Owen Jones and Robert Kurzban recently posted their paper, “Intuitions of Punishment” (forthcmoing in the University of Chicago Law Review) on SSRN. Here’s the abstract.
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Recent work reveals, contrary to wide-spread assumptions, remarkably high levels of agreement about how to rank order, by blameworthiness, wrongs that involve physical harms, takings of property, or deception in exchanges. In The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice we proposed a new explanation for these unexpectedly high levels of agreement.
Elsewhere in this issue, Professors Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman offer a critique of our views, to which we reply here. Our reply clarifies a number of important issues, such as the interconnected roles that culture, variation, and evolutionary processes play in generating intuitions of punishment.
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You can download the article for free here. For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Michael McCullough on the Situation of Revenge and Forgiveness,” “Steven Pinker Speaks at Harvard Law School,” “John Darley on “Justice as Intuitions” – Video,” “The Situation of Punishment (and Forgiveness),” “The Situation of Revenge,” “The Situation of Punishment,” and “Why We Punish.”
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