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Brian Rosebury

University of Central Lancashire, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Faculty Member

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Brian Rosebury works as a philosopher, historian of ideas, and writer on literature.

Since the 1990s he has worked mainly in moral and political philosophy, focusing especially on questions of moral responsibility, reciprocity, retribution and punishment. His first substantial paper in this field ("Moral responsibility and 'moral luck'") appeared in Philosophical Review in 1995. More recently, he has published articles in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2008), Utilitas (2009), Criminal Law and Philosophy (2011), and Criminal Justice Ethics (2011)

In literary studies and aesthetics, his works include Art and Desire: a study in the aesthetics of fiction (Palgrave 1988), Tolkien: a Cultural Phenomenon (Palgrave, 2003), and articles in the British Journal of Aesthetics (1979, 1997, 2000).
Phone: +44(0)1772 893037
Address: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
United Kingdom

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Papers by Brian Rosebury

Hopkins: A Note on Scansion

The Cambridge Quarterly, 1979

Fiction, Emotion and ’Belief’: A Reply to Eva Schaper

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 1979

The paper argues that our emotions in response to fictional representations are best explained, n... more The paper argues that our emotions in response to fictional representations are best explained, not as requiring a suspension of disbelief, but as resembling the emotions we feel when we propound a hypothetical case to ourselves, such as the imagined happiness or suffering of ourselves or another. In reading fiction we voluntarily participate in a hypothesis represented by the work. If this explanation is accepted, we can retain the view that beliefs always entail commitment to the reality of what is believed.

Comment pouvons-nous etre emus par une fiction par laquelle nous connaissons des comptes rendus ou des representations d'evenements qui ne sont pas reellement arrives? E. Schaper critique l'hypothese de Coleridge d'une "suspension volontaire de la non-croyance" de la part de l'auditeur ou du lecteur. L'A. montre que si sa solution est meilleure d'un point de vue psychologique que la precedente, elle ne resoud cependant pas le paradoxe.

Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien

Tolkien Studies, 2008

On Punishing Emotions

Ratio Juris, 2003

This paper challenges recent influential arguments which would encourage legislators and courts t... more This paper challenges recent influential arguments which would encourage legislators and courts to give weight to an assessment of the "evaluative judgements" expressed by the emotions which motivate crimes. While accepting the claim of Kahan and Nussbaum and others that emotions, other than moods, have intentional objects ("the cognitive conception"), and are not mere impulses which bypass cognition ("the mechanistic conception"), it suggests the following criticisms of their analysis. First, the concept of an emotional "evaluative judgement" tends to elide the distinction between (misleadingly named) "judgements" that are merely the sense of an emotion, and do not have the character of acts, and deliberative emotional judgements that do resemble acts and so properly fall within the corrective scope of the law. Second, intentional emotions are empowered by pre-intentional psychological resources which are less amenable than intentional states to the agent's conscious supervision: The traditional recognition of "infirmity" in mitigation of crimes uncharacteristic of the criminal's overall conduct towards others is justified by the unpredictable action of these pre-intentional elements and can survive the abandonment of the mechanistic conception of emotion.

Respect for Just Revenge

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2008

The paper considers acts of private (in the sense of individually motivated and extralegal) reven... more The paper considers acts of private (in the sense of individually motivated and extralegal) revenge, and draws attention to a special kind of judgement we may make of such acts. While endorsing the general view that an act of private revenge must be morally wrong, it maintains that under certain special conditions (which include its being just) it is susceptible of a rational respect from others which is based on its standing outside morality, as a choice by the revenger not to act morally but to obey other compelling motives. This thesis is tested against various objections, notably those which doubt the intelligibility or application of such non-moral 'respect', or would assimilate it to moral approval; and it is distinguished from various positions with which it might be confused, such as the 'admirable immorality' of Slote, or the Nietzschean critique of morality. 2 RESPECT FOR JUST REVENGE I The thesis of this paper is that, under certain conditions, an act of private revenge may properly be the object of a special kind of positive judgement, even though it is at the same time rightly morally condemned. The name I propose for this positive judgement is 'non-moral respect'. I will suggest in passing that respect of this kind can be extended to various other kinds of acts which are morally wrong, but the main focus of the paper will be upon revenge. By 'private revenge', I mean a deliberate injurious act or course of action against another person, motivated by resentment of an injurious act or acts performed by that other person against the revenger, or against some other person or persons whose injury the revenger resents. Both motive (vengeful resentment) and injurious act must be present to constitute revenge. Within the motive, we could distinguish further between the passive resentment that is a response to the injury received, and the active vengeful feeling that empowers the decision to strike back, but I will not pursue this distinction, since for revenge both components must be present: where only passive resentment is felt, we have not revenge but forbearance, or impotent embitterment. The adjective 'private' serves to exclude cases in which the revenger acts with institutional authority. We must set aside the important, but for present purposes

The Political Logic of Victim Impact Statements

Criminal Justice Ethics, 2011

The guilty get a good run in our judicial system while victims can be a dirty word. It's the worl... more The guilty get a good run in our judicial system while victims can be a dirty word. It's the world turned upside down.. .. Prominent defence lawyer Rob Stary, a member of the Law Institute's Criminal Law Section, believes victim impact statements provide the opportunity to find out how the victim feels.. .. "They are cathartic in their nature, they're helpful for the victim to articulate their positionand that's important-and allow the judge when they're determining penalty to understand the immediate long-term consequences,'' he explained. "Most judges, despite a view that they are removed from the community, in fact are highly sensitive to the impact upon victims. That's reflected in sentencing comments all over the place.'' Stary and I agree to disagree on this point. 1 I Introduction: a political context In this paper I discuss three aspects of the continuing debate over the use of Victim Impact Statements (VIS) in criminal proceedings. I aim to show, in each case, the dependence of key arguments in favor of VIS on presuppositions that can be characterized as political, in the sense that they enter the debate not so much through argumentation internal to the ethics of 2 criminal justice, as through the influence of a wider popular and media consensus about the entitlements of a citizen and the failings of the criminal justice system. I will focus primarily upon those arguments for VIS that frame them within a discourse of "justice" rather than "welfare," but I will acknowledge and distinguish the latter when necessary. I hope that one contribution of the paper will be to assist clarification of the distinction, and to promote reconsideration of the weight each type of justification can carry. An intimate relationship between the discourses of criminal justice and of the wider political realm is inevitable and indeed desirable. Both are informed by the attempts of people of goodwill to think rationally about deep and contested moral values, while keeping in clear view the general and specific facts of human life. We should set aside, plausible though it may sometimes seem, the notion of a wholly irrational popular sentiment beating down upon, and potentially corroding, the sober deliberations of the legislators and the courts. Instead I want to show, by evaluating certain arguments for VIS, that they are open to objections that can be successfully refuted if, and only if, influential, and rather specific, political presuppositions are brought to their aid. I do not aim to disprove or discredit these presuppositions, only to demonstrate their role in the case for VIS, though I believe we may think differently about the moral and political context of VIS if the analysis is accepted. What are these presuppositions, and how have they arisen? In contemporary western culture, most people believe that our social and political apparatus, including law, has value to the extent that it serves or facilitates individual well-being. The individual life is the locus of value; social goods are ultimately reducible to an aggregate of individual goods. This is not a universal or necessary view, and various conservative, religious, and communitarian traditions offer alternatives, mainly by affirming the existence of intrinsic or irreducibly social goods, 2 or by assailing the concept of individual autonomy. But it is the dominant belief, natural to a liberal democracy. And within it, often only loosely corresponding to

The historical contingency of aesthetic experience

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2000

Soulignant la valeur esthétique et la dimension contingente-historique des associations mentales ... more Soulignant la valeur esthétique et la dimension contingente-historique des associations mentales que provoque la contemplation d'une oeuvre d'art, l'A. évalue le conflit entre les différentes conceptions kantienne, formaliste et consensuelle de l'expérience esthétique. Examinant la critique ...

Irrecoverable Intentions and Literary Interpretation

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 1997

THE OBJECTIVE of this paper is to explore the relevance of irrecoverable authorial intentions to ... more

Moore’s Moral Facts and the Gap in the Retributive Theory

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2011

Private Revenge and its Relation to Punishment

Utilitas, 2009

In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private ... more In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private revenge are rare in moral philosophy. This article reviews some examples, from both classical and recent writers, finding uncertainty and equivocation over the ethical significance of acts of revenge, and in particular over their possible resemblances, in motive, purpose or justification, to acts of lawful punishment. A key problem for the coherence of our ethical conception of revenge is the consideration that certain acts of revenge may be just (at least in the minimal sense that the victim of revenge has no grounds for complaint against the revenger) and yet be generally agreed to be morally wrong. The challenge of explaining adequately why private revenge is morally wrong poses particular difficulty for purely retributive theories of punishment, since without invoking consequentialist reasons it does not seem possible adequately to motivate an objection to just and proportionate acts...

The Moral Weight of a Democratic Majority

It is a still-influential characteristic of liberal thought since Mill that it advances moral arg... more It is a still-influential characteristic of liberal thought since Mill that it advances moral arguments for limiting the authority of a democratic majority. This article suggests several reasons for thinking that a numerical majority nevertheless has some, though not necessarily decisive, moral weight. At the core of these reasons is the principle that every individual citizen has equal moral standing, even when he or she belongs to a numerical majority.

Tolkien : a cultural phenomenon

The Intrinsic Good of Justice

Ratio Juris

Why Good Government is not Enough

The Political Quarterly, 2001

The Theory of the Offender's Forfeited Right

Criminal Justice Ethics, 2015

Review: The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull

Review: Ishtyaque Haji, Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals and Perplexities

Mmal Appraisability is not quite such a good book as its confident and lucid introduction leads o... more

Review: John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

Tolkien Studies II, 2005

Of the various arguments aimed at discrediting Tolkien's work a priori, one of the hardest t... more

Review: Arne Zettersten, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life

The European Legacy, 2014

Moral Responsibility and "Moral Luck

The Philosophical Review, 1995

This paper has two purposes. The first (part 1) is to defend a distinctive account of moral respo... more This paper has two purposes. The first (part 1) is to defend a distinctive account of moral responsibility; the second (part 2), to argue that &quot;moral luck,&quot; understood as a susceptibility of moral desert to lucky or unlucky outcomes, does not exist. The strategy will be to show ...

Hopkins: A Note on Scansion

The Cambridge Quarterly, 1979

Fiction, Emotion and ’Belief’: A Reply to Eva Schaper

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 1979

The paper argues that our emotions in response to fictional representations are best explained, n... more The paper argues that our emotions in response to fictional representations are best explained, not as requiring a suspension of disbelief, but as resembling the emotions we feel when we propound a hypothetical case to ourselves, such as the imagined happiness or suffering of ourselves or another. In reading fiction we voluntarily participate in a hypothesis represented by the work. If this explanation is accepted, we can retain the view that beliefs always entail commitment to the reality of what is believed.

Comment pouvons-nous etre emus par une fiction par laquelle nous connaissons des comptes rendus ou des representations d'evenements qui ne sont pas reellement arrives? E. Schaper critique l'hypothese de Coleridge d'une "suspension volontaire de la non-croyance" de la part de l'auditeur ou du lecteur. L'A. montre que si sa solution est meilleure d'un point de vue psychologique que la precedente, elle ne resoud cependant pas le paradoxe.

Revenge and Moral Judgement in Tolkien

Tolkien Studies, 2008

On Punishing Emotions

Ratio Juris, 2003

This paper challenges recent influential arguments which would encourage legislators and courts t... more This paper challenges recent influential arguments which would encourage legislators and courts to give weight to an assessment of the "evaluative judgements" expressed by the emotions which motivate crimes. While accepting the claim of Kahan and Nussbaum and others that emotions, other than moods, have intentional objects ("the cognitive conception"), and are not mere impulses which bypass cognition ("the mechanistic conception"), it suggests the following criticisms of their analysis. First, the concept of an emotional "evaluative judgement" tends to elide the distinction between (misleadingly named) "judgements" that are merely the sense of an emotion, and do not have the character of acts, and deliberative emotional judgements that do resemble acts and so properly fall within the corrective scope of the law. Second, intentional emotions are empowered by pre-intentional psychological resources which are less amenable than intentional states to the agent's conscious supervision: The traditional recognition of "infirmity" in mitigation of crimes uncharacteristic of the criminal's overall conduct towards others is justified by the unpredictable action of these pre-intentional elements and can survive the abandonment of the mechanistic conception of emotion.

Respect for Just Revenge

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2008

The paper considers acts of private (in the sense of individually motivated and extralegal) reven... more The paper considers acts of private (in the sense of individually motivated and extralegal) revenge, and draws attention to a special kind of judgement we may make of such acts. While endorsing the general view that an act of private revenge must be morally wrong, it maintains that under certain special conditions (which include its being just) it is susceptible of a rational respect from others which is based on its standing outside morality, as a choice by the revenger not to act morally but to obey other compelling motives. This thesis is tested against various objections, notably those which doubt the intelligibility or application of such non-moral 'respect', or would assimilate it to moral approval; and it is distinguished from various positions with which it might be confused, such as the 'admirable immorality' of Slote, or the Nietzschean critique of morality. 2 RESPECT FOR JUST REVENGE I The thesis of this paper is that, under certain conditions, an act of private revenge may properly be the object of a special kind of positive judgement, even though it is at the same time rightly morally condemned. The name I propose for this positive judgement is 'non-moral respect'. I will suggest in passing that respect of this kind can be extended to various other kinds of acts which are morally wrong, but the main focus of the paper will be upon revenge. By 'private revenge', I mean a deliberate injurious act or course of action against another person, motivated by resentment of an injurious act or acts performed by that other person against the revenger, or against some other person or persons whose injury the revenger resents. Both motive (vengeful resentment) and injurious act must be present to constitute revenge. Within the motive, we could distinguish further between the passive resentment that is a response to the injury received, and the active vengeful feeling that empowers the decision to strike back, but I will not pursue this distinction, since for revenge both components must be present: where only passive resentment is felt, we have not revenge but forbearance, or impotent embitterment. The adjective 'private' serves to exclude cases in which the revenger acts with institutional authority. We must set aside the important, but for present purposes

The Political Logic of Victim Impact Statements

Criminal Justice Ethics, 2011

The guilty get a good run in our judicial system while victims can be a dirty word. It's the worl... more The guilty get a good run in our judicial system while victims can be a dirty word. It's the world turned upside down.. .. Prominent defence lawyer Rob Stary, a member of the Law Institute's Criminal Law Section, believes victim impact statements provide the opportunity to find out how the victim feels.. .. "They are cathartic in their nature, they're helpful for the victim to articulate their positionand that's important-and allow the judge when they're determining penalty to understand the immediate long-term consequences,'' he explained. "Most judges, despite a view that they are removed from the community, in fact are highly sensitive to the impact upon victims. That's reflected in sentencing comments all over the place.'' Stary and I agree to disagree on this point. 1 I Introduction: a political context In this paper I discuss three aspects of the continuing debate over the use of Victim Impact Statements (VIS) in criminal proceedings. I aim to show, in each case, the dependence of key arguments in favor of VIS on presuppositions that can be characterized as political, in the sense that they enter the debate not so much through argumentation internal to the ethics of 2 criminal justice, as through the influence of a wider popular and media consensus about the entitlements of a citizen and the failings of the criminal justice system. I will focus primarily upon those arguments for VIS that frame them within a discourse of "justice" rather than "welfare," but I will acknowledge and distinguish the latter when necessary. I hope that one contribution of the paper will be to assist clarification of the distinction, and to promote reconsideration of the weight each type of justification can carry. An intimate relationship between the discourses of criminal justice and of the wider political realm is inevitable and indeed desirable. Both are informed by the attempts of people of goodwill to think rationally about deep and contested moral values, while keeping in clear view the general and specific facts of human life. We should set aside, plausible though it may sometimes seem, the notion of a wholly irrational popular sentiment beating down upon, and potentially corroding, the sober deliberations of the legislators and the courts. Instead I want to show, by evaluating certain arguments for VIS, that they are open to objections that can be successfully refuted if, and only if, influential, and rather specific, political presuppositions are brought to their aid. I do not aim to disprove or discredit these presuppositions, only to demonstrate their role in the case for VIS, though I believe we may think differently about the moral and political context of VIS if the analysis is accepted. What are these presuppositions, and how have they arisen? In contemporary western culture, most people believe that our social and political apparatus, including law, has value to the extent that it serves or facilitates individual well-being. The individual life is the locus of value; social goods are ultimately reducible to an aggregate of individual goods. This is not a universal or necessary view, and various conservative, religious, and communitarian traditions offer alternatives, mainly by affirming the existence of intrinsic or irreducibly social goods, 2 or by assailing the concept of individual autonomy. But it is the dominant belief, natural to a liberal democracy. And within it, often only loosely corresponding to

The historical contingency of aesthetic experience

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2000

Soulignant la valeur esthétique et la dimension contingente-historique des associations mentales ... more Soulignant la valeur esthétique et la dimension contingente-historique des associations mentales que provoque la contemplation d'une oeuvre d'art, l'A. évalue le conflit entre les différentes conceptions kantienne, formaliste et consensuelle de l'expérience esthétique. Examinant la critique ...

Irrecoverable Intentions and Literary Interpretation

The British Journal of Aesthetics, 1997

THE OBJECTIVE of this paper is to explore the relevance of irrecoverable authorial intentions to ... more

Moore’s Moral Facts and the Gap in the Retributive Theory

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2011

Private Revenge and its Relation to Punishment

Utilitas, 2009

In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private ... more In contrast to the vast literature on retributive theories of punishment, discussions of private revenge are rare in moral philosophy. This article reviews some examples, from both classical and recent writers, finding uncertainty and equivocation over the ethical significance of acts of revenge, and in particular over their possible resemblances, in motive, purpose or justification, to acts of lawful punishment. A key problem for the coherence of our ethical conception of revenge is the consideration that certain acts of revenge may be just (at least in the minimal sense that the victim of revenge has no grounds for complaint against the revenger) and yet be generally agreed to be morally wrong. The challenge of explaining adequately why private revenge is morally wrong poses particular difficulty for purely retributive theories of punishment, since without invoking consequentialist reasons it does not seem possible adequately to motivate an objection to just and proportionate acts...

The Moral Weight of a Democratic Majority

It is a still-influential characteristic of liberal thought since Mill that it advances moral arg... more It is a still-influential characteristic of liberal thought since Mill that it advances moral arguments for limiting the authority of a democratic majority. This article suggests several reasons for thinking that a numerical majority nevertheless has some, though not necessarily decisive, moral weight. At the core of these reasons is the principle that every individual citizen has equal moral standing, even when he or she belongs to a numerical majority.

Tolkien : a cultural phenomenon

The Intrinsic Good of Justice

Ratio Juris

Why Good Government is not Enough

The Political Quarterly, 2001

The Theory of the Offender's Forfeited Right

Criminal Justice Ethics, 2015

Review: The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder, ed. Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull

Review: Ishtyaque Haji, Moral Appraisability: Puzzles, Proposals and Perplexities

Mmal Appraisability is not quite such a good book as its confident and lucid introduction leads o... more

Review: John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth

Tolkien Studies II, 2005

Of the various arguments aimed at discrediting Tolkien's work a priori, one of the hardest t... more

Review: Arne Zettersten, J. R. R. Tolkien’s Double Worlds and Creative Process: Language and Life

The European Legacy, 2014

Moral Responsibility and "Moral Luck

The Philosophical Review, 1995

This paper has two purposes. The first (part 1) is to defend a distinctive account of moral respo... more This paper has two purposes. The first (part 1) is to defend a distinctive account of moral responsibility; the second (part 2), to argue that &quot;moral luck,&quot; understood as a susceptibility of moral desert to lucky or unlucky outcomes, does not exist. The strategy will be to show ...