THE SCOPE: Ethics in Progress provides a crossdisciplinary & crosscultural global forum for the examination and discussion of innovative research in ethics across disciplines. EiP especially encourages submissions that use a range of empirical and experimental research methods. It addresses moral development, normative framework & its dynamics, and moral activism in context. A semi-annual journal that appears in Spring-Autumn cycle. It encourages original submissions from all over the world. ABOUT THE JOURNAL CURRENT ISSUE ARCHIVES INDEXED IN: AMUR; ANVUR.IT; Arianta; AureHAL; BASE; CEJSH; Citefactor; CORE; Crossref; Dimensions; DOAJ; EBSCO (Sociology Source Ultimate Database; Central & Eastern European Academic Source Database); Editage; ERIH Plus; EZB; Exaly; fatcat!; Federacja Bibliotek Cyfrowych; Index Copernicus; Infona; Internet Archive Scholar; Journal TOCs; JournalList; Jouroscope; JUFO Portal; Keepers Registry; Letpub; Library of Science; MIAR; Most Wiedzy; NAVER; OA.mg; OpenAIRE; OpenAlex database; PBN; Pist.tn; PKP Index; Polindex; QOAM; ReadCube; Redalyc; Researcher.Life; ResearchBite; Reaserchgate; Resurchify; ScienceGate; Scinapse; ScimagoJR; Scite; Scijournal; SCOPUS; Scilit; Sherpa Romeo; SUDOC; Szczepański List; Ulrich's Periodicals Directory; Vrije Universitet Amsterdam Library; Wikidata; Wikipedia (Pl); Wikipedia (En); WorldCat; WoS Core Collection - Emerging Sources Citation Index; ZDB. Search Books for quotations of Ethics in Progress (by DOI) - click. JOURNAL METRICS Ministry of Science and Higher Education (2024): 40 SOCIAL MEDIA DOI: 10.14746/eip e-ISSN: 2084-9257 ARTICLES ARE LICENSED UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0 International) DATA ARCHIVING The PRESSto platform digitally preserves the content of this journal using the PKP Preservation Network (PKP PN), which provides digital long-term preservation of data and secured access to the content of the journal. The journal "Ethics in progress" complies with the I40C standards for open citations. PUBLISHER Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań ul. Wieniawskiego 1 61-712 Poznań, Poland FUNDING The project in the years 2022–2024 is financed under the program of the Ministry of Education and Science under the name "Development of scientific journals" (“Rozwój czasopism naukowych”), contract number RCN/SP/0012/2021/1. The project in the years 2019–2021 is financed under the program of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the name "Support for scientific journals" (“Wsparcie dla Czasopism Naukowych”), contract number 261/WCN/2019/1.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ethics in Progreess https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Beyond the Traditional Grammar of Punishment
While modern criminal law has largely been structured around established notions of individual responsibility, blame, punishment, and reparation, some of the most pressing challenges facing contemporary societies increasingly expose the limits of these categories. This introductory contribution presents the themes and common concerns that animate the essays collected in this thematic issue, namely the growing dissatisfaction with traditional penal paradigms and the search for alternative conceptions of punishment, responsibility, and justice capable of addressing structural injustice, environmental harm, social conflict, and emerging forms of accountability. At the same time, the article introduces the issue’s central problem: the tension between individual accountability and the systemic conditions within which wrongdoing and harm take shape. Situating these debates within a broader critical tradition that has questioned the relationship between law, violence, and justice, the contribution examines the opportunities and limits of criminal law as an instrument of social change and explores the extent to which contemporary legal institutions are capable of responding to harms that exceed traditional punitive frameworks.
Copyright (c) 2026 Chiara Magni, Anna De Giuli, Giulia Battistoni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Utilitarianism and Prison Abolition: A Normative Perspective
This paper develops a utilitarian case for prison abolition grounded on utilitarianism’s commitment to the reduction of pain, challenging the traditional forward-looking utilitarian justifications of punishment, whose empirical foundations are increasingly contested. To construct the utilitarian abolitionist argument, traces of an abolitionist theory are identified in Bentham’s penal thought, especially in his neglected analysis of indirect legislation as a means of crime prevention. His theoretical analysis is integrated with contemporary debates on punishment, incarceration and restorative justice. The paper argues that a consistently utilitarian approach should prioritize harm reduction through social restructuring, transformative approaches, and restorative responses to wrongdoing, rather than relying on incarceration and deterrence-centred punishment.
Copyright (c) 2026 Marina Beraha https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Beyond Retribution: Walter Benjamin and the Case for Prospective Justice
The dominant paradigm of justice in Western thought is retributive, framed through an economic logic of debt, guilt, and proportional punishment. Retributive justice promises balance but perpetually postpones its delivery. This article argues that this deferral is not a failure but a structural feature: justice conceived as debt can never be settled in the present. This holds an analogy with Christian eschatological temporality, reproduced in secularized juridical forms. The deferral is actively maintained by what Walter Benjamin identified as “mythical violence,” that is, the foundational and preservative force of law that reduces life to administrable “mere life” and functions as a freezer of political time. Through a Benjaminian lens, the article critiques this apparatus and posits an alternative: prospective justice. Reconceived not as a future ideal but as a messianic intervention in the “now-time” [Jetztzeit], prospective justice involves the collective redistribution of agency to repair harm, the restoration of inviolable human dignity, and the use of a “divine violence” directed not at individuals but at the systemic structures of legal domination. The conclusion asserts that true justice requires a shift from inhabiting the frozen time of debt to seizing the charged possibility of the Jetztzeit.
Copyright (c) 2026 María Fernanda Miranda González https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Punishing and Forgiving: Contributions of Deconstruction to Contemporary Debates on Justice
This article challenges the widespread tendency to frame forgiveness either as a moral alternative to punishment or as a practice set in opposition to and disconnected from criminal law. It instead focuses on the tension between punishment, forgiveness and justice by examining the work of Jacques Derrida. The paper argues that the prevailing readings of Derridean forgiveness as unconditional and alien to any legal logic overlook its place within the broader deconstructive task, particularly in the constitutive tension between law and justice. In light of this reconsideration, the article explores the critical scope of deconstruction to interrogate the role of forgiveness, both within punitive logics and within frameworks that advocate responses to harm beyond punishment, including transitional justice and restorative justice.
Copyright (c) 2026 Quintana Dominguez Idoia https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Reimagining Justice Beyond Blame: Defending Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model
This paper defends Iris Marion Young’s Social Connection Model (SCM) as a superior framework for understanding responsibility for structural injustice and proposes a conceptual intervention into what I term the punishment dilemma. The dilemma is this: the liability model’s backward-looking focus on blame is conceptually mismatched to structural phenomena (since no identifiable perpetrator exists), yet impunity is morally intolerable. The liability model – built on identifiable wrongdoing, direct causation, and culpable intent – fails because structural harms are processual, systemic, and normalized. Young’s SCM performs a foundational shift from fault to social position: responsibility derives not from culpable action but from constitutive participation in interconnected social processes that produce unjust outcomes. I reconstruct the SCM’s philosophical architecture, showing how its five features and four parameters provide a coherent alternative. Drawing on Virginia Mantouvalou’s analysis of state-mediated vulnerability and Serena Parekh’s work on gender violence and refugee policy, I demonstrate that structural injustice generates a demand for accountability that retributive punishment cannot satisfy. I then develop transformative sanction: punitive or quasi-punitive measures justified not by backward-looking desert but by forward-looking structural disruption. Young’s four parameters – power, privilege, interest, and collective ability – provide criteria for operationalizing this framework. I address the indeterminacy critique (Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli) and the motivational challenge (Martha C. Nussbaum), showing that the SCM survives both. While further specification of procedural safeguards is needed, the SCM stands as a philosophically coherent and politically actionable framework for transforming structural injustice.
Copyright (c) 2026 Arif Guljar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
Starting from the principle of criminal legality — nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege — and from selected environmental cases, this paper examines the difficulties of applying traditional criminal law categories to environmental offences. In environmental harm, causation, mens rea, individual responsibility, and even the identification of harm itself are often opaque. Given this complexity, the paper then addresses contemporary debates, focusing in particular on alternative ways of conceptualizing responsibility and punishment in cases of environmental offences. Finally, it analyzes Directive (EU) 2024/1203, to be implemented by Member States by May 2027, arguing that it offers a hybrid model of responsibility, punishment and justice through a combination of individual, corporate and institutional responsibility, of retributive and consequentialist theories of punishment, as well as retributive, restorative, and transformative approaches to justice.
Copyright (c) 2026 Giulia Battistoni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
From Celebrities to Ordinary Citizen. Limits of the Legitimacy of Social Punishment
Public discourse and academic debate on the permissibility of social punishment range from strong endorsement to categorical rejection. This paper defends a moderate view: social punishment practices such as shaming, canceling, or deplatforming may be legitimate, but only under certain conditions. It focuses on one key criterion: the social status of the wrongdoer and asks whether celebrities and non-celebrities should be treated differently. I argue that the epistemic power of celebrities justifies greater exposure to social punishment, whereas non-celebrities should generally be subject only to private punishment. The paper outlines the normative implications of this distinction. Due to the subject of this paper and given that it is a work in political philosophy, the method used here is reflective equilibrium.
Copyright (c) 2026 Natalia Witosza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The relationship between criminal law and social change has conventionally been conceived as unidirectional: penal statutes reflect, rather than shape, the normative hierarchy of a given society. This article examines the conditions under which the promotional function of criminal law – its deployment, in Bobbio’s sense, as an instrument for installing new social norms rather than merely conserving existing ones – can be considered legitimate. The affirmative consent model in sexual criminal law, as enacted in Spain, serves as the test case against which three analytical perspectives map the boundaries of permissible penal promotion. First, the declaratory perspective holds that, with respect to negative sexual autonomy, the affirmative consent model performs a conservative function, declaring a pre-existing public wrong by reference to shared civic values, while assuming a constitutive function with respect to positive autonomy, thereby exceeding the declaratory warrant of criminal law. Second, the conditioned promotional perspective identifies four cumulative legitimacy criteria and finds the affirmative consent model only partially compliant with them. Third, the normative framing perspective contends that the political rationality structuring affirmative consent reform is oriented toward the legal entrenchment of an interpretative grammar rather than behavioral transformation. The three perspectives converge in finding that the promotional justification of affirmative consent fails to meet the legitimacy requirements applicable to each. The shared conclusion is that whereas criminal law may legitimately perform a conservative function in protecting negative sexual autonomy, it may not legitimately be deployed to entrench a specific communicative model for exercising positive sexual autonomy. The subsidiarity principle is advanced as the criterion that confines criminal law to a consolidating role in cultural transformation, allocating its promotional ambitions to the domain of social and educational policy.
Copyright (c) 2026 Jorge Hernan Fernandez Mejias https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0