| Contents |
The most original of original sins. The social problem : cheat or cooperate? ; Our natures lost and rediscovered ; Culture : our small groups become large ; The culture and evolution of law ; The problem of property ; The promising animal : homo exchangius ; Two solutions to the social problem -- Detecting and blaming. Detecting cheaters ; Blaming cheaters ; Blame and punishment -- First-party punishment : conscience and guilt. The moral animal ; Empathy ; Psychopaths -- Second-party punishment : retaliation and revenge. The avenging animal ; Self-defense and its cousins ; Angry sentencing judges : are we judging or retaliating? -- Third-party punishment : retribution. The punishing animal ; Moving from second- to third-party punishment ; Ostracism : "The cold shoulder is just a step toward execution" ; Punishment over time : from banishment and back again ; The roots of responsibility, excuse, and justification -- Forgiveness and its signals. The forgiving animal ; Apology ; Atonement ; The problem of repatriation -- Delegating punishment. Consensus decisions : bees, monkeys, judges, and jurors ; Trial as punishment ; Non-judge non-jury traditions ; The golden age of the English jury ; Modern jurors as punishers -- Legal dissonances. The naturalistic fallacy : mind the gap ; The fallacy of the naturalistic fallacy ; Closing the gap -- Evaluating some process dissonances. Blinking to verdicts ; Signal-to-noise problems : storytelling ; Unanimity and the dilemma of decision versus deliberation -- Into the gap : evaluating some substantive dissonances. Mental state boundary problems ; Two no intent dissonances : the felony-murder rule and corporate criminal liability ; Two no harm dissonances : attempt and conspiracy ; Lessons from the gap -- Brains punishing brains. The punishment ethos ; A new (and very old) way to look at punishment. |
| Abstract |
"Evolution built us to punish cheaters. Without that punishment instinct, we would never have been able to live in small groups, and would never have realized all the significant benefits that small-group living conferred, including mutual defense, cooperative hunting, property, divisions of labor and economies of scale. In fact, to a large extent our notions of right and wrong, of empathy and compassion, of fairness and justice, all come from the tensions of group living, and thus indirectly owe their very existence to punishment. It may sound strange that one key to civilization is our willingness to punish each other, but every parent knows it's true. Every parent also feels the irresistible pull not to punish too much, and in fact maybe not to punish at all - to forgive - and this, too, is a remnant of evolution. Our punishment instinct is not so much a sword ready to fall as it is a finely tuned balance, sometimes susceptible to the gentlest of breezes"-- Provided by publisher. |
