Research | Faron Ray

Publications

'In Their Name: On the State's Standing to Hold Marginalized Offenders to Account' (2025), Legal Theory 31(1):74–95

According to a popular view, states responsible for structural injustice lack the standing to hold marginalized offenders to account. I raise doubts about this. I argue that the view sits uneasily with a natural way of understanding state punishment: namely, that when the state condemns criminal offenders, it does so in the name of its people. If I call you to account in Sarah’s name, the fact that I have behaved badly in similar ways may make my intervention objectionable in some respects. But it does not obviously show that I lack the standing to hold you to account. This suggests that there is a gap between a state’s responsibility for structural injustice and its lacking standing to hold disadvantaged offenders to account. I consider several ways of closing this gap, but suggest that none vindicates the popular view that structural injustice undermines a state's standing—at least not in its standard form.

Under Review (titles changed for anonymity)

'Understanding Standing to Blame'

The intuitive data associated with the standing to blame concern cases in which it seems appropriate to dismiss or silence another person’s blame. These data raise two questions. The first is metaphysical: what do our judgments about the standing to blame track? The second is normative: are such judgments correct? I argue for a novel answer to the metaphysical question, and show how it reshapes the normative one. I then defend the correctness of our core standing judgments.

In Preparation

'Anger, Aptness, and Autonomy'

It is natural to think that anger at wrongdoing can be justified even when it is instrumentally bad for us. A popular way of explaining this thought is to say that wrongdoing itself 'calls for' anger—that anger is non-instrumentally valuable as an 'apt' or 'fitting' response to wrongdoing. Against a widely held view, I argue that anger cannot be justified by its aptness. Nonetheless, I suggest that apt anger is conditionally valuable. Apt anger is valuable, I suggest, when it stands an expression of a person’s autonomously chosen posture toward wrongdoing.

'Non-preventable Attacks and Liability to Harm'

Culpable attackers sometimes seem liable to suffer what look like futile harms: harms that cannot prevent the attack, and so serve no paradigmatic defensive purpose. Some try to explain this by saying that culpable attackers deserve to suffer such harms. Others suggest that culpable attackers can be liable to such harms in service of defending the victim’s honor. I raise doubts about these views and defend an alternative account. On that account, culpable attackers are sometimes liable to suffer harms in service of ensuring that they do not take pleasure in, or remain satisfied by, their wrongdoing. I explain how this is importantly distinct from desert, and explore what role it may have in a justification of punishment.

'History and Necessity in Self-Defense and Punishment'

It is standardly thought that defensive harm must be necessary if it is to be permissible. But sometimes whether defensive harm is necessary is itself the consequence of past actions taken by the defender. In this paper, I explore how a defender’s past foreclosure of less harmful defensive options bears on the permissibility of using greater defensive force at the time of attack. I then show how the analysis I develop raises a novel worry about deterrent punishment in cases where the state has culpably contributed to the need for deterrence.