punitive damages are not compensation for injury and is levied to punish reprehensible conduct of defendant and to deter its future occurrence. common law is the base of this approach. according to the u.k. house of lords, there are some restrictions in levying this kind of damage. these restrictions have been fully respected by the courts of all the commonwealth states except australia and the...

Recent research in moral psychology highlights the role of emotion and intuition in moral judgment. In the wake of these findings, the role and significance of moral reasoning remain uncertain. In this article, we distinguish among different kinds of moral reasoning and review evidence suggesting that at least some kinds of moral reasoning play significant roles in moral judgment, including rol...

Recent studies indicate that emotional processes, mediated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), are of great importance for moral judgment. Neurological patients with VMPC dysfunction have been shown to generate increased utilitarian moral judgments, i.e. are more likely to endorse emotionally aversive actions in order to maximize aggregate welfare, when faced with emotionally salient ...

The paper explores the deterrent effect of punitive damages when capital investment is endogenous to the legal rule. Irrespective of the level of damages, firms can reduce their expected liabilities by either increasing safety (the law’s intended goal) or reducing wealth exposed to liability. We show that punitive damages can exacerbate this wealth reduction effect and thereby reduce deterrence...

When making moral judgments, people are typically guided by a plurality of moral rules. These rules owe their existence to human emotions but are not simply equivalent to those emotions. And people’s moral judgments ought to be guided by a plurality of emotion-based rules. The view just stated combines three positions on moral judgment: [1] moral sentimentalism, which holds that sentiments play...