I criticize an increasingly popular set of arguments for the justifiability of punishment. Some philosophers try to justify punishment by appealing to what Peter Strawson calls the reactive attitudes – emotions like resentment, indignation, remorse and guilt. These arguments fail. The view that these emotions commit us to punishment rests on unsophisticated views of punishment and of these emot...

a r t i c l e i n f o Humans willingly pay a cost to punish defecting partners in experimental games. However, the psychological motives underpinning punishment are unclear. Punishment could stem from the desire to reciprocally harm a cheat (i.e. revenge) which is arguably indicative of a deterrent function. Alternatively, punishment could be motivated by the desire to redress the balance betwe...

Punishment typically involves depriving violators of resources they own such as money or labor. These resources can become revenue for authorities and thus motivate profitseeking punishment. In this paper, we design a novel experiment to provide direct evidence on the role punishment plays in communicating norms. More importantly, we provide experimental evidence indicating that if people know ...

despite the challenges noticed in the meaning and concept of pederasty (lawāṭ), different viewpoints have always existed among the jurists concerning the punishment of the pederast, to the extent that some jurists have decreed death penalty equally for both the married and unmarried pederast. in contrast, some others have reconciled among the related traditions in this respect and considered th...

Social control and the enforcement of social norms glue a society together. It has been shown theoretically and empirically that informal punishment of wrongdoers fosters cooperation in human groups. Most of this research has focused on voluntary and uncoordinated punishment carried out by individual group members. However, as punishment is costly, it is an open question as to why humans engage...

OBJECTIVES Corporal punishment is still widely practiced around the globe, despite the large body of child development research that substantiates its short- and long-term consequences. Within this context, this paper examined the relationship between parental use of corporal punishment and youth externalizing behavior with a Chilean sample to add to the growing empirical evidence concerning th...

In many species, mutual cooperation is stabilized by forms of policing and peer punishment: if cheaters are punished, there is a strong selective pressure to cooperate. Most human societies have complemented, and sometimes even replaced, such peer punishment mechanisms with pool punishment, where punishment is outsourced to central institutions such as the police. Even before free-riding occurs...