An influential view in recent philosophy of punishment is that the apparatus of criminal justice should be geared at least in part to state censure of wrongdoing. I argue that if it were to be so geared, such an apparatus would make ambitious claims to authority, and that the legitimacy of the relevant state would then depend on whether those claims can be vindicated. This paper looks first at what kind of authority is being claimed by this apparatus. The criminal law, I argue, cannot merely be thought of as claiming a right to rule and to be obeyed. Rather, its authority is better understood as the authority of moral oversight: a power to alter, at will (though within certain limits), citizens’ liability to answer for their compliance with—and to be officially censured for their failure to comply with—a designated set of pre-existing moral 7reasons. The paper then looks at whether a state could realistically be expected to possess such authority—that is, whether a state that claims to have such a power could ever be legitimate.

中文翻译：

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道德监督的权威：论刑法的合法性

近来惩罚哲学中的一个有影响力的观点是，刑事司法机构应该至少部分地适应国家对不法行为的谴责。我认为，如果它如此适合，那么这样的机构就会对权威提出雄心勃勃的主张，而相关国家的合法性将取决于这些主张是否可以得到证实。本文首先着眼于该设备声称拥有什么样的权威。我认为，刑法不能仅仅被认为是主张统治和被服从的权利。相反，它的权威更好地理解为道德监督的权威：有权随意（尽管在一定限度内）改变公民有责任为他们遵守并因未能遵守而受到官方谴责的责任——一套指定的预先存在的道德 7 理由。然后，该论文研究了一个国家是否可以现实地被期望拥有这种权力——也就是说，一个声称拥有这种权力的国家是否可能是合法的。