Punishment plays a role in human cooperation, but it is costly. Prior research shows that people are more cooperative when they expect to receive negative feedback for non-cooperation, even in the absence of costly punishment, which would have interesting implications for theory and applications. However, based on theories of habituation and cue-based learning, we propose that people will learn to ignore expressions of disapproval that are not clearly associated with material costs or benefits. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a between-subjects, 40-round public goods game (i.e. much longer than most studies), where participants could respond to others’ contributions by sending numerical disapproval messages, paying to reduce others’ earnings, or neither. Consistent with previous results, we observed steadily increasing contributions in the costly punishment condition. In contrast, contributions declined after the early rounds in the expressed disapproval condition, and were eventually no higher than the basic control condition with neither costly punishment nor disapproval ratings. In other words, costless disapproval may temporarily increase cooperation, but the effects fade. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of our findings, including the unexpectedly high levels of cooperation in a second control condition.

This study examines the recent proliferation of manslaughter charges and subsequent prosecutions brought against people who have shared, sold, or provided drugs that have led to overdose death in Canada. It presents a documentary analysis of news media coverage, court decisions, and Access-to-Information and Freedom-of-Information requests of materials from criminal legal institutions. The analysis finds that the vast majority of those who face manslaughter charges are engaged in the lowest tiers of the drug trade, are themselves people who use drugs, and are often intimately known to the deceased. Messaging by police, prosecutors and the courts mobilize the overdose crisis as rationale for these charges and prosecutions, positioning them as a form of redress to impacted communities. This phenomenon illustrates how punitive criminal legal responses to the overdose crisis have deepened alongside the retreat of criminal law in other circumstances, contradicting claims of a therapeutic turn in Canadian drug policies.

The maintenance of cross-cultural variation and arbitrary traditions in human populations is a key question in cultural evolution. Conformist transmission, the tendency to follow the majority, was previously considered central to this phenomenon. However, recent theory indicates that cognitive biases can greatly reduce its ability to maintain traditions. Therefore, we expanded prior models to investigate two other ways that cultural variation can be sustained: payoff-biased transmission and norm reinforcement. Our findings predict that both payoff-biased transmission and reinforcement can enhance conformist transmission's ability to maintain traditions. However, payoff-biased transmission can only sustain cultural variation if it is functionally related to environmental factors. In contrast, norm reinforcement readily generates and maintains arbitrary cultural variation. Furthermore, reinforcement results in path-dependent cultural dynamics, meaning that historical traditions influence current practices, even though group behaviours have changed. We conclude that environmental variation probably plays a role in functional cultural traditions, but arbitrary cultural variation is more plausibly due to the reinforcement of norm compliance.

To comply with Shiʿi theological-jurisprudential justifications and dogmatic traditions, the Iranian postrevolutionary legal system formally enshrined the principle of legality of crime and punishment within the Iranian Constitution and important legal provisions. Despite this formal entrenchment and codification of its criminal law, which together act as a legal constraint on the traditionally excessive power of Muslim judges, the Iranian theocratic system has exempted religious sins from this principle by blurring the distinction between crime and sin and criminalizing certain sinful acts with unclear language. These two legal mechanisms not only violate the principle of legality and amplify legal uncertainty, but their reference to Sharia law also binds the fate of the accused more tightly to the discretion of the judge than to the letter of the law. Consequently, the religiopolitical predilections of judges have become a determining factor in findings of criminal responsibility and imposition of punishment on citizens.

People simultaneously entangled in multiple state systems are often subject to contradictory legal mandates that can foster distrust and incentivize system avoidance. This study focuses on those indebted to both the child support system and the criminal legal system, a situation we describe as dual debt. We ask whether and how the imposition of legal debts with punitive surveillance and collections mechanisms fosters alienation in the form of legal cynicism and estrangement, which we refer to jointly as legal anomie. Drawing from interview data in Minnesota, we find that legal anomie and system avoidance are mutually reinforcing processes, as debts in these systems triggered consequences that pushed people out of the formal labor market and heightened their distrust of legal institutions. The case of dual debt demonstrates how alienating and contradictory policy systems can foster both legal anomie and system avoidance, particularly in the context of economic and social precarity.

I formulate a compatibilism that is distinctively responsive to skeptical worries about the justification of punishment and other moral responsibility practices. I begin with an evolutionary story explaining why backward-looking reactive attitudes are “given” in human society. Cooperative society plausibly could not be sustained without such practices. The necessary accountability practices have complex internal standards. These internal standards may fully ground the appropriateness of reactive attitudes. Following a recent analogy, we can similarly hold that there are no external standards for what is funny; the norms of comedy are complex, but funny is funny. However, this is compatible with moral reasons to change the practices themselves, and therefore change what is fitting within them: in the first instance, a moralistic “that's not funny” is ill-fitting, but “that shouldn't be funny” can be apt. The analogous reformist position prescribes practices constituting the minimal responsibility norms necessary for cooperative society.

Many moral judgments are rooted in the outrage heuristic. In making such judgments about certain personal injury cases, people's judgments are both predictable and widely shared. With respect to outrage (on a bounded scale of one to six) and punitive intent (also on a bounded scale of one to six), the judgments of one group of six people, or 12 people, nicely predict the judgements of other groups of six people, or 12 people. Moreover, outrage judgments are highly predictive of punitive intentions. Because of their use of the outrage heuristic, people are intuitive retributivists. People care about deterrence, but they do not think in terms of optimal deterrence. Because outrage is category-specific, those who use the outrage heuristic are likely to produce patterns that they would themselves reject, if only they were to see them. Because people are intuitive retributivists, they reject some of the most common and central understandings in economic and utilitarian theory. To the extent that a system of criminal justice depends on the moral psychology of ordinary people, it is likely to operate on the basis of the outrage heuristic and will, from the utilitarian point of view, end up making serious and systematic errors.

Gregory the Great's Moralia in Job has been said to mark a transitional phase in the development of atonement doctrine. I argue that the Moralia cohesively portrays Christ's redemptive work as achieving something in two directions: towards God, a vicarious payment of humanity's debt of punishment; towards humanity, an efficaciously convicting and restorative example. This sustains a spirituality in which exacting and self-denying moral effort rests on freedom from judgement and on the death accomplished by the Mediator. Engaging the Moralia in this manner illuminates patristic exegetical sensibilities and proves instructive about how the fathers fit into later taxonomies of atonement models.

Kant’s conception of remorse has received little discussion in the literature. I argue that he thinks we ought to experience remorse for both retributivist and forward-looking reasons. This account casts helpful light on his ideas of conversion and the descent into the hell of self-cognition. But while he prescribes a heartbreakingly painful experience of remorse, he acknowledges that excess remorse can threaten rational agency through distraction and suicide, and this raises questions about whether actual human beings ought to cultivate their consciences in such a way as to experience remorse in the way he conceives it.

It has been a teaching of the Catholic Church for many centuries that the fact that an act is immoral is not itself a sufficient reason for acts of that kind to be punishable under the law. Therefore, before American Catholics or their bishops actively support laws making abortion illegal and punishable, they must carefully examine such laws to determine whether they are consistent with the common good and thus morally justifiable. This article first turns to the three conditions that Thomas Aquinas offers in the Treatise on Law (Summa Theologica, I-II, QQ. 90-105) that a law must fulfill in order for it to be consistent with the common good. Serious reasons are identified for doubting that laws prohibiting and punishing abortion can fulfill Aquinas’s three conditions. There are also serious reasons based on Catholic teaching, i.e., that we are always obliged to follow our conscience, for concluding that, contrary to the common good, many conscientious persons would be mistakenly punished by such laws. For these reasons, the article proposes that American Catholics and their bishops should reexamine their support for laws punishing abortion and should consider instead actively opposing such laws.

While humans are highly cooperative, they can also behave spitefully. Yet spite remains understudied. Spite can be normatively driven and while previous experiments have found some evidence that cooperation and punishment may spread via social learning, no experiments have considered the social transmission of spiteful behaviour. Here we present an online experiment where, following an opportunity to earn wealth, we asked participants to choose an action towards an anonymous partner across a full spectrum of social behaviour, from spite to altruism. In accordance with cultural evolutionary theory, participants were presented with social information that varied in source and content. Across six conditions, we informed participants that either the majority or the highest earner had chosen to behave spitefully, neutrally or altruistically. We found an overall tendency towards altruism, but at lower levels among those exposed to spite compared with altruism. We found no difference between social information that came from the majority or the highest earner. Exploratory analysis revealed that participants’ earnings negatively correlated with altruistic behaviour. Our results contrast with previous literature that report high rates of spite in experimental samples and a greater propensity for individuals to copy successful individuals over the majority.