2010 Lectures: Masaki Ichinose

Professor Masaki Ichinose

Professor Masaki Ichinose

We were delighted to welcome Professor Ichinose (The University of Tokyo) to Oxford to deliver the Annual Uehiro Lectures in Practical Ethics in 2010. 

The lecture series was entitled 'Modes of Responsibility'.

His main research interests are causation, probability, and the concept of person. Publications include in 1997, ‘The Rise of Person-Knowledge Theory: The Moment of John Locke’ published by The University of Tokyo Press (in Japanese) and in 2001, The Labyrinth of Cause and Effect’ published by Keiso publishing company (in Japanese) and in 2006, ‘The Labyrinth of Cause and Reason: The Philosophy of "Because"’ published by Keiso publishing company (in Japanese). In 1998 he won the Watsuji Tetsuro Prize of Culture and the Nakamura Hajime Prize.

Download sample publications in English  |  Personal Website

Modes of Responsibility

In these lectures, I will discuss criminal responsibility from a philosophical point of view (including some Japanese perspectives). I will scrutinize these issues by distinguishing three perspectives on criminal responsibility, namely, those of the “victim”, “offender”, and “punishment”. My aim in discussing the issue of victims is to raise and analyse a question of who constitutes a victim, particularly in the case of homicide. This question is examined by confronting a contemporary problem in the metaphysics of death, that is, whether dead people could suffer harm or not. Secondly, I will investigate how to estimate, as far as is scientifically possible, how responsible an offender is for their offence. This problem would be tackled by taking into account the contemporary debates on free will and neuroethics. In considering this issue, I intend to adopt a probabilistic approach and propose concepts of “degrees of freedom and responsibility”. Thirdly, I will discuss the new and traditional problem of how to justify a system of punishment. In particular, my focus here is upon the issue of capital punishment and the theory of human rights which forms a basis of the system of punishment (notwithstanding the fact that capital punishment has been abolished in the UK). My approach to this issue might be called “impossibilism” rather than retentionism or abolitionism. These three topics which I will consider roughly correspond to three basic modal concepts, namely, “actuality”, “possibility”, and “necessity (i.e. normativity)” respectively, so I have called these lectures “Modes of Responsibility".

Audio recordings

Who is a victim of homicide? Click here to listen to the first lecture.

Freedom, Responsibility, and Natural Phenomena. Click here to listen to the second lecture.

Death Penalty and Human Rights. Click here to listen to the third lecture.