According to both deontologists and consequentialists, if there is a reason to promote the general happiness – or to promote any other state of affairs unrelated to one's own projects or self-interest – then the reason must apply to everyone. This view seems almost self-evident; to challenge it is to challenge the way we think of moral reasons. I contend, however, that the view depends on the unwarranted assumption that the only way to restrict the application scope of a reason for action is by restricting it to those agents whose interests or projects are involved in the reason. In fact normative theories may coherently restrict application scopes in other ways. Thus we must take seriously the possibility that the reason to promote the general happiness, although genuine, does not apply to everyone.

Restorative justice should have greater weight as a criterion in criminal justice sentencing practice. It permits a realistic recognition of the kinds of harm and damage caused by offences, and encourages individualized non-custodial sentencing options as ways of addressing these harms. Non-custodial sentences have proven more effective than incarceration in securing social reconciliation and preventing recidivism, and they avoid the serious social and personal costs of imprisonment. This paper argues in support of restorative justice as a guiding idea in sentencing. As part of this defence, it considers whether the use of the idea of restorative justice will conflate criminal law with civil law or displace the authority of the criminal courts, and whether the sentences it recommends are best thought of as punishments or alternatives to punishment.

This article criticizes the standard way philosophers pose issues about the core practices of criminal justice institutions. Attempting to get at some of the presuppositions of posing these issues in terms of punishment, I construct a revised version of Rawls's ‘telishment’ case, a revision based on actual features of contemporary criminal justice practices in the USA. In addressing the implications of ‘racialment’, as I call it, some connections are made to current philosophical discussions about race. I conclude with brief remarks about the importance of race to philosophical discussion as such.

The paper examines one objection to the suggestion that, rather than being subjected to extended prison sentences on the one hand, or simply released on the other, dangerous offenders should be in principle liable to some form of civil detention on completion of their normal sentences. This objection raises the spectre of a ‘social harm reduction system’, pursuing various reductivist means outside the criminal justice system. The objection also threatens to undermine dualist theories of punishment, theories which combine reductivist and retributivist considerations. The paper attempts to refute the objection by holding that a wedge can be driven between incapacitation and other reductivist measures, and hints at a possibly new version of dualism in the process.