Interview with Professor Joshua Greene

From The Project on Law & Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School (PLMS):

Here is an outstanding interview of Joshua Greene by Harvard Law Student Jeff Pote. The interview, titled “On Moral Judgment and Normative Questions” lasts just over 58 minutes. It was conducted as part of the Law and Mind Science Seminar at Harvard.

Bio:

Joshua D. Greene is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He received his A.B. at Harvard University in 1997 where he was advised by Derek Parfit. He received his PhD in Philosophy at Princeton University in 2002 having written a dissertation on the foundation of ethics advised by David Lewis and Gilbert Harman. From 2002 to 2006, when he began at Harvard, he studied as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton in the Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Laboratory under Jonathan Cohen. He is currently the Director of the Moral Cognition Lab.

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Table of contents:

• 00:00 — Title Frame
• 00:23 — Introduction
• 00:54 — How did your professional interests develop?
• 04:58 — What are the questions that interest you?
• 06:07 — What research projects are you currently working on?
• 08:32 — Could you describe the original experiment that supported a dual-process view of moral judgment?
• 13:13 — Has further research supported the dual-process view of moral judgment?
• 16:43 — Could you explain how this, or any, psychological understanding could bear on normative questions of law and policy?
• 24:39 — Could you provide an example of a situation where we should not rely on “blunt intuition?”
• 30:42 — Can you see other places where psychological research illuminates normative questions of law or policy?
• 37:40 — Do any of our moral judgments represent an objective moral reality (or moral facts)?
• 44:38 — Could you provide an example of a “moral objectivist” solution that you find unpersuasive?
• 49:33 — What is the problem of “free will” and what is its relevance for legal responsibility and punishment?
• 56:26 — How will this emerging scientific understanding of the human animal affect law and moral philosophy?

Duration: 58:04

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For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Joshua Greene To Speak at Harvard Law School,” “2010 Law and Mind Sciences Conference,”  “The Interior Situation of Honesty (and Dishonesty),” “Moral Psychology Primer,” “Law & the Brain,” “Pinker on the Situation of Morality,” “The Science of Morality,” and “Your Brain and Morality.”

The Captured Situation of Justice

Michael S. Kang and Joanna Shepherd recently posted the important paper “The Partisan Price of Justice: An Empirical Analysis of Campaign Contributions and Judicial Decisions” on  SSRN.  Here’s the abstract.

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Do campaign contributions affect judicial decisions by elected judges in favor of their contributors’ interests? Although the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal Co. relies on this intuition for its logic, it has been until now largely a proposition that has gone empirically untested. No longer. Using a dataset of every state supreme court case in all fifty states over a four-year period, we find that elected judges are more likely to decide in favor of business interests as the amount of campaign contributions that they have received from those interests increases. In other words, every dollar of direct contributions from business groups is associated with an increase in the probability that the judges will vote for business litigants. However, we find surprisingly a statistically significant relationship between campaign contributions and judicial decisions in favor of contributors’ interests only for judges elected in partisan elections, not nonpartisan ones. Our findings suggest an important role of political parties in connecting campaign contributions to judicial decisions under partisan elections. In the flurry of reform activity responding to Caperton, our findings support judicial reforms that propose the replacement of partisan elections with nonpartisan methods of judicial selection and retention.

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You can download the paper for free here.  For a sample of related Situationist posts, see “Situationist Corruption,” “The Situation of Judges,” “The Situation of Earmarks,” “The Situation of Judging – Part I,” and “The Situation of Judging – Part II.”