Journal of Applied Philosophy,Vol. 29, No.

1, 2012
doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2011.00535.x

Book Reviews

Attempts in the Philosophy of Action and the Criminal Law

G Y, 2010
New York, Oxford University Press
x + 349 pp, £37.50 (hb)

GideonYaffe has tried to write a comprehensive, powerfully-argued and original book on

the topic of attempts in the philosophy of action and the criminal law — and his attempt
is a resounding success. Alongside R. A. Duff’s highly regarded Criminal Attempts
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), Yaffe’s book will help to shape the agenda for the
philosophical treatment of the problem of attempted crimes for some years to come.
The topic of attempts is one which raises many important and difficult issues for both
philosophers and criminal lawyers. Yaffe, a professor of both philosophy and law at the
University of Southern California, gives close and rigorous attention to a wide range of
these issues.
The book has twelve chapters, grouped into four parts. Part 1, containing the first
three chapters, addresses the questions of what attempted crimes are and what justifi-
cation there is for criminalising them. Chapter 1 argues that attempted crimes are
justifiably criminalised, not because they create risks of harm, but because those who
attempt crimes — who try to commit them — are motivated and guided in their actions
in essentially the same way that criminal completers are. AsYaffe notes, this is to provide
support for a subjectivist approach to attempts. Chapter 2 then argues in favour of the
dominant legal view that an intention to commit the crime is rightly understood as
necessary for criminal attempts (a view contrary to those philosophers of action who
argue that one can in fact try to do something without intending to do it). In Chapter 3,
Yaffe articulates and defends a key element in his account of attempts as tryings, the
‘Guiding Commitment View’, according to which ‘to try to do something is to be
committed to each of the components of success and to be moved by those commit-
ments’ (p. 73).
Part 2 then goes on to examine the role of intention in attempt in more detail, looking
at what intention (or intentions) a criminal attempter must have in order to be commit-
ted to the completed crime and so be guilty of attempting to commit that crime. Chapter
4 looks at whether an attempter must be committed to the legal properties of the
completed crime, and at what commitments an attempter must have to the act, result
and mental elements of the completed crime. An attempter’s commitment to the
circumstantial elements of the completed crime are examined in Chapter 5, as well as the
problem of whether or not it is possible to attempt ‘impossible’ crimes (such as mur-
dering a person who is already dead). Yaffe’s view is that such attempts can qualify as
criminal attempts. Chapter 6 argues that it is possible to attempt crimes of recklessness
and negligence (i.e. crimes that do not themselves require intention), while Chapter 7
argues that some solicitations are attempts (namely those where the completed crime is
a ‘result crime’) while others are not (those where the completed crime is an ‘act crime’).

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2012, Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 Book Reviews 85

The third part of the book examines issues concerned with what kind of evidence is
needed for attempted crimes. Chapter 8 argues that criminal attempts require some act
in furtherance of the intended crime because without such an act there is insufficient
evidence that the defendant was committed to completing the crime, given ability,
opportunity and no change of mind. Chapter 9 argues that in some cases the nature of the
attempter’s plan (e.g. to murder someone through voodoo incantations) shows that the
person, while genuinely trying to commit the crime, has a diminished practical compe-
tence and that this means that we have insufficient evidence to warrant a finding of guilt.
Part 3 closes with Chapter 10’s discussion of the act requirement in attempt.Yaffe argues
that any act in furtherance of a criminal intention will provide adequate evidence of a
criminal attempt where the agent is rational and practically competent. However, if the
person is irrational or practically incompetent, then the evidence needed for guilt is that
the person performed the ‘last act’ (i.e. the act after which nothing more is needed from
the attempter for completion of the crime, absent external interventions). In this way,
Yaffe seeks to reconcile the different approaches to the act requirement in attempt.
The last two chapters, comprising Part 4, examine issues relating to the sentencing of
attempters. Chapter 11 addresses the problem of the attempter who abandons their
attempted crime before completion. Yaffe argues for a middle course of treating aban-
donment as mitigating sentence, compared with the two extremes of treating it as a
complete affirmative defence and viewing it as irrelevant. He argues that, though the
reasons for punishing attempts and completions are usually the same, if some of the
reasons for punishing the completed crime are undercut in the case of abandonment
then there is reason to mitigate the sentence. Such reasons are undercut in such cases
because abandonment shows that the abandoner has appreciated sufficient reasons to
abandon their course of action, whereas the unrepentant attempter has not shown any
such appreciation. Finally, in Chapter 12,Yaffe defends the view that it is fair to punish
last act attempters less severely than criminal completers, because the last act attempter
and the completer do not in fact ‘do the same thing’.Yaffe argues that while persons who
exercise the same control do deserve the same censure, they do not necessarily deserve
the same sanction.This is because the difference in their contexts (which can include the
difference between successful and unsuccessful attempts) can warrant different sanc-
tions being issued to express the same censure.
Each chapter of the book is clearly structured and well-introduced.Yaffe’s arguments
are tightly, even densely, written, but he provides clear signposts of where the discussion
is going and has gone. Yaffe’s philosophical method is very solidly — some might say
unremittingly — analytic. The focus is very much on defining terms and positions with
precision, closely analysing, advancing and critiquing arguments premise by premise,
and reaching crisply delineated conclusions for and against the various positions advo-
cated and critiqued.
Yaffe’s frequent references to and deft use of actual case law and statutory provisions
(nearly all US cases and statutes, it may be noted) help to connect the book to the
practical realities of the law of criminal attempts, realities which are sometimes bizarre,
sometimes humorous, but often very sad or distressing. (Perhaps in those cultures which
treat losers as invisible and criminals as pariahs, the failed criminal is the most socially
contemptible of all.) At the same time, Yaffe’s analyses of the cases often show how the
sometimes simple-seeming events constituting criminal attempts can become much
more complex and problematic once we start critically reflecting on them.

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2012

86 Book Reviews

This brief review has not tried to do justice to the impressive detail and complexity of
Yaffe’s arguments. It should suffice to say, however, that anyone attempting original work
in this area will now need to complete this book first.

STEVEN TUDOR
La Trobe University, Australia

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2011.00542.x

The Philosophy of Information

L F, 2011
New York, Oxford University Press
xx + 405 pp., $55 (hb)

This is an ambitious book. Floridi is a champion of the philosophy of information, on the

surface an interesting and important area of inquiry. Information is a fundamental
concept in computer science, but it is also widely used elsewhere (cf. the notion of
genetic information and its transfer), and has a secure place in ordinary pre-
philosophical talk. So naturally we can ask about the best way to model this concept and
related concepts like information flow; but there are also questions about the right and
wrong uses of information, so the ethics of information can be expected to be part of the
philosophy of information.Thus understood, the philosophy of information is much like
any other kind of ‘philosophy of’: it involves the application of conceptual analysis and
other philosophical techniques to certain domain-specific notions and the puzzles and
questions they give rise to.
The philosophy of information in Floridi’s hands is a very different ‘philosophy
of’. Floridi thinks that the concept of information is so fundamental that the ultimate
goal of philosophy of information should be to transform philosophy, including ethics
(Floridi briefly touches on such a transformation of ethics, but doesn’t discuss it
in depth in the present book). Like Floridi, I’ll use the label PI for the philosophy
of information understood in this vastly more ambitious way. I’ll begin with a quick
summary of PI’s basic themes, and then follow this up with a brief account of the way
Floridi’s book tackles these themes before concluding with some equally brief critical
comments.
For Floridi, PI is nothing less than a new philosophical paradigm, one that will replace
stagnating ‘scholastic’ paradigms like analytic philosophy. He sees the concept of infor-
mation itself as utterly fundamental, as important and fundamental as the concepts of
Being, Knowledge, and Good and Evil, and one that promises to cast light on all of these.
To carry out the desired transformation of philosophy, Floridi avails himself of a variety
of new methods and tools from a diverse range of fields (including logic, computer
science, and theoretical physics), using these to advance his view of what the philosophy
of information can and should do. Along the way he addresses a substantial array of
interconnected philosophical issues and problems such as: What is information? Must
there be just one concept of information? How is the idea of semantic information

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2012

 Book Reviews 87

related to truth? Can information explain meaning? Could epistemology be based on a

theory of information? Can nature be understood in informational terms?
In Floridi’s hands these topics acquire an even greater degree of interconnectedness
through the unusual philosophical perspective that he brings to his work.This perspective
is constructionist. Ultimate reality (Kant’s noumenal world) is unknowable, but it
provides certain affordances and constraints; these come to us as data that are processed
at a given level of abstraction (LOA), with the latter functioning as ‘interfaces that mediate
the epistemic relation between the observed and the observer’ (p. 76). At best, therefore,
we construct models of the world. As a result semantic and epistemic notions such as truth
and knowledge apply to our models, not to ultimate reality. Floridi doesn’t think this lead
to relativism, however, because he thinks certain models are clearly better than others in
the way they account for the affordances and constraints imposed by ultimate reality.
The book itself begins by announcing that the time is ripe for the arrival of PI in its
ambitious form. After giving a list of the most prominent questions facing PI on this
ambitious formulation, Ch. 3 introduces LOAs, relating these to familiar philosophical
notions like levels of explanation (and, as we have already seen, to a certain Kantian
understanding of our access to the world). Ch. 4 presents Floridi’s well-known view that
semantic information should be thought of as well-formed, meaningful and truthful
data, with Ch. 5 extending this account to a quantitative theory of strongly semantic
information (one which retains the idea that information is truthful rather than definable
in purely probabilistic terms). The next two chapters deal with the question of how data
can be intrinsically meaningful (the symbol grounding problem), and answers this
question in terms of a new action-based semantics that stresses the interaction between
agents and their environment. Ch. 8 asks what it means for data to be truthful, answering
this in terms of a constructionist notion of truth as correctness. Chs. 9–12 deal with
epistemology in an informational setting: how can semantic information be upgraded to
knowledge in a way that avoids Gettier problems? Ch. 13 tackles a rather different
epistemological theme: how increasingly complex knowledge games can be used as an
informational test to distinguish between conscious and unconscious agents (such as
zombies). The final two chapters turn to metaphysics. After rejecting the idea that the
ultimate nature of reality is digital (Ch. 14), Floridi spends Ch. 15 defending a much
weaker information-centred view: a form of realism (informational structural realism)
that carries ontological commitment to structural properties and relations as well as to
structural objects understood in informational terms.
Floridi’s book is not an easy one. Its ambitious scope will make it difficult reading even
for many of those familiar with the problems tackled in (small-p) philosophy of infor-
mation. It should also be said that the book’s style is relatively unforgiving; there are no
easy introductory chapters, and the book moves rapidly between difficult mathematical
material and difficult and contentious philosophical material. It is hard to judge how
successful this approach will finally be judged to be, but I suspect that the academic
readership of this book will simply be divided. Many philosophers will, I suspect, be
dismissive. In particular, they will think that Floridi moves far too fast where it is
imperative to move slowly, that semi-formal notions like that of a LOA remain too crude
to bear the philosophical weight Floridi asks them to bear, that Kantianism has familiar,
perhaps devastating, problems that Floridi fails to face up to; and so on. Many computer
scientists, by contrast, will be enthralled at the thought that central notions from their
discipline hold important, indeed revolutionary, lessons for philosophy.

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88 Book Reviews

My own view falls somewhere in between. I think the book is difficult, but well
worth grappling with. I am a fan of (small-p) philosophy of information, and from that
perspective I think that the book often moves far too fast philosophically and tries to do too
much. But I also think there is a great deal to admire in this book, including much to
admire philosophically. For example, some of the material on epistemology, especially Ch.
13 but also some of his work on the definition of knowledge, is masterful, and while many
will disagree with the details of Floridi’s attempted modelling of the concept of informa-
tion and his attempt to solve the grounding problem much of this work strikes me
as extremely good. But I certainly don’t think that all of Floridi’s contributions to PI are
successful (among other things, I found the material on truth as correctness relatively
underdeveloped, and too susceptible to familiar objections to epistemic notions of truth;
I also found the thesis of informational structural realism frustratingly elusive, and hard to
reconcile on the face of it with the LOA-mediated form of Kantianism defended elsewhere
in the book). Despite such reservations, I thought this an intriguing, eye-opening work —
although I suspect that the hoped-for revolution in philosophy will have to wait.

FREDERICK KROON
University of Auckland

doi: 10.1111/j.1468-5930.2011.00549.x

Love’s Vision
T J, 2011
Princeton, Princeton University Press.
xi + 197 pp, £24.95 (hb)

During the past few decades there has been a resurgence of interest in the Philosophy of
Love, and in particular, of romantic love. Philosophers have grappled with questions
regarding both the nature of love and the reasons for loving particular people. Very
broadly speaking, there are two schools of thought. The rationalist school argues that
love, like other emotions, has reasons and can thus be explained and justified. By
contrast, the anti-rationalist school, of which Harry Frankfurt is a major proponent, (see,
for example, The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), contends
that there are no justificatory reasons for love.
In the elegantly written Love’s Vision, Troy Jollimore offers a novel way to understand
romantic love. His book draws upon a vast body of philosophical literature on the nature
of love, but it is easily accessible for those without a background in philosophy. It is full
of useful examples from literature, film and music, and is compelling and fun to read. His
principal aim is to explain why love lies ‘somewhere in between’ the rationalist and the
anti-rationalist views of love, whilst at the same time claiming that love, though posing
moral problems, is fundamentally a moral emotion. In order to do this, he develops the
idea that love is a way of seeing the beloved that involves placing her at the centre of the
lover’s vision. The lover views her properties in the best possible light, and tries to see
the world from her point of view.

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 Book Reviews 89

Jollimore observes that love involves both epistemic and moral quandaries. The
epistemic problem lies in the way that love demands accepting a disproportionately
favourable view of the beloved. The moral problem is that love asks us to neglect the
needs of others in favour of the beloved, even when their needs are greater. Thus,
although love is a kind of vision, these are two ways in which it might be said to be ‘blind’.
On the first, the beloved is idealised and the lover is blinded to her negative qualities. On
the second, the lover develops a kind of tunnel vision, shutting herself off from the needs
and desires of those other than her beloved.
Regarding the epistemic problem, Jollimore reminds us of the difference between love
and infatuation; the latter being far more prone to idealisation. He accepts that love also
demands that we view the beloved with a positive bias, but points out that it also requires
us to acquire deep knowledge of her and to try to understand her actions. Therefore, we
might end up seeing the beloved more accurately than we would were we not to love her.
Jollimore also admits that love’s tunnel vision might encourage us to ignore the needs
of others, but offers an original and interesting way to understand love’s morality. He
suggests that, by calling on us to fully appreciate someone else in her individuality and
to try to understand her thoughts and actions charitably, love represents an ideal moral
relationship. A very interesting point he makes on this subject is that love teaches us to
be moral by providing us with insight into the value of other people. We could be moral
without love if we followed impersonal moral rules, but these can only be developed in
the first place through identifying with others and fully appreciating their value. The
‘impersonal saint’ who ‘lives her life entirely according to the impersonal attitude’ could
only know that others are valuable through the experiences of lovers (p. 168). In other
words, morality is only made possible through the existence of love.
Further, contra Frankfurt, Jollimore argues that the lover does not bestow value onto the
beloved, but rather focussed and generous attention that allows him to see her value.Thus
the lover does not make the beloved more valuable than others; her value is just attended
to and appreciated more.To be appreciated in this way is valuable in allowing the beloved
to feel that she matters, that her ‘mental and emotional events’ are important (p. 89). In
addition, by conceiving of love in this way, Jollimore is able to demonstrate that the beloved
is loved for her features whilst avoiding the problem faced by the rationalists that the lover
is rationally obligated to stop loving the beloved when she loses her lovable features. On his
account, by being open to whatever value is there to be found, the lover, looking at her
beloved with love’s vision, should continue to be able to find value in the beloved.
Moreover, love is not only a response to the perceived value of the beloved; it also
involves identifying with her.This is widely acknowledged, but Jollimore provides a fresh
way of conceiving of identification through the model of vision. On his understanding,
the lover sees the world through the eyes of the beloved and allows her way of perceiving
things to affect his vision. Thus love ‘involves both appreciating the properties she bears
as an object and identifying with her as a subject’ (p. 123). By making identification with
the beloved an essential feature of love, Jollimore manages to avoid the objection that the
rationalist cannot distinguish between love and admiration.
However, one slight reservation I have about Jollimore’s account is that he is unable
to distinguish between romantic love and friendship. Indeed, he presupposes that friend-
ship and romantic love are so similar that ‘we are justified in providing a single unified
account that treats them as essentially the same phenomenon’ (pp. xv–xvi). He does not
argue for this, and to ask him to do so when he has so much else to say would probably

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90 Book Reviews

be unfair. Nonetheless, though he is probably right that romantic love is ‘a particular

form of friendship’ (p. xvi) it would be useful to say exactly what form it is so that we are
able to differentiate between relationships. Jollimore alludes that the difference might be
the presence of sexual desire, but this is insufficient: there are best friends who have sex,
even exclusive sex, who do not conceive of themselves as romantic lovers.
Overall though, Jollimore offers fresh insight into a topic that philosophers have been
grappling with at least since Plato. Though he does not explicitly discuss his view in
terms of marriage, a significant implication of his theory, in my view, is to offer us an idea
of what marriage might be asking us to commit to. It has long been questioned whether
it is really possible to promise to love someone come what may. If it is not, then marriage
vows seem somewhat unfair. However, it seems possible to promise to look at someone
with love’s vision and, if Jollimore is correct, then viewing someone in this way will
generate loving feelings towards them. Thus, Jollimore offers us not only a new way of
understanding love, but also practical insight into how to love and how to make it last.

NATASHA MCKEEVER
University of Sheffield

© Society for Applied Philosophy, 2012