader with the results generated form the questionnaire distributed manually. The analysis and discussion is focused on evaluating the primary data in the line with objectives of the proposed study which is about Buying behaviour and culture. Respondent to Questionnaire: There are total of 80 Questionnaire was given to people belong to Pakistani community and only 33 Questionnaires are returned which is 41 % of total and taken for further research. Overall there are 59 % Questionnaires was not respondent and could not include for analysis. Feels Happy in Cultural Clothes: The below chart shows that females and males of almost all the category of ages considerably have strong point of view that it give them feelings of happiness when they wear their cultural clothes because it create a difference and also it gives them feeling of belonging to the traditional cultural as well. Cultural Clothes as Identity: The below Graph is showing that females of age 26-35 and also females of age 18-25 are significant believes that cultural clothes are their identity and the Males of middle age 36-49 and above 50 believes that cultural clothes are their identity. Here the difference between the Females and Males age difference shows that Female of Young age are more concern about their cultural identity as compared to Males because they mostly do not bother about clothing as cultural identity. Peer Group and Reference Group influencing: The below graph shows that females of age group 18-25 and age 26-35 consider the compliments of the family and friends for the destining and also males of age 18-25 and 26-35 believes that opinion of the family and friends are important follow for choice clothing. It shows tat Overall males and females of Pakistani community is influenced by the reference groups compliments and opinions. According to the studies about the Pakistani community it was observed that they have strong influences of peer group specially the family and parents who always give them guidance and opinion about their behaviour and culture. Cultural Influences for shopping of Clothes: The below Graph is about the point of view when Pakistani community looking for shopping .When people are going for clothes shopping they consider the cultural they belong as this graph shows that females of the community between age group of 18-25, 26-35 and 36-49 consider that culture influences the shopping for clothing but males have not shows the large impact of cultural for their shopping. According to studies carried for Pakistani community also discussed that people have strong feeling and believes about the culture and also feel happy when they do something depending on their culture. Western and Eastern Clothes Likeness between Old and New Generations: The below graph shows that New generation Strong believed that western clothes are good to wear and they like it. It show that Female and male of age between 18-25 and 26-35 are significantly agreed that they likes the western clothes and it is important for Marketers to know that this segment have strong view point about likeness of Western clothes. The blow graph shows that Old Generation likes the Eastern Clothes. If we look at graph it clearly shows that Females and Males of middle age 36-49 are more interested towards the eastern clothes and hey have strong believe that eastern clothes are good to wear. If we look at old and new generations Likeness about eastern and western clothes we can analysis that new generation likes more western clothes and they follow the western clothing trend as compared to old generation which is still following the eastern cultural clothes and fashion. It show that old generation have more impact of the cultural believes and values on them as compared to new generation. Religious Gathering and Traditional Clothes: The below graph show that females of all age consider that traditional clothing is important for religious gathering and they prefer to dress up according to the gathering requirements on this preference of traditional clothing males have not show he significant impact of gathering and traditional clothes which shows that females are more concerned about the traditional clothing as compared to males for the religious gathering. According to the Studies shows that Pakistani Community have strong religious, traditional, beliefs, Rituals which reflects in their buying behaviour which seen in research carried out as secondary research. If Western Brands Offer Eastern Clothes: The below graph shows that Pakistani community will feel happy if they can find eastern clothes in western brand shops like Asda and next etc. Females and males of young to middle age are strongly believed that it would be pleasure to shop when they can buy eastern clothes in western brands shopping. It is important to know about this segment point of view about this and Asda is already considering this eastern clothing for this segment and they are working good and people also showed their interest in this research (secondary research about Asda). If Eastern Shops Start selling Western Clothes: The below graph showing that people are somehow interested to buy western clothes if eastern shops start selling. But their point of view about this in both gender males and females are not significant considerably so it is telling about that they feel more happy to busy western clothes from western brand shops rather than eastern. It is important for marketers to know about this to start any new product for this community. Quality is more important than Price: The below Graph shows that Pakistani community have strong believe that quality is more important than price. Females and males both consider this that quality is more important and also this graph shows that young and middle age people are always considering quality as important factor to buy clothes. It shows that old age people are still not that much aware about the quality product they still try to consider the price and it is also social class factor that people look for the low price even if the quality is not good and it was seen in secondary research as well. According to secondary research about the Pakistani community also shown that people are brand lover yet they are still conscious about price as well because of exchange rate but as far as young generation they are not that much price conscious they are brand lover and take brand as status symbol it can be the reason that they are born here. Research Ethics: Research ethics is the appropriateness of how the researcher behaves in relation to the rights of the respondents who become the subject of the researchers work, or are affected by it (saunder et all 2003), Throughout the whole research there will need to be a consideration of the ethical issues. Ethnical responsibilities like honestly and with integrated work have been taken care. Fraud has been avoided to bring new finding by the research. Data analysis has been done on in right direction by using excel sheet. Conclusion: According to the secondary research and the result of primary research which is done by questionnaire shows that Pakistani community Have strong believes, values and ritual consideration when they are buying Clothes. They consider their culture as important factor and have strong influence towards shopping for dresses. Growth Prospects And Outcomes: Due to increase in Pakistani population and their economic status as leading high earning community with huge expenditure capacity, marketer should study more cultural and consumer buying Behavior of this community in UK market, by forming Pakistani consumer market segment, targeting and Positioning Pakistani consumer in UK to make business more profitable, expandable and providing better customer services. Currently there are few branded shops target perfectly the Pakistani consumer, but still to marketers need to understand the Pakistani consumer and explore their cultural influences to make this segment important. Further Research Due to limited resource of manpower and time, Research can be further carried out on larger scale, more geographically, aged group and big target consumer. Further researched is needed on Pakistani consumer buying Behaviour, understanding cultural and social characteristics and its implication. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens | Analysis Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens | Analysis Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Given the reputation and gravity of Oliver Twist, it is sometimes difficult to recall that this was only Dickens’ second novel, written and serialised in 1838. Moreover, it was a risky project because Dickens had won massive popular acclaim on the basis of his preceding novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836), which could not have been more different in its comic recording of the adventures of the ‘Pickwick Club’. Nevertheless, Dickens’ novel of the pauper child’s struggles in the wickedness of London’s thieves’ kitchens was to become one of his most enduring, popular successes, adapted for stage and screen multiple times since its inception and as popular today as when it was first published. When Dickens began Oliver Twist, he was a young man with a mission: to expose the evils of society’s treatment of such children as Oliver represents and expose the invidiousness of the contentious Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. From his birth in the workhouse, where he is ‘badged and ticketed’, Oliver is the essence of all that Dickens believes to be wrong with Victorian Society. Indeed, the author believed that by making his readers care about one such boy, he could make them care about many. Though it may be ‘a mistake to think of Oliver Twist as a realistic story’ it nevertheless contains enduring truths and such descriptions as ‘the paupers funeral in Chapter Five [were] also historically accurate’. The novel concerns the story of a child, born out of wedlock in the workhouse of ‘a certain town’. By refusing to name the town, Dickens is not only dismissive of all such places as not worth the ‘trouble’ of mentioning but also imposing a comprehensively applicable generic, as he is on the emblematic child himself. After a series of early struggles, set pieces, such as Oliver’s asking for ‘more’, having become so powerfully entrenched in the public consciousness as to make them almost clichà ©d,   Oliver becomes so desperate that he walks to London and is immediately sucked into the world of thieves and vagabonds which so powerfully populate the novel. A palpable concern with these characters, such as Fagin and Sikes, is that they are, in common with many of Dickens’ villains, more charismatic than the benevolent and certainly, one of the reasons readers continue to be drawn to the story is the evil genius that is Fagin, persis tently referred to as ‘the Jew’. This is in itself problematic in contemporary society, as the inherent anti-Semitism which attaches to Dickens’ descriptions of him are difficult for the modern reader to dispassionately assimilate. Yet, ‘in his rendering of Fagins gang and their surroundings, Dickens intended a realism that he felt was lacking in the popular crime fiction of the time, the so called ‘Newgate Novels’. Oliver finds some solace in the company of the urchin robbers, such as Dodger, nurtured by Fagin and in this the reader perceives a connection with Dickens’ own early struggles alone in London. When the intricacies of the plot deliver Oliver back and forth between what we later learn is his ‘natural’ environment, that of the upper-class Brownlow et al, a certain energy is removed from the novel until, via Nancy and Bill’s violent relationship and her betrayal of him to save the child, the appalling vitality of the story reappears. This complex relationship is in fact possibly one of the more contemporaneously resonant within the novel. Indeed, it is said that Dickens, when acting out the scene of Sikes murder of Nancy, frequently came close to physical collapse since this, combined with the insidious malevolence of Fagin that urged Sikes to it, is one of the more terrifying yet gripping moments in the book. Its potent appeal, indeed, may cause the reader to question his own moral sensibility in finding such wickedness such a compelling draw. It is, indeed, interesting to note that when David Lean filmed the novel so brilliantly in 1948, possibly due to censorship, he cut away from the violence to focus on Sikes’ dog desperately trying to escape. Nancy remains one of the finer and more subtle creations in a novel teeming with emblematic caricatures, her pain at betraying Bill fully revealed in her ‘confession’ to the character of whom she is in many ways the inverse, Rose, who cannot understand her compulsion to return to Sikes any more than Nancy can herself: ‘I dont know what it is, answered the girl; I only know that it is so, and not with me alone, but with hundreds of others as bad and wretched as myself. I must go back. Whether it is God’s wrath for the wrong I have done, I do not know; but I am drawn back to him through every suffering and ill usage; and I should be, I believe, if I knew that I was to die by his hand at last.’ Nancy is describing the purest of loves and by rendering a prostitute capable of such delicacy and depth of feeling Dickens was yet again giving a voice to those that had none. Both in his fiction and in his life, indeed, Dickens spoke out time and time again for those whom society, for one reason or another, ‘cast out’. In the final analysis, Dickens’ achievement in Oliver Twist is fundamental to its continuing appeal. It has, within its pages, the evocation of both the era in which it was set and the possibility of the perpetuation of evil which continues to dwell within mankind. Historically, one cannot imagine the possibility of a realisation of social iniquity which is beyond or above that realised in Oliver’s story and in this, the child does indeed, as Dickens intended, represent the small voice of the innocent against   the power and invidiousness of an uncaring mass. As an enduring emblem of the many, this one, lonely child, Oliver Twist, became, both contemporaneously and for future generations, a symbol of both the deep despair and profound hope he definitively embodies. Bibliography: Peter Ackroyd, Dickens, (Sinclair Stevenson, London, 1990). Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999). John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens in Two Volumes, (J.M. Dent Sons, London, 1966). Ruth Glancy, Student Companion to Charles Dickens, (Greenwood Press, Westport CT, 1999). F. Hopkinson Smith, In Dickenss London, (Charles Scribers Sons, New York, 1916). John Manning, Dickens on Education, (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1959). Steven Marcus, Dickens, from Pickwick to Dombey, (Basic Books, New York, 1965). John R. Reed, Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness, (Ohio University Press, Athens, OH, 1995). Paul Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment, (Unwin Hyman, London, 1988). Types of Neighbourhoods: Exam Revision Types of Neighbourhoods: Exam Revision Malachi-Chaim Robinson Jason Rhodes Essay Exam 1 Part 1- Short Answer: Jacobs to contend there are only three types of neighborhoods: (1) the street neighborhood, (2) districts of 100,000 people or more, and (3) the city as a whole. This ideas definitely reflect in the idea of city planning. It is noteworthy to note that Jacobs considers these to be the ideal take on what a neighborhood to have in order to not be dependent on economics and that these three types of neighborhoods enable people to come together in unity and harmony and that is when the neighborhood is most successful. And also she believes that the continuity these neighborhood bring definelty help foster the social interactions among the people to have a healthy and safe environment. These three types are also related as they describe that the planning of a city needs to take place from the street level perspective and the goal needs to support and promote the vitality of city streets. And the biggest thing of how these are related is that the city is organized in a complex fashion. Thus , everything is interrelated and everything is related to everything. So any attempts to simplify anything hurts the people of the city and planning. Kevin Lynch was able to introduce urban designers to a new idea about the urbanism of a city. He focused on how the people in the city used and perceived the physical environment and not the traditional way by the use of learning about the city through maps. Lynch was able to gather his research after a five year long examination of the most important elements of the city perceived by the residents in that area and his goal reflected his vision of identifying the most important features to the people in that area. His core concept was the idea of â€Å"legibility† which is how easy the paths of the cityscape can be organized into a recognizable pattern. He conducted his research in three cities and identified the five key elements that make up the perceived elements of the city: path, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. The path consists of the channels along which the observer moves. This includes streets, paths, routes and this the single most important mechanism in the idea of promoting urban legibility because this is how people experience the city. And the idea that people are using paths constructed in their mental capacity demonstrates the idea of the promotion of legibility as they are able to recognize the paths of the cityscape. Landmarks are point references which are similar to nodes. Contrasting nodes, landmarks are external features to the individuals and where they enter during their travels. They are often physical structures and is extensive. Landmarks help promote the idea of urban legibility as they are used by people to help better understand and navigate the environment that was built. In â€Å"Building American Cityscapes,† Edward Muller argues that the American urban landscape reflects â€Å"a unifying consensus founded on a capitalistic economy and liberal social philosophy† (304). Basically, in lament terms, Muller is arguing that the characteristics of the American system ideals is written into the landscape and is shaped differently from other cities and countries. An example of this in the text is when he argues that ideally, the transformation of the American system has been transformed and impacted by the change from the original urban settlements in North America that reflected the derivative transplants of European societies (304). The furtherization from the idea of the founding roots built the nationwide enterprise of the current state and premise of which Muller argues of the capitalistic economy. The liberal social philosophy stresses the freedom and rights of the individual marked by the government protecting these fundamental rights. An example of this is in the text is when Muller said: â€Å"Substantial infusionsofdiverse immigrant groups have testedthissocial vision,butageneral adherenceto theliberal philosophyin agrowingeconomy diminished rigid class stratification, effected a sharing of the power and wealth with upwardly mobile generations, and produced a dynamic yet untidy social geography (304). Thus, changes and marks have impacted the environment and changed the way in how the environment is looked and perceived as the current American urban landscape according to Muller. And due to the new center of the economics at the center of the American landscape, these changes have been reflected the consequences by the geographical nature. Part 2- Essay Answer to Question 1: More and more people have been moving to the suburbia since the 1950’s and it has become the place to live. But, also to geographers it has become and study and a huge cultural discussion. Geographers have researched and tried to create a set of definitions or a criteria that defines a suburbia. In fact, contrary to popular belief while researching and trying to determine the suburb is from different approaches and cultural angles, it has been found that the concept and idea of the suburbia is a hotly discussed and popular issue among geographers. So many definitions are proposed for the suburbia, but geographers do agree on the fact there are few people who even understand the idea and concept in this world as to what a suburbia truly is. So what exactly is a suburbia? The urban settings are inside of the main city and urban areas have high population densities and lots of businesses that are centralized in that area in order for people and there is some stress on interpersonal relationships because of overcrowding. On the contrast, rural settings are completely different and are far from the city and the density of the population in the rural settings is low. Few businesses can cater to the people. The suburbia is the level between the rural and urban areas. It consists of neighborhoods that surrounds the city but not located in the centralized location of where people go or congregate to. The suburbia exists really on the outer edge districts and is characterized by housing area, some shopping avenues, and some schools. In James Howard Kunstler’s TED talk, he basically is able to dictate that public places should be inspired by the centers of civil life and the idea of common good. Also, he argues that he believes that there are locations or places in America that should not be worth caring about. Kunstler is a sense relates to the ideas and concepts proposed by Jane Jacobs. Jane Jacobs was an urbanist pioneer that examined how planners plan the city and the various concerns that arise when planning the city. She even researches as to what factors directly lead to the success of neighborhoods, sidewalks, and such. She has even contributed this success because of the rising demand for diversity. In Kunstler’s view we see his fear of the trust in the suburbia because no one cares to know each other and develop social interactions. People keep to themselves and there is a sense of a lack of trust in the eyes of the community among neighbors. This critique reflected the idea of Jacobs in s ense. Both agree that lack of trust and fear is evident among urbanism and both agree that if this problem is captured it can be definitely changed and impacted. Kunstler believes that if you get to know the people and environment around you, this can definitely have an impact on how the fear can be resolved in a sense. Jacobs, on the other hand argues for the development of surveillance. Even though the two have different solutions, both can agree on the concept that neighborhoods become successful when the problem is identified and fixed in the best way possible. Another concept that be realized is that both Jacobs and Kunstler agree on the fact that a change in the planning of the city needs to be in order to bring continuity in order to have social interactions in order to foster a healthy and safe environment, which Kunstler argues. In James Howard Kunstler’s TED talk, he basically is able to dictate that public places should be inspired by the centers of civil life and the idea of common good. Also, he argues that he believes that there are locations or places in America that should not be worth caring about. Kunstler is a sense relates to the ideas and concepts proposed by Kevin Lynch. Lynch was an urban farmer that was able to research and dissect on the perceptions and the navigation of the environment by the people in relation to city planning. He is able to examine how the external factors of the environment affects the people along with space and time. Lynch says that specific and definite elements such as the path, district, landmark, edge, and node exists in the complexity in every structure. Kunstler’s ideas as a stretched part on my end also reveals a want for the city to be transformed into an imageable landscape which is similar to Lynch. In fact, both can agree on the fact that the ci ty can be transformed into different view by considering the environment. If this is done, both also agree the people in that community can perceive the place with different perceptions and meanings. Thus, change can impact the people living in that area. Both Kunstler and Lynch both definitely share the idea that there needs to be a change in the development and planning of the city. Both Lynch and Kunstler stems from different backgrounds and different approaches ideally, but both argue on the same premise that the environment needs to be altered in order to impact the people around it. In a sense, the landscape of the environment are being shaped and reshaped by the social interactions and perceptions of what it should be in that particular area. It seems as if both Lynch and Kunstler seems to grasp the concept of the urban life and environmental images. In conclusion, Kunstler ideas seems to relate back to the pioneers of the great field of urbanism in this subject. There is a definite parallel of Kunstler’s work to Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch. Kunstler is definitely able to cover the history and development of the planning of specific cities and suburbs. He is able to critically examine how land have been used and misused, rather than for the collective group effort. Kunstler definitely blames the fall of suburbia due to the automobile industry and the destruction on the idea of what a community is in the idea of an urban sprawl. Kunstler definitely has some good points to show how history has shaped the ideas of neighborhoods. The fact alone is that Kunstler is a controversial figure. Reflection: Human Resources and CSR Reflection: Human Resources and CSR This essay would cover three major aspects of human resource management in my previous employment. HRM in my organization HRM and CSR HRM policies during recession Human resource management can be described as an approach to management that consider people as its key resources. For every organization their employees are the key resource for success. Without co-operation or commitment from employees, organizations cant achieve heights. In a broader sense HRM is defined as the part of management process that specializes in the management of people in work organizations.HRM emphasizes that employees are critical in achieving sustainable competitive advantage, that human resource specialists help organizational controllers to meet both efficiency and equity objectives'(The human resource management:Theory and Practice pg11) HRM in my organization In my limited experience I have seen a range of HRM activities by HRM professional in my organization.HR managers are considered as single point of contact for employees for all the HR related issues.HRM holds a significant role in managing employees in an organization. Behaviour theorists suggests that behaviour and performance of the human resource is a function of at least four variables: ability, motivation, role perception and situational contingencies.(McShane,1995). Strategic management of people has been considered as a primary goal for HRM. Strategies has been formulated at the organizational level by the senior management and then it has been distributed to the Business level and then to Functional level.HR managers has to leverage the organizational strategy to the line managers.HR managers has to motivate employees to achieve the common goal or the organizational strategy. HRM activities includes a range of activities from recruitment, training, appraisal and rewards.HR managers are linked to an employee from the time he joins the organization to the time he leaves the organization. An HR manager has to keep record of all the employees working in the particular organization. In my experience HR team conducts recruitment based on the requirement from each business unit to carry out a project.HR team first analyze the available internal work force and then if not found enough resources, then conduct recruitments. Appropriate candidates are shortlisted and then interviewed.HR manager role also includes planning induction training for the new joiners, creating training plan from the employees, making a buffer pool to manage surplus employees in the organization and also to take care of employee separation processes. In my personal view my previous employer Tech Mahindra limited follows Guest model of HRM. According to Guest model of HRM core set of HRM practices can achieve superior individual and organizational performance. The central hypothesis of HRM is that if an integrated set of HRM practices are applied in a coherent fashion with a view to achieving normative goals of high commitment, high quality and task flexibility then superior individual performance will result.(Braton, Gold : Human Resource Management:Theory and Practice pg21).In Techmahindra HR practices are performed in such a way that employees are given proper training and are rewarded properly so that their commitment to the organization will increase. They are made aware of the organizational strategy and the organizational goals. By doing like that each employee will work towards achieving that common goal. We also had a forum call JOSH which represents fun and entertainment of employees in the organization. JOSH club will o rganize events throughout the year so that employees can participate in those events and can relax from the work load. This will create a good work environment for the employees. I consider this as a good HR strategy to give employee a warm feeling in the organization. Picture adapted from Lecture2 hand out. I can clearly say that in my previous employment the HRM cycle was similar to the HRM Cycle developed by Fomburn(1984).Once the employee is selected to the organization then he will be evaluated yearly based on his performance. Manager will assign goals to employee that needs to be achieved during the financial year. At the end of financial year appraisal discussion will take place between employee and manager and will review how far the employee achieved his/her goals. Based on that if required manager will ask the employee to attend training programmes or if the employee performs exceptionally then he/she will be nominated for a reward and will receive a hike in his/her pay. HRM and CSR Corporate Social Responsibility Corporate social responsibility (CSR), also known as corporate conscience, corporate citizenship or corporate social performance, is a form of corporate self-regulation integrated into a business model.(Source: Wood, D. (1991)). CSR focused business promotes public interest by encouraging community growth and development and eliminating practices that harm public sphere regardless of legality. All major multinational firms have CSR policy associated with their organizational policy. All organization has a responsibility to the society. Many organizations follow different procedures for CSR.CSR based business promotes public interest by encouraging community growth and development. Organizations focus on growth of the community and society by implementing several welfare schemes.CSR is also considered as a welfare policy that each multinational firms or organization dedicate to the society. In my previous employment we had several schemes included in the CSR policy. In my organization it was considered as an initiative which is voluntarily undertaken by every employee to improve quality of life in the society.CSR reflects organizations brand and value by addressing societies most complex problems and try to bring a sustainable solution(source:TechMahindra website). HR policies are tailored in such a way that organizational and project goals are not affected by employee participation in CSR activities. Several issues that a society faces include lack of proper education in villages, lack of computer in some schools etc. So these issues are taken as part of CSR and each organization with the help of their employees tries to find out a solution. In my previous employment we have taken care of an orphanage. We have supplied them with all the necessary food, provided education and invited them for all the celebrations that we conducted in our office. All employees who are actively involved in the CSR spend valuable time with them when they visited our office. Similarly we have also conducted tree plantation and also implemented Go Green policy in office premises. We have taken up a rural village and provided education for women and children. Employees can actively participate in these programs during their free time and on weekends. We have Techmahindra foundation to help and support Education in rural areas, women empowerment and to support the needy. HR policies are made in such a way that employees can provide support to the foundation by giving donations or being a volunteer of the foundation to help and support the CSR activities. HR Policies during recession Every organization has a change in their organizational strategy during the economic recession time. Senior management has asked HR professionals to come up with a new HR strategy to deal with the financial crisis. The primary objective of senior management was to reduce cost and maintain financial stability in the organization. Due to financial crisis many organizations had to shut down their operations, many employees lost their job and those organizations that survived the crisis are due to proper organizational and HR strategies. Creative human resource management is necessary during the recession period. HRM function has to develop new ideas to bring change to HRM process. These changes bring change in the procedure in which an organization works. The main idea behind brining in new procedures is to reduce cost of the organization. Usually recession period is not considered as a good time to bring HRM Innovations. For most organizations during recession their policies and practices should be base lined on cost cutting In my previous employment, during recession period HR professional came up with a strategic plan to find out number of employees that are currently working on projects and employees that are not allocated to any projects. As cost cutting was one of the main objectives HR professionals implemented job rotation scheme so that employees that are working on a project is given an opportunity to work on another project where the organization was actually looking for an external resource. When they found that by job rotation the requirement of external candidate is not required as the internal employee was able to manage the new challenge. Another HR policy was to identify real key employees in the organization. This was done to ensure that key employees dont leave the organization during the recession time. They were made intact to the organization.HR professionals has also implemented some policies to find out employees that are not performing up to the expectation. Those employees were put in a job pool and have given opportunity to develop their skills and apply for new roles outside the organization. Most organizations were following lay-off scheme during the recession time as an easy way of cost cutting. In my organization we valued commitment of employees to the organization. So instead of relieving employees they were given a nominal amount as salary and a space to develop their skills. If an employee shows his/her skills then he/she will be taken back into project with the normal pay. During recession period HR officials were forced to revisit the training plans and make suitable arrangements so that trainings will not incur heavy cost for the organization. CONCLUSION I could clearly state that in my previous employment the HR strategy was intact with the organisational strategy, where the strategy was driven by HR. Resource based view of strategy was given more importance.HRM policies and practices should be tailored by considering employees as their key resources.

Chapter 4 of Mary Shelleys Frankenstein Essay -- Mary Shelley Franken

Chapter 4 of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein In 1816 the famous gothic novel ‘Frankenstein’ was begun, Frankenstein was largely successful because it was the first sci-fi novel that anyone had ever seen. The Gothicism that this genre is meant to expose is very good because it really is written to evoke terror in readers and show the dark side of human nature, and of course another reason the novel was a success, was because the author Mary Shelley had a first hand experience of the death that this book precedes. Mary began the novel in Italy after staying with Lord Byron and after a discussion about science they challenged each other to a ghost writing competition, Mary’s mother died soon after Mary was born. Mary had two children that died and one was called William, these experiences of death were mirrored in Mary’s novel. Also reading journals from her husbands early life, he wanted to be a surgeon, and after talking with him and the family doctor where she thought up the idea of using electricity to bring corpses to life. In this essay I will be writing the about atmosphere of the chapter, the facial contrasts of the creature, Frankenstein’s dream, the creatures intentions, the creatures special request, the prejudice against the creature and the destruction of Frankenstein. Frankenstein hysterical reaction towards his creation, I will show you is prejudice and unjust. At the beginning of the chapter 4 Mary Shelley starts off by setting the scene of Frankenstein’s workshop, the aura created around the scene was shown as sinister and dreary, I comprehend from the text that it was a rainy night by the following quotes, â€Å"It was on a dreary night of November.† â€Å"The rain pattered dismally against the... ...re children how they should be looked after or else the child will grow up the same way he was brought up in a non-caring way, and also that everyone in society has responsibility to the helpless and needy, because they too want to be helped and accepted by others or they too will feel unable to manage with the life that was brought on to them. It also shows that no matter what, there will be prejudice found in your lifetime and they will be prejudice towards you, but in this novel Frankenstein’s creation was called The Monster, but he is only misunderstood the real monster in this novel is Victor Frankenstein himself, and all the torture he went through he brought upon himself. In conclusion, you have a responsibility towards everyone else, and your actions you hold may be brought against you if you cannot bring yourself to show the correct moral ethics.

In the extract where Pip Essay

When Estella is told to play with Pip she feels ashamed to play him because he is of a lower class. â€Å"With this boy! Why he is such a common labouring-boy! † Miss Havisham’s response gives us evidence of how she wants to make Pip feel; she wants to hurt him emotionally. â€Å"You can break his heart† To make it worse for Pip, it seems as though the only reason she agrees to play with him is because she has the ability to hurt and humiliate him. Estella also refers to Pip as ‘boy’ showing that she looks down on him with disdain and gives him no respect. â€Å"What do you play boy? † â€Å"Nothing but beggar my neighbour, miss† Albeit she disrespects him he continues to be respectful by referring to her as ‘miss’. The fact that he doesn’t know any other games, reflects that he has a very restricted childhood and doesn’t play as often as we would expect a child to. The setting is continuously being described which readily mirrors sadness and lifelessness. â€Å"corpse-like†, â€Å"grave-clothes† Estella is incessantly adding to his distress by using her power to make him feel contempt and extremely inferior. She deliberately criticises his lower-class language, features and footwear, just to intensify his emotions. â€Å"He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy! † â€Å"And what coarse hands he has. And what thick boots! † She has the ability to arouse inexperienced emotions within him, emotions that he has never come across ever before. â€Å"Her contempt for me was so strong, that it became infectious and I caught it. † Pip understands that he shouldn’t upset Estella because of the difference in class between them. So he therefore does as she would expect him to. â€Å"I misdealt, as was only natural, when I knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong† No matter how much Estella criticises and hurts Pip, he is still very polite to her and lets her say what she wants, only because she is of a higher class. â€Å"†¦ she denounces me for a stupid, clumsy labouring-boy† Pip is unendlessly polite towards Estella and seems nervous, scared and threatened by her. â€Å"I don’t like to say,† I stammered. ‘ â€Å"I replied, in a whisper† also mirrors his timid ness, and the fact that he doesn’t want here to overhear. Estella’s Dialogue has been used very strongly to create sympathy for Pip and her contempt has greatly affected him. As we have seen Pip isn’t someone who would say anything to hurt another individual and especially someone of a higher class. But he is so hurt that he actually says that he thinks Estella is ‘very insulting’. This makes us fell sorry for him because he is a child that has been greatly insulted and admits to feeling that way. Pip has started to feel extremely uncomfortable and belittled by Estella’s demeanour. â€Å"I think I should like to go home’ Despite the fact that Pip is willing to go home, Miss Havisham makes him stay and play. Pip once again cannot defy Miss Havisham and does as he is told. â€Å"Play the game out† Estella wins the game and once again looks at him despicably causing him more hurt. Once the game was over, Miss Havisham asks Pip to come again after six days and even after all the pain and trauma he had just been through he doesn’t say no to her, only because she was of a higher class and he wouldn’t ever dare say no to her. â€Å"Yes, ma’am† As Pip is about to leave, Miss Havisham asks Estella to give Pip some food, in a sense which seemed of pity. Estella once again refers to Pip as ‘boy’ and speaks to him in a very rude manner. â€Å"You wait here, you boy† this creates an emotion of sympathy within the reader towards Pip due to Estella’s harsh rudeness to Pip. Whilst waiting for Estella to return with some food, Pip takes the opportunity to look at ‘coarse’ hands and ‘common’ boots; theses were the two features that Estella had earlier on criticised. They had never before affected him but she had had too strong an impact on him that he had now become extremely conscious about them and had started to look down on them. Neither had the fact that he called knaves instead of Jacks, but now he was willing to ask his uncle why he never taught him to call them Knaves. His thoughts have gone so far that he wishes his uncle was brought up more ‘genteelly’ and then maybe he would have been as well. Dickens here has managed to generate great sympathy for Pip by showing us how an individual of an upper class can hurt someone just due to their financial status. When Estella returns with some food, she puts it down in such a manner that a dog would be treated with. This shows how disgraceful she thinks Pip is and form sympathy within the reader because we know that Pip shouldn’t be treated in such a way and that he deserves more respect than he receives. His emotions overtook him and tears started to fall but this signalled to Estella that she had succeeded and this gave Pip the strength to hold back his tears, but in return she just gave him a ‘contemptuous toss’ to show the endless disgust and contempt she has for him. As soon as she left his emotions just started to uncontrollably flow. In this scene his tears were what initially formed sympathy within the reader but as the scene progressed the fact that he tried to fight his emotions from flowing out in front of Estella, comprehensively intensifies our empathy for Pip. Her behaviour has left Pip emotionally scarred. His feelings for her only comprised of anger, frustration and hatred. â€Å"So bitter were my feeling, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that needed counteraction† Pip’s strong and genuine feelings in this concluding line leave a lasting sense of commiseration in favour of Pip. Dickens has successfully used his unique skills and techniques of writing, which contained effective vocabulary, an eccentric setting, a crucial voice, realistic characters and dialogue, a powerful beginning and poignant ending to create sympathy for Pip. Batool Rafay 10Ck Show preview only The above preview is unformatted text This student written piece of work is one of many that can be found in our GCSE Great Expectations section.

Against and for Capital Punishment

SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? ACTS, OMISSIONS, AND LIFELIFE TRADEOFFS Cass R. Sunstein* and Adrian Vermeule** Many people believe that the death penalty should be abolished even if, as recent evidence seems to suggest, it has a significant deterrent effect. But if such an effect can be established, capital punishment requires a life-life tradeoff, and a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, that form of punishment.The familiar problems with capital punishment— potential error, irreversibility, arbitrariness, and racial skew—do not require abolition because the realm of homicide suffers from those same problems in even more acute form. Moral objections to the death penalty frequently depend on a sharp distinction between acts and omissions, but that distinction is misleading in this context because government is a special kind of moral agent.The widespr ead failure to appreciate the life-life tradeoffs potentially involved in capital punishment may depend in part on cognitive processes that fail to treat â€Å"statistical lives† with the seriousness that they deserve. The objection to the act/omission distinction, as applied to government, has implications for many questions in civil and criminal law. INTRODUCTION†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 704 I. EVIDENCE †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 10 II. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: MORAL FOUNDATIONS AND FOUR OBJECTIONS †¦ 716 A. Morality and Death†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢ € ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 717 B. Acts and Omissions †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 719 1. Is the act/omission distinction coherent with respect to government?†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 720 * Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence, the University of Chicago Law School, Department of PoliticalScience, and the College. ** Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law, the University of Chicago. The authors thank Larry Alexander, Ron Allen, Richard Berk, Steven Calabresi, Jeffrey Fagan, Robert Hahn, Dan Kahan, Andy Koppelman, Richard Lempert, Steven Levitt, James Liebman, Daniel Markel, Frank Michelman, Tom Miles, Eric Posner, Richard Posner, Joanna Shepherd, William Stuntz, James Sullivan, and Eugene Volokh for helpful suggestions, and Blake Roberts for excellent research assistance and valuable comments.Thanks too to participants in a work-in-progress lunch at the University of Chicago Law School and a constitutional theory workshop at Northwestern University Law School. 703 SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 704 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 2. Is the act/omission distinction morally relevant to capital punishment? †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 724 C. The Arbitrary and Discriminatory Realm of Homicide†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 728 D. Preferable Alternatives and the Principle of Strict Scrutiny†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 32 E. Slipper y Slopes †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 734 F. Deontology and Consequentialism Again†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 737 III. COGNITION AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 740 A. Salience †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 741 B. Acts, Omissions, and Brains†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. 741 C. A Famous Argument that Might Be Taken as a Counterargument †¦.. 743 IV.IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE PROBLEMS †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 744 A. Threshold Effects (? ) and Regional Variation †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 745 B. International Variation †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 745 C. Offenders and Offenses †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 746 D. Life-Life Tradeoffs and Beyond†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦.. 747 CONCLUSION †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ 48 INTRODUCTION Many people believe that capital punishment is morally impermissible. In their view, executions are inherently cruel and barbaric. 1 Often they add that capital punishment is not, and cannot be, imposed in a way that adheres to the rule of law. 2 They contend that, as administered, capital punishment ensures the execution of (some) innocent people and also that it reflects arbitrariness, in the form of random or invidious infliction of the ultimate penalty. 3 Defenders of capital punishment can be separated into two different camps.Some are retributivists. 4 Following Immanuel Kant,5 they claim that for the most heinous forms of wrongdoing, the penalty of death is morally justified or perhaps even required. Other defenders of capital punishment are consequentialists and often also welfarists. 6 They contend that the deterrent 1. See, e. g. , Furman v. Georgia, 408 U. S. 238, 309, 371 (1972) (Marshall, J. , concurring). 2. See Stephen B. Bright, Why the United States Will Join the Rest of the World in Abandoning Capital Punishment, in DEBATING THE DEATH PENALTY: SHOULD AMERICA HAVE CAPITAL PUNISHMENT? 52 (Hugo Adam Bedau & Paul G. Cassell eds. , 2004) [hereinafter DEBATING THE DEATH PENALTY]. 3. See, e. g. , James S. Liebman et al. , A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995 (Columbia Law Sch. , Pub. Law Research Paper No. 15, 2000) (on file with authors). 4. See, e. g. , Luis P. Pojman, Why the Death Penalty Is Morally Permissible, in DEBATING THE DEATH PENALTY, supra note 2, at 51, 55-58. 5. See IMMANUEL KANT, THE PHILOSOPHY OF LAW: AN EXPOSITION OF THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES OF JURISPRUDENCE AS THE SCIENCE OF RIGHT 198 (W.Hastrie trans. , 1887) (1797). 6. Arguments along these lines can be found in Pojman, supra note 4, at 58-73. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 705 effect of capital punishment is significant and that it justifies the infliction of the ultimate penalty. Consequentialist defenses of capital punishment, however, tend to assume that capital punishment is (merely) morally permissible, as opposed to being morally obligatory.Our goal here is to suggest that the debate over capital punishment is rooted in an unquestioned assumption and that the failure to question that assumption is a serious moral error. The assumption is that for governments, acts are morally different from omissions. We want to raise the possibility that an indefensible form of the act/omission distinction is crucial to some of the most prominent objections to capital punishment—and that defenders of capital punishment, apparently making the same distinction, have failed to notice that according to the logic of their theory, capital punishment is morally obligatory, not just permissible.We suggest, in other words, tha t on certain empirical assumptions, capital punishment may be morally required, not for retributive reasons, but rather to prevent the taking of innocent lives. 7 The suggestion bears not only on moral and political debates, but also on constitutional questions. In invalidating the death penalty for juveniles, for example, the Supreme Court did not seriously engage the possibility that capital punishment for juveniles may help to prevent the death of innocents, including juvenile innocents. And if our suggestion is correct, it relates to many questions outside of the context of capital punishment. If omissions by the state are often indistinguishable, in principle, from actions by the state, then a wide range of apparent failures to act—in the context not only of criminal and civil law, but of regulatory law as well—should be taken to raise serious moral and legal problems. Those who accept our arguments in favor of the death penalty may or may not welcome the implicat ions for government action in general.In many situations, ranging from environmental quality to appropriations to highway safety to relief of poverty, our arguments suggest that in light of 7. In so saying, we are suggesting the possibility that states are obliged to maintain the death penalty option, not that they must inflict that penalty in every individual case of a specified sort; hence we are not attempting to enter into the debate over mandatory death sentences, as invalidated in Lockett v. Ohio, 438 U. S. 586 (1978), and Woodson v. North Carolina, 428 U. S. 280 (1976). For relevant discussion, see Martha C.Nussbaum, Equity and Mercy, 22 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 83 (1993). 8. Roper v. Simmons, 125 S. Ct. 1183 (2005). Here is the heart of the Court’s discussion: As for deterrence, it is unclear whether the death penalty has a significant or even measurable deterrent effect on juveniles, as counsel for the petitioner acknowledged at oral argument. . . . [T]he absence of evidenc e of deterrent effect is of special concern because the same characteristics that render juveniles less culpable than adults suggest as well that juveniles will be less susceptible to deterrence. . . To the extent the juvenile death penalty might have residual deterrent effect, it is worth noting that the punishment of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is itself a severe sanction, in particular for a young person. Id. at 1196. These are speculations at best, and they do not engage with the empirical literature; of course, that literature does not dispose of the question whether juveniles are deterred by the death penalty. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 06 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 imaginable empirical findings, government is obliged to provide far more protection than it now does, and it should not be permitted to hide behind unhelpful distinctions between acts and omissions. The foundation for our argument is a significant bod y of recent evidence that capital punishment may well have a deterrent effect, possibly a quite powerful one. 9 A leading national study suggests that each execution prevents some eighteen murders, on average. 0 If the current evidence is even roughly correct—a question to which we shall return—then a refusal to impose capital punishment will effectively condemn numerous innocent people to death. States that choose life imprisonment, when they might choose capital punishment, are ensuring the deaths of a large number of innocent people. 11 On moral grounds, a choice that effectively condemns large numbers of people to death seems objectionable to say the least.For those who are inclined to be skeptical of capital punishment for moral reasons—a group that includes one of the current authors—the task is to consider the possibility that the failure to impose capital punishment is, prima facie and all things considered, a serious moral wrong. Judgments of thi s sort are often taken to require a controversial commitment to a consequentialist view about the foundations of moral evaluation. One of our principal points, however, is that the choice between consequentialist and deontological approaches to morality is not crucial here.We suggest that, on certain empirical assumptions, theorists of both stripes might converge on the idea that capital punishment is morally obligatory. On 9. See, e. g. , Hashem Dezhbakhsh et al. , Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Postmoratorium Panel Data, 5 AM. L. & ECON. REV. 344 (2003); H. Naci Mocan & R. Kaj Gittings, Getting Off Death Row: Commuted Sentences and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment, 46 J. L. & ECON. 453, 453 (2003); Joanna M. Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punishment’s Differing Impacts Among States, 104 MICH. L. REV. 03 (2005) [hereinafter Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization]; Joanna M. Shepherd, Murders of Passion, Exe cution Delays, and the Deterrence of Capital Punishment, 33 J. LEGAL STUD. 283, 308 (2004) [hereinafter Shepherd, Murders of Passion]; Paul R. Zimmerman, Estimates of the Deterrent Effect of Alternative Execution Methods in the United States, 65 AM. J. ECON. & SOC. (forthcoming 2006) [hereinafter Zimmerman, Alternative Execution Methods], available at http://papers. ssrn. com/sol3/papers. cfm? abstract_id=355783; Paul R. Zimmerman, State Executions, Deterrence, and the Incidence of Murder, 7 J. APPLIED ECON. 63, 163 (2004) [hereinafter Zimmerman, State Executions]. 10. See Dezhbakhsh et al. , supra note 9, at 344. In what follows, we will speak of each execution saving eighteen lives in the United States, on average. We are, of course, suppressing many issues in that formulation, simply for expository convenience. For one thing, that statistic is a national average, as we emphasize in Part IV. For another thing, future research might find that capital punishment has diminishing retu rns: even if the first 100 executions deter 1800 murders, it does not follow that another 1000 executions will deter another 18,000 murders.We will take these and like qualifications as understood in the discussion that follows. 11. In recent years, the number of murders in the United States has fluctuated between 15,000 and 24,000. FED. BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES tbl. 1 (2003), available at http://www. fbi. gov/ucr/03cius. htm. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 707 consequentialist grounds, the death penalty seems morally obligatory if it is the only or most effective means of preventing significant numbers of murders; much of our discussion will explore this point.For this reason, consequentialists should have little difficulty with our arguments. For deontologists, a killing is a wrong under most circumstances, and its wrongness does not depend on its consequences or its ef fects on overall welfare. Many deontologists (of course not all) believe that capital punishment counts as a moral wrong. But in the abstract, any deontological injunction against the wrongful infliction of death turns out to be indeterminate on the moral status of capital punishment if the death is necessary to prevent significant numbers of killings.The unstated assumption animating much opposition to capital punishment among intuitive deontologists is that capital punishment counts as an â€Å"action† by the state, while the refusal to impose it counts as an â€Å"omission,† and that the two are altogether different from the moral point of view. A related way to put this point is to suggest that capital punishment counts as a â€Å"killing,† while the failure to impose capital punishment counts as no such thing and hence is far less problematic on moral grounds. We shall investigate these claims in some detail.But we doubt that the distinction between state a ctions and state omissions can bear the moral weight given to it by the critics of capital punishment. Whatever its value as a moral concept where individuals are concerned, the act/omission distinction misfires in the general setting of government regulation. If government policies fail to protect people against air pollution, occupational risks, terrorism, or racial discrimination, it is inadequate to put great moral weight on the idea that the failure to act is a mere â€Å"omission. No one believes that government can avoid responsibility to protect people against serious dangers—for example, by refusing to enforce regulatory statutes—simply by contending that such refusals are unproblematic omissions. 12 If state governments impose light penalties on offenders or treat certain offenses (say, domestic violence) as unworthy of attention, they should not be able to escape public retribution by contending that they are simply refusing to act.Where government is conce rned, failures of protection, through refusals to punish and deter private misconduct, cannot be justified by pointing to the distinction between acts and omissions. It has even become common to speak of â€Å"risk-risk tradeoffs,† understood to arise when regulation of one risk (say, a risk associated with the use of DDT) gives rise to another risk (say, the spread of malaria, against which DDT has been effective). 13 Or suppose that an air pollutant creates adverse health effects 12.Indeed, agency inaction is frequently subject to judicial review. See Ashutosh Bhagwat, Three-Branch Monte, 72 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 157 (1996). 13. See generally RISK VERSUS RISK: TRADEOFFS IN PROTECTING HEALTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT (John D. Graham & Jonathan Baert Wiener eds. , 1995) (considering â€Å"risk-risk tradeoffs† on topics such as DDT, the use of estrogen for menopause, and clozapine theory SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 708 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 ut also has health benefits, as appears to be the case for ground-level ozone. 14 It is implausible to say that, for moral reasons, social planners should refuse to take account of such tradeoffs; there is general agreement that whether a particular substance ought to be regulated depends on the overall effect of regulation on human well-being. As an empirical matter, criminal law is pervaded by its own risk-risk tradeoffs. When the deterrent signal works, a failure to impose stringent penalties on certain crimes will increase the number of those crimes.A refusal to impose such penalties is, for that reason, problematic from the moral point of view. It should not be possible for an official—a governor, for example—to attempt to escape political retribution for failing to prevent domestic violence or environmental degradation by claiming that he is simply â€Å"failing to act. † The very idea of â€Å"equal protection of the laws,† in its oldest and most literal sense, attests to the importance of enforcing the criminal and civil law so as to safeguard the potential victims of private violence. 5 What we are suggesting is that to the extent that capital punishment saves more lives than it extinguishes, the death penalty produces a risk-risk tradeoff of its own—indeed, what we will call a life-life tradeoff. Of course, the presence of a life-life tradeoff does not resolve the capital punishment debate. By itself, the act of execution may be a wrong, in a way that cannot be said of an act of imposing civil or criminal penalties for, say, environmental degradation.But the existence of life-life tradeoffs raises the possibility that for those who oppose killing, a rejection of capital punishment is not necessarily mandated. On the contrary, it may well be morally compelled. At the very least, those who object to capital punishment, and who do so in the name of protecting life, must come to terms with the possibility that th e failure to inflict capital punishment will fail to protect life—and must, in our view, justify their position in ways that do not rely on question-begging claims about the distinction between state actions and state omissions, or between killing and letting die.We begin, in Part I, with the facts. Raising doubts about widely held beliefs based on older studies or partial information, recent studies suggest that capital punishment may well save lives. One leading study finds that as a national average, each execution deters some eighteen murders. Our question whether capital punishment is morally obligatory is motivated by these findings; our central concern is that foregoing any given execution may be equivalent to condemning some unidentified people to a premature and violent death.Of course, social science can always be disputed in this contentious domain, and spirited attacks have been made on the recent studies;16 hence, we mean to for schizophrenia). 14. See Am. Trucki ng Ass’ns, Inc. v. EPA, 175 F. 3d 1027, 1051-53 (D. C. Cir. 1999). 15. See RANDALL KENNEDY, RACE, CRIME, AND THE LAW (1997). 16. See Richard Berk, New Claims About Executions and General Deterrence: Deja SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 709 outline, rather than to defend, the relevant evidence here.But we think that to make progress on the moral issues, it is productive and even necessary to take those findings as given and consider their significance. Those who would like to abolish capital punishment, and who find the social science unconvincing, might find it useful to ask whether they would maintain their commitment to abolition if they were firmly persuaded that capital punishment does have a strong deterrent effect. We ask such people to suspend their empirical doubts in order to investigate the moral issues that we mean to raise here.In Part II, the centerpiece of the Article, we offer a few remarks on moral foundations and examine some standard objections to capital punishment that might seem plausible even in light of the current findings. We focus in particular on the view that capital punishment is objectionable because it requires affirmative and intentional state â€Å"action,† not merely an â€Å"omission. † The act/omission distinction, we suggest, systematically misfires when applied to government, which is a moral agent with distinctive features.The act/omission distinction may not even be intelligible in the context of government, which always faces a choice among policy regimes, and in that sense cannot help but â€Å"act. † Even if the distinction between acts and omissions can be rendered intelligible in regulatory settings, its moral relevance is obscure. Some acts are morally obligatory, while some omissions are morally culpable. If capital punishment has significant deterrent effects, we suggest that for government to omit to impose it is morally blameworthy, even on a deontological account of morality.Deontological accounts typically recognize a consequentialist override to baseline prohibitions. If each execution saves an average of eighteen lives, then it is plausible to think that the override is triggered, in turn triggering an obligation to adopt capital punishment. Once the act/omission distinction is rejected where government is concerned, it becomes clear that the most familiar, and plausible, objections to capital punishment deal with only one side of the ledger: the objections fail to take account of the exceedingly arbitrary deaths that capital punishment may deter.The realm of homicide, as we shall call it, is replete with its own arbitrariness. We consider rule-of-law concerns about the irreversibility of capital punishment and its possibly random or invidious administration, a strict scrutiny principle that capital punishment should not be permitted if other means for producing the same le vel of deterrence are available, and concerns about slippery slopes. We suggest that while some of these complaints have Vu All over Again? , 2 J. EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUD. 03 (2005); see also Deterrence and the Death Penalty: A Critical Review of New Evidence: Hearings on the Future of Capital Punishment in the State of New York Before the New York State Assemb. Standing Comm. on Codes, Assemb. Standing Comm. on Judiciary, and Assemb. Standing Comm. on Correction, 2005 Leg. , 228th Sess. 1-12 (N. Y. 2005) (statement of Jeffrey Fagan, Professor of Law and Pub. Health, Columbia Univ. ), available at www. deathpenaltyinfo. org/FaganTestimony. pdf [hereinafter Deterrence and the Death Penalty].For a response to Fagan’s testimony, see generally Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization, supra note 9. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 710 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 merit, they do not count as decisive objections to capital punishment, because they emb ody a flawed version of the act/omission distinction and generally overlook the fact that the moral objections to capital punishment apply even more strongly to the murders that capital punishment apparently deters.In Part III, we conjecture that various cognitive and social mechanisms, lacking any claim to moral relevance, may cause many individuals and groups to subscribe to untenable versions of the distinction between acts and omissions or to discount the lifesaving potential of capital punishment while exaggerating the harms that it causes. An important concern here is a sort of misplaced concreteness, stemming from heuristics such as salience and availability. The single person executed is often more visible nd more salient in public discourse than any abstract statistical persons whose murders might be deterred by a single execution. If those people, and their names and faces, were highly visible, we suspect that many of the objections to capital punishment would at least be shaken. As environmentalists have often argued, â€Å"statistical persons† should not be treated as irrelevant abstractions. 17 The point holds for criminal justice no less than for pollution controls. Part IV expands upon the implications of our view and examines some unresolved puzzles.Here we emphasize that we hold no brief for capital punishment across all contexts or in the abstract. The crucial question is what the facts show in particular domains. We mean to include here a plea not only for continuing assessment of the disputed evidence, but also for a disaggregated approach. Future research and resulting policies would do well to take separate account of various regions and of various classes of offenders and offenses. We also emphasize that our argument is limited to the setting of life-life tradeoffs— in which the taking of a life by the state will reduce the number of lives taken overall.We express no view about cases in which that condition does not holdâ⠂¬â€for example, the possibility of capital punishment for serious offenses other than killing, with rape being the principal historical example, and with rape of children being a currently contested problem. Such cases involve distinctively difficult moral problems that we mean to bracket here. A brief conclusion follows. I. EVIDENCE For many years, the deterrent effect of capital punishment was sharply disputed. 18 In the 1970s, Isaac Ehrlich conducted the first multivariate 17. Lisa Heinzerling, The Rights of Statistical People, 24 HARV.ENVTL. L. REV. 189, 189 (2000). 18. Compare, e. g. , Isaac Ehrlich, The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death, 65 AM. ECON. REV. 397, 398 (1975) (estimating each execution deters eight murders), with William J. Bowers & Glenn L. Pierce, The Illusion of Deterrence in Isaac Ehrlich’s Research on Capital Punishment, 85 YALE L. J. 187, 187 (1975) (finding Ehrlich’s data and methods unreliable). A good over view is Robert Weisberg, The Death SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 711 egression analyses of the death penalty, based on time-series data from 1933 to 1967, and concluded that each execution deterred as many as eight murders. 19 But subsequent studies raised many questions about Ehrlich’s conclusions—by showing, for example, that the deterrent effects of the death penalty would be eliminated if data from 1965 through 1969 were eliminated. 20 It would be fair to say that the deterrence hypothesis could not be confirmed by the studies that have been completed in the twenty years after Ehrlich first wrote. 21 More recent evidence, however, has given new life to Ehrlich’s hypothesis. 2 A wave of sophisticated multiple regression studies have exploited a newly available form of data, so-called â€Å"panel data,† that uses all information from a set of units (states or counties ) and follows that data over an extended period of time. A leading study used county-level panel data from 3054 U. S. counties between 1977 and 1996. 23 The authors found that the murder rate is significantly reduced by both death sentences and executions. The most striking finding was that on average, each execution results in eighteen fewer murders. 24 Other econometric studies also find a substantial deterrent effect.In two papers, Paul Zimmerman uses state-level panel data from 1978 onwards to measure the deterrent effect of execution rates and execution methods. He estimates that each execution deters an average of fourteen murders. 25 Using state-level data from 1977 to 1997, H. Naci Mocan and R. Kaj Gittings find that each execution deters five murders on average. 26 They also find that increases in the murder rate result when people are removed from death row Penalty Meets Social Science: Deterrence and Jury Behavior Under New Scrutiny, 1 ANN. REV. L. & SOC. SCI. 151 (2005). 19.See Ehrlich, supra note 18, at 398; Isaac Ehrlich, Capital Punishment and Deterrence: Some Further Thoughts and Additional Evidence, 85 J. POL. ECON. 741 (1977). 20. For this point and an overview of many other criticisms of Ehrlich’s conclusions, see Richard O. Lempert, Desert and Deterrence: An Assessment of the Moral Bases of the Case for Capital Punishment, 79 MICH. L. REV. 1177 (1981). 21. See id. ; Weisberg, supra note 18, at 155-57. 22. Even as this evidence was being developed, one of us predicted, perhaps rashly, that the debate would remain inconclusive for the foreseeable future. See Adrian Vermeule, Interpretive Choice, 75 N.Y. U. L. REV. 74, 100-01 (2000). 23. See Dezhbakhsh et al. , supra note 9, at 359. 24. Id. at 373. 25. Zimmerman, Alternative Execution Methods, supra note 9; Zimmerman, State Executions, supra note 9, at 190. 26. Mocan & Gittings, supra note 9, at 453. Notably, no clear evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment emerges from L awrence Katz et al. , Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence, 5 AM. L. & ECON. REV. 318, 330 (2003), which finds that the estimate of deterrence is extremely sensitive to the choice of specification, with the largest estimate paralleling that in Ehrlich, supra note 18.Note, however, that the principal finding in Katz et al. , supra, is that prison deaths do have a strong deterrent effect and a stunningly large one—with each prison death producing a reduction of â€Å"30-100 violent crimes and a similar number of property crimes. † Id. at 340. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 712 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 and when death sentences are commuted. 27 A study by Joanna Shepherd, based on data from all states from 1997 to 1999, finds that each death sentence deters 4. 5 murders and that an execution deters 3 additional murders. 8 Her study also investigates the contested question whether executions deter crimes of passion and murders by intimates. Although intuition might suggest that such crimes cannot be deterred, her own finding is clear: all categories of murder are deterred by capital punishment. 29 The deterrent effect of the death penalty is also found to be a function of the length of waits on death row, with a murder deterred for every 2. 75 years of reduction in the period before execution. 30 Importantly, this study finds that the deterrent effect of capital punishment protects African-American victims even more than whites. 1 In the period between 1972 and 1976, the Supreme Court produced an effective moratorium on capital punishment, and an extensive unpublished study exploits that fact to estimate the deterrent effect. Using state-level data from 1977 to 1999, the authors make before-and-after comparisons, focusing on the murder rate in each state before and after the death penalty was suspended and reinstated. 32 The authors find a substantial deterrent effect: â€Å"[T]he data indicate that murder rates increased immediately after the moratorium was imposed and decreased directly after the moratorium was lifted, providing support for the deterrence hypothesis. 33 A recent study offers more refined findings. 34 Disaggregating the data on a state-by-state basis, Joanna Shepherd finds that the nationwide deterrent effect of capital punishment is entirely driven by only six states—and that no deterrent effect can be found in the twenty-one other states that have restored capital punishment. 35 What distinguishes the six from the twenty-one? The answer, she contends, lies in the fact that states showing a deterrent effect are executing more people than states that are not. In fact the data show a 27. Mocan & Gittings, supra note 9, at 453, 456. 8. Shepherd, Murders of Passion, supra note 9, at 308. 29. Id. at 305. Shepherd notes: Many researchers have argued that some types of murders cannot be deterred: they assert that murders committed during arguments or oth er crime-of-passion moments are not premeditated and therefore undeterrable. My results indicate that this assertion is wrong: the rates of crime-of-passion and murders by intimates—crimes previously believed to be undeterrable—all decrease in execution months. Id. 30. Id. at 283. 31. Id. at 308. 32. Hashem Dezhbakhsh & Joanna M.Shepherd, The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Evidence from a â€Å"Judicial Experiment,† at tbls. 3-4 (Am. Law & Economics Ass’n Working Paper No. 18, 2004), available at http://law. bepress. com/cgi/viewcontent. cgi? article=1017&context=alea (last visited Dec. 1, 2005). 33. Id. at 3-4. 34. Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization, supra note 9. 35. Id. at 207. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 713 â€Å"threshold effect†: deterrence is found in states that had at least nine total executions between 1977 and 1996.In states below th at threshold, no deterrence effect can be found. 36 This finding is intuitively plausible. Unless executions reach a certain level, murderers may act as if the death penalty is so improbable as not to be worthy of concern. 37 Shepherd’s main lesson is that once the level of executions reaches a certain level, the deterrent effect of capital punishment is substantial. All in all, the recent evidence of a deterrent effect from capital punishment seems impressive, especially in light of its â€Å"apparent power and unanimity. 38 But in studies of this kind, it is hard to control for confounding variables, and reasonable doubts inevitably remain. Most broadly, skeptics are likely to question the mechanisms by which capital punishment is said to have a deterrent effect. In the skeptical view, many murderers lack a clear sense of the likelihood and perhaps even the existence of executions in their states; further problems for the deterrence claim are introduced by the fact that ca pital punishment is imposed infrequently and after long delays.Emphasizing the weakness of the deterrent signal, Steven Levitt has suggested that â€Å"it is hard to believe that fear of execution would be a driving force in a rational criminal’s calculus in modern America. †39 And, of course, some criminals do not act rationally: many murders are committed in a passionate state that does not lend itself to an all-things-considered analysis on the part of perpetrators. More narrowly, it remains possible that the recent findings will be exposed as statistical artifacts or found to rest on flawed econometric methods.Work by Richard Berk, based on his independent review of the state-level panel data from Mocan and Gittings, offers multiple objections to those authors’ finding of deterrence. 40 For example, Texas executes more people than any other state, and when Texas is removed from the data, the evidence of deterrence is severely weakened. 41 Removal of the appa rent â€Å"outlier state[s]† that execute the largest numbers of people seems to eliminate the finding of deterrence 36. Id. at 239-41. 37.Less intuitively, Shepherd finds that in thirteen of the states that had capital punishment but executed few people, capital punishment actually increased the murder rate. She attributes this puzzling result to what she calls the â€Å"brutalization effect,† by which capital punishment devalues human life and teaches people about the legitimacy of vengeance. Id. at 40-41. 38. See Weisberg, supra note 18, at 159. 39. See Steven D. Levitt, Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not, 18 J. ECON. PERSP. 163, 175 (2004). 0. See Berk, supra note 16; Deterrence and the Death Penalty, supra note 16, at 6-12. 41. Berk, supra note 16, at 320. It has also been objected that the studies do not take account of the availability of sentences that involve life without the possibility of paro le; such sentences might have a deterrent effect equal to or beyond that of capital punishment. See Deterrence and the Death Penalty, supra note 16. A response to Berk can found in Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization, supra note 9. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 714STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 altogether. 42 Berk concludes that the findings of Mocan and Gittings are driven by six states with more than five executions each year. Berk, however, proceeds by presenting data in graphic form; he offers no regression analyses in support of his criticism. These concerns about the evidence should be taken as useful cautions. At the level of theory, it is plausible that if criminals are fully rational, they should not be deterred by infrequent and much-delayed executions; the deterrent signal may well be too weak to affect their behavior.But suppose that like most people, criminals are boundedly rational, assessing probabilities with the aid of heurist ics. 43 If executions are highly salient and cognitively available, some prospective murderers will overestimate their likelihood, and will be deterred as a result. Other prospective murderers will not pay much attention to the fact that execution is unlikely, focusing instead on the badness of the outcome (execution) rather than its low probability. 44 Few murderers are likely to assess the deterrent signal by multiplying the harm of execution against its likelihood.If this is so, then the deterrent signal will be larger than might be suggested by the product of that multiplication. Levitt’s theoretical claim assumes that prospective murderers are largely rational in their reaction to the death penalty and its probability—standing by itself, a plausible conjecture but no more. As for the recent data, it is true that evidence of deterrence is reduced or eliminated through the removal of Texas and other states in which executions are most common and in which evidence of deterrence is strongest. 5 But removal of those states seems to be an odd way to resolve the contested questions. States having the largest numbers of executions are most likely to deter, and it does not seem to make sense to exclude those states as â€Å"outliers. †46 By way of comparison, imagine a study attempting to determine what characteristics of baseball teams most increase the chance of winning the World Series. Imagine also a criticism of the study, parallel to Berk’s, which complained that data about the New York Yankees should be thrown out, on the ground that the Yankees have won so many times as to be â€Å"outliers. This would be an odd idea, because empiricists must go where the evidence is; in the case of capital punishment, the outliers provide much of the relevant evidence. Recall here Shepherd’s finding, compatible with the analysis of some skeptics, that the deterrent effect occurs only in states in which there is some threshold 42. Berk, supra note 16, at 320-24; Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization, supra note 9. 43. On bounded rationality in general, see RICHARD H. THALER, QUASI-RATIONAL ECONOMICS (1991). 44.See Yuval Rottenstreich & Christopher K. Hsee, Money, Kisses, and Electric Shocks: On the Affective Psychology of Risk, 12 PSYCHOL. SCI. 185, 188 (2001); Cass R. Sunstein, Probability Neglect: Emotions, Worst Cases, and Law, 112 YALE L. J. 61 (2002). 45. See Shepherd, Deterrence Versus Brutalization, supra note 9. 46. Id. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 715 number of executions. 47 But let us suppose, plausibly, that the evidence of deterrence remains inconclusive.Even so, it would not follow that the death penalty as such fails to deter. As Shepherd also finds in her most recent study,48 more frequent executions, carried out in closer proximity to convictions, are predicted to amplify the deterrent signal for both ration al and boundedly rational criminals. We can go further. A degree of doubt, with respect to the current system, need not be taken to suggest that existing evidence is irrelevant for purposes of policy and law.In regulation as a whole, it is common to embrace some version of the precautionary principle49—the idea that steps should be taken to prevent significant harm even if cause-and-effect relationships remain unclear and even if the risk is not likely to come to fruition. Even if we reject strong versions of the precautionary principle,50 it hardly seems sensible that governments should ignore evidence demonstrating a significant possibility that a certain step will save large numbers of innocent lives.For capital punishment, critics often seem to assume that evidence on deterrent effects should be ignored if reasonable questions can be raised about the evidence’s reliability. But as a general rule, this is implausible. In most contexts, the existence of legitimate qu estions is hardly an adequate reason to ignore evidence of severe harm. If it were, many environmental controls would be in serious jeopardy. 51 We do not mean to suggest that government should commit what many people consider to be, prima facie, a serious moral wrong simply on the basis of speculation that this action will do some good.But a degree of reasonable doubt need not be taken as sufficient to doom a form of punishment if there is a significant possibility that it will save large numbers of lives. It is possible that capital punishment saves lives on net, even if it has zero deterrent effect. A life-life tradeoff may arise in several ways. One possibility, the one we focus on here, is that capital punishment deters homicides. Another possibility is that capital punishment has no deterrent effect, but saves lives just 7. See id. 48. Id. 49. For overviews of the precautionary principle and related issues, see INTERPRETING THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE (Tim O’Riordan & J ames Cameron eds. , 1994); ARIE TROUWBORST, EVOLUTION AND STATUS OF THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE IN INTERNATIONAL LAW (2002). 50. See, e. g. , Julian Morris, Defining the Precautionary Principle, in RETHINKING RISK AND THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE (Julian Morris ed. , 2000). 51.Indeed, those skeptical of capital punishment invoke evidence to the effect that capital punishment did not deter, and argue, plausibly, that it would be a mistake to wait for definitive evidence before ceasing with a punishment that could not be shown to reduce homicide. See Lempert, supra note 20, at 1222-24. This is a kind of precautionary principle, arguing against the most aggressive forms of punishment if the evidence suggested that they did not deter. We are suggesting the possibility of a mirror-image precautionary principle when the evidence goes the other way. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN.L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 716 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 by incapacitating those who would otherwise k ill again in the future. 52 Consider those jurisdictions that eschew capital punishment altogether. What sanction can such jurisdictions really apply to those who have already been sentenced to life in prison without parole? Sentences of this sort may take more lives overall by increasing the number of essentially unpunishable withinprison homicides of guards and fellow inmates. 53 Many murderers are killed in prison even in states that lack the death penalty. 4 And if murderers are eventually paroled into the general population, some of them will kill again. Overall, it is quite possible that the permanent incapacitation of murderers through execution might save lives on net. A finding that capital punishment deters—and deterrence is our focus here—is sufficient but not necessary to find a life-life tradeoff. In any event, our goal here is not to reach a final judgment about the evidence. It is to assess capital punishment given the assumption of a substantial deterre nt effect.In what follows, therefore, we will stipulate to the validity of the evidence and consider its implications for morality and law. Those who doubt the evidence might ask themselves how they would assess the moral questions if they were ultimately convinced that life-life tradeoffs were actually involved—as, for example, in hostage situations in which officials are authorized to use deadly force to protect the lives of innocent people. II. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: MORAL FOUNDATIONS AND FOUR OBJECTIONS Assume, then, that capital punishment does save a significant number of innocent lives.On what assumptions should that form of punishment be deemed morally unacceptable, rather than morally obligatory? Why should the deaths of those convicted of capital murder, an overwhelmingly large fraction of whom are guilty in fact, be considered a more serious moral wrong than the deaths of a more numerous group who are certainly innocents? We consider, and ultimately reject, several re sponses. Our first general contention is that opposition to capital punishment trades on a form of the distinction between acts and omissions.Whatever the general force of that distinction, its application to government systematically fails, because government is a distinctive kind of moral agent. Our second general contention is that, apart from direct state involvement, the features that make capital punishment morally objectionable to its critics are also features of the very murders that capital punishment deters. The principal difference, on the empirical assumptions we are making, is that in a legal regime without capital punishment far more people die, and those people are innocent of any 2. See Ronald J. Allen & Amy Shavell, Further Reflections on the Guillotine, 95 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 625, 630-31 (2005). 53. See id. at 630 n. 9. 54. See Katz et al. , supra note 26, at 340. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHME NT MORALLY REQUIRED? 717 wrongdoing. No one denies that arbitrariness in the system of capital punishment is a serious problem. But even if the existing system is viewed in its worst light, it involves far less arbitrariness than does the realm of homicide.Let us begin, however, with foundational issues. A. Morality and Death On a standard view, it is impossible to come to terms with the moral questions about capital punishment without saying something about the foundations of moral judgments. We will suggest, however, that sectarian commitments at the foundational level are for the most part irrelevant to the issues here. If it is stipulated that substantial deterrence exists, both consequentialist and deontological accounts of morality will or should converge upon the view that capital punishment is morally obligatory.Consequentialists will come to that conclusion because capital punishment minimizes killings overall. Deontologists will do so because an opposition to killing is, b y itself, indeterminate in the face of life-life tradeoffs; because a legal regime with capital punishment has a strong claim to be more respectful of life’s value than does a legal regime lacking capital punishment; and because modern deontologists typically subscribe to a consequentialist override or escape hatch, one that makes otherwise mpermissible actions obligatory if necessary to prevent many deaths—precisely what we are assuming is true of capital punishment. Only those deontologists who both insist upon a strong distinction between state actions and state omissions and who reject a consequentialist override will believe the deterrent effect of capital punishment to be irrelevant in principle. Suppose that we accept consequentialism and believe that government actions should be evaluated in terms of their effects on aggregate welfare.If we do so, the evidence of deterrence strongly supports a moral argument in favor of the death penalty—a form of punish ment that, by hypothesis, seems to produce a net gain in overall welfare. Of course, there are many complications here; for example, the welfare of many people might increase as a result of knowing that capital punishment exists, and the welfare of many other people might decrease for the same reason. A full consequentialist calculus would require a more elaborate assessment than we aim to provide here.The only point is that if capital punishment produces significantly fewer deaths on balance, there should be a strong consequentialist presumption on its behalf; any argument against capital punishment, on consequentialist grounds, will face a steep uphill struggle. To be sure, it is also possible to imagine forms of consequentialism that reject welfarism as implausibly reductionist and see violations of rights as part of the set of consequences that must be taken into account in deciding what to SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 03 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 718 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol . 58:703 do. 55 For some such consequentialists, killings are, under ordinary circumstances, a violation of rights, and this point is highly relevant to any judgment about killings. But even if the point is accepted, capital punishment may be required, not prohibited, on consequentialist grounds, simply because and to the extent that it minimizes rights violations. Private murders also violate rights, and the rights-respecting consequentialist must take those actions into account.But imagine that we are deontologists, believing that actions by government and others should not be evaluated in consequentialist terms; how can capital punishment be morally permissible, let alone obligatory? For some deontologists, capital punishment is obligatory for moral reasons alone. 56 But suppose, as other deontologists believe, that under ordinary circumstances, the state’s killing of a human being is a wrong and that its wrongness does not depend on an inquiry into whether the action prod uces a net increase in welfare.For many critics of capital punishment, a deontological intuition is central; evidence of deterrence is irrelevant because moral wrongdoing by the state is not justified even if it can be defended on utilitarian grounds. Compare a situation in which a state seeks to kill an innocent person, knowing that the execution will prevent a number of private killings; deontologists believe that the unjustified execution cannot be supported even if the state is secure in its knowledge of the execution’s beneficial effects. Of course, it is contentious to claim that capital punishment is a moral wrong.But if it is, then significant deterrence might be entirely beside the point. It is simply true that many intuitive objections to capital punishment rely on a belief of this kind: just as execution of an innocent person is a moral wrong, one that cannot be justified on consequentialist grounds, so too the execution of a guilty person is a moral wrong, whateve r the evidence shows. Despite all this, our claims here do not depend on accepting consequentialism or rejecting the deontological objection to evaluating unjustified killings in consequentialist terms.The argument is instead that by itself and in the abstract, this objection is indeterminate on the moral status of capital punishment. To the extent possible, we intend to bracket the most fundamental questions and to suggest that whatever one’s view of the foundations of morality, the objection to the death penalty is difficult to sustain under the empirical assumptions that we have traced. Taken in its most sympathetic light, a deontological objection to capital punishment is unconvincing if states that refuse to impose the death penalty produce, by that 55.Amartya Sen, Rights and Agency, 11 PHIL. & PUB. AFF. 3, 15-19 (1982). 56. See Pojman, supra note 4, at 58-59. As noted below, the case of Israel is a good test for such deontologists; Israel does not impose the death penal ty, in part on the ground that executions of terrorists would likely increase terrorism. Do deontologists committed to capital punishment believe that Israel is acting immorally? In our view, they ought not to do so, at least if the empirical assumption is right and if the protection of lives is what morality requires. SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN.L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 719 very refusal, significant numbers of additional deaths. Recall the realm of homicide: for deontologists who emphasize life’s value and object to the death penalty, the problem is acute if the refusal to impose that penalty predictably leads to a significant number of additional murders. In a hostage situation, police officers are permitted to kill (execute) those who have taken hostages if this step is reasonably deemed necessary to save those who have been taken hostage.If the evidence of deterrence is convincing, why is capital punishment so different in principle? Of course, these points might be unresponsive to those who believe that execution of a guilty person is morally equivalent to execution of an innocent person and not properly subject to a recognition of life-life tradeoffs. We will explore this position in more detail below. And we could envision a form of deontology that refuses any exercise in aggregation—one that would refuse to authorize, or compel, a violation of rights even if the violation is necessary to prevent a significantly larger number of rights violations.But most modern deontologists reject this position, instead admitting a consequentialist override to baseline deontological prohibitions. 57 Although the threshold at which the consequentialist override is triggered varies with different accounts, we suggest below that if each execution deters some eighteen murders, the override is plausibly triggered. To distill these points, the only deontological accounts that are inconsistent with our argument are those that both (1) embrace a distinction between state actions and state omissions and (2) reject a consequentialist override.To those who subscribe to this complex of views, and who consider capital punishment a violation of rights, our argument will not be convincing. In the end, however, we believe that it is difficult to sustain the set of moral assumptions that would bar capital punishment if it is the best means of preventing significant numbers of innocent deaths. Indeed, we believe that many of those who think that they hold those assumptions are motivated by other considerations—especially a failure to give full weight to statistical lives—on which we focus in Part III. B.Acts and Omissions A natural response to our basic concern would invoke the widespread intuition that capital punishment involves intentional state â€Å"action,† while the failure to deter private murders is merely an â€Å"omission† by the state. In our view, this appealing and intuitive line of argument goes rather badly wrong. The critics of capital punishment have been led astray by uncritically applying the act/omission distinction to a regulatory setting. Their position condemns the â€Å"active† infliction of death by governments but does not condemn the â€Å"inactive† production of death that comes from the refusal to maintain a system 57.For an overview, see Larry Alexander, Deontology at the Threshold, 37 SAN DIEGO L. REV. 893, 898-901 (2000). SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM 720 STANFORD LAW REVIEW [Vol. 58:703 of capital punishment. The basic problem is that even if this selective condemnation can be justified at the level of individual behavior, it is difficult to defend for governments. 58 A great deal of work has to be done to explain why â€Å"inactive,† but causal, government decisions should not be part of the moral calculus.Suppose that we endorse the deontological pos ition that it is wrong to take human lives, even if overall welfare is promoted by taking them. Why does the system of capital punishment violate that position, if the failure to impose capital punishment also takes lives? Perhaps our argument about unjustified selectivity is blind to morally relevant factors that condemn capital punishment and that buttress the act/omission distinction in this context. There are two possible points here, one involving intention and the other involving causation.First, a government (acting through agents) that engages in capital punishment intends to take lives; it seeks to kill. A government that does not engage in capital punishment, and therefore provides less deterrence, does not intend to kill. The deaths that result are the unintended and unsought byproduct of an effort to respect life. Surely— it might be said—this is a morally relevant difference. Second, a government that inflicts capital punishment ensures a simple and direct causal chain between its own behavior and the taking of human lives.When a government rejects capital punishment, the causal chain is much more complex; the taking of human lives is an indirect consequence of the government’s decision, one that is mediated by the actions of a murderer. The government authorizes its agents to inflict capital punishment, but it does not authorize private parties to murder; indeed, it forbids murder. Surely that is a morally relevant difference, too. We will begin, in Part II. B. 1, with questions about whether the act/omission distinction is conceptually intelligible in regulatory settings.Here the suggestion is that there just is no way to speak or think coherently about government â€Å"actions† as opposed to government â€Å"omissions,† because government cannot help but act, in some way or another, when choosing how individuals are to be regulated. In Part II. B. 2, we suggest that the distinction between government acts and omissions, even if conceptually coherent, is not morally relevant to the question of capital punishment. Some governmental actions are morally obligatory, and some governmental omissions are blameworthy.In this setting, we suggest, government is morally obligated to adopt capital punishment and morally at fault if it declines to do so. 1. Is the act/omission distinction coherent with respect to government? In our view, any effort to distinguish between acts and omissions goes 58. Compare debates over going to war: Some pacifists insist, correctly, that acts of war will result in the loss of life, including civilian life. But a refusal to go to war will often result in the loss of life, including civilian life.SUNSTEIN & VERMEULE 58 STAN. L. REV. 703 1/9/2006 10:51:05 AM December 2005] IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? 721 wrong by overlooking the distinctive features of government as a moral agent. If correct, this point has broad implications for criminal and civil law. Whate ver the general status of the act/omission distinction as a matter of moral philosophy,59 the distinction is least impressive when applied to government, because the most plausible underlying considerations do not apply to official actors. 0 The most fundamental point is that, unlike individuals, governments always and necessarily face a choice between or among possible policies for regulating third parties. The distinction between acts and omissions may not be intelligible in this context, and even if it is, the distinction does not make a morally relevant difference. Most generally, government is in the business of creating permissions and prohibitions. When it explicitly or implicitly authorizes private action, it is not omitting to do anything or refusing to act. 1 Moreover, the distinction between authorized and unauthorized private action—for example, private killing— becomes obscure when the government formally forbids private action but chooses a set of policy instruments that do not adequately or fully discourage it. To be sure, a system of punishments that only weakly deters homicide, relative to other feasible punishments, does not quite authorize homicide, but that system is not properly characterized as an omission, and little turns on whether it can be so characterized.Suppose, for example, that government fails to characterize certain actions—say, sexual harassment—as tortious or violative of civil rights law and that it therefore permits employers to harass employees as they choose or to discharge employees for failing to submit to sexual harassment. It would be unhelpful to characterize the result as a product of governmental â€Å"inaction. † If employers are permitted to discharge employees for refusing to submit to sexual harassment, it is because the law is allocating certain entitlements to employers rather than employees. Or consider the context of ordinary torts.When Homeowner B sues Factory A over air pollution, a decision not to rule for Homeowner B is not a form of inaction: it is the allocation to Factory A of a property right to pollute. In such cases, an apparent government omission is an action simply because it is an allocation of legal rights. Any decision that allocates such rights, by creating entitlements 59. For discussion of the philosophical controversy over acts and omissions, see generally RONALD DWORKIN, LIFE’S DOMINION: AN ARGUMENT ABOUT ABORTION, EUTHANASIA, AND INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM (1993); Frances M.Kamm, Abortion and the Value of Life: A Discussion of Life’s Dominion, 95 COLUM. L. REV. 160 (1995) (reviewing DWORKIN, supra); Tom Stacy, Acts, Omissions, and the Necessity of Killing Innocents, 29 AM. J. CRIM. L. 481 (2002). 60. Here we proceed in the spirit of Robert Goodin by treating government as a distinctive sort of moral agen