The Failure of Desert Based Justifications for Punishment

The 36th Conference on Value Inquiry was hosted by Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, 16–17 April 2010. The Conference Coordinator was George Schedler. More than 50 contributors presented papers on the conference theme, “Wrongdoing and Its Consequences.” Participants included philosophers from Canada, China, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom, as well as the United States. The conference provided a venue for a wide variety of topics, which spurred much discussion, and included plenary sessions by Larry May on “Collective Punishment and Mass Confinement,” Randall Auxier on “Ironic Wrongdoing and the Arc of the Universe,” and Thomas Magnell on Critical Points for Human Civilization and Intelligence.”