Marking the Boundaries of Punishment: Retribution Directed at Innocents, Animals & Collectives

University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia PA

Investigators

Abstract

Understanding what motivates the human desire to punish is essential for building an effective and fair legal system. Are punitive motivations informed by a desire to deter future wrongdoers and better protect society or by a retributive drive to deliver just deserts to offenders for past bad acts? What factors must be present to find an entity punishment-worthy and how do these factors impact the severity of our punitive response? While our judicial system offers answers to these questions in the form of penal codes, sentencing guidelines, and other legal rules, there is scant evidence to show that these provisions align with people's intuitions about punishment. Additionally, past psychological research that has tried to isolate the motivations underlying people's desire to punish offenders is inconclusive, owing to the difficulty of separating retributive and general deterrence motivations. Using online and laboratory experiments, the present project aims to provide much clearer evidence for the existence of a specifically retributive motive. The project also aims to document the scope of retribution. Does this motivation to punish rely on the actor having human adult mental states and moral capacities or can entities generally thought to be inappropriate targets for state-level punishment - including children, adults with limited mental capacities, and non-human entities - be appropriate recipients of punishment? The data from this project will be critical to a number of pressing policy issues, including the movement incorporating more retributive principles into state and federal criminal law, and recent moves to place limitations on capital punishment by the Supreme Court. Although the project should yield benefits most directly for scholars, judges, and legal policymakers, the project is also designed to enhance the educating, training, and mentoring of the next generation of scholars at the intersection of law and psychology.