Justice without Retribution: An Epistemic Argument against Retributive Criminal Punishment

Gregg D. Caruso (2020)
Neuroethics ​13(1): 13-28.

Abstract

Within the United States, the most prominent justification for criminal punishment is retributivism. This retributivist justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that she deserves something bad to happen to her just because she has knowingly done wrong—this could include pain, deprivation, or death. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment. This means that the retributivist position is not reducible to consequentialist considerations nor in justifying punishment does it appeal to wider goods such as the safety of society or the moral improvement of those being punished. A number of sentencing guidelines in the U.S. have adopted desert as their distributive principle, and it is increasingly given deference in the “purposes” section of state criminal codes, where it can be the guiding principle in the interpretation and application of the code’s provisions. Indeed, the American Law Institute recently revised the Model Penal Code so as to set desert as the official dominate principle for sentencing. And courts have identified desert as the guiding principle in a variety of contexts, as with the Supreme Court’s enthroning retributivism as the “primary justification for the death penalty.” While retributivism provides one of the main sources of justification for punishment within the criminal justice system, there are good philosophical and practical reasons for rejecting it. One such reason is that it is unclear that agents truly deserve to suffer for the wrongs they have done in the sense required by retributivism. In the first section, I explore the retributivist justification of punishment and explain why it is inconsistent with free will skepticism. In the second section, I then argue that even if one is not convinced by the arguments for free will skepticism, there remains a strong epistemic argument against causing harm on retributivist grounds that undermines both libertarian and compatibilist attempts to justify it. I maintain that this argument provides sufficient reason for rejecting the retributive justification of criminal punishment. I conclude in the third section by briefly sketching my public health-quarantine model, a non-retributive alternative for addressing criminal behavior that draws on the public health framework and prioritizes prevention and social justice. I argue that the model is not only consistent with free will skepticism and the epistemic argument against retributivism, it also provides the most justified, humane, and effective way of dealing with criminal behavior.

The info is here.

Sexual ads trigger financial impatience in hungry men — but have the opposite effect in women

Anastasiya Tyshko
psypost.org
Originally posted 7 April 20

Here is an excerpt:

Previous research indicates that hungry people are prone to making impatient decisions and opt for immediate rather than delayed benefits. In the present study, researchers sought to test how the combination of hunger and exposure to sexual ads would affect people’s financial decisions.

“One of the reasons we were interested in this topic was the quite ambiguous effects of sex in advertising, as demonstrated in previous research. Moreover, we wanted to explore potentially interactive effects between two basic human drives (in our case linked to hunger and sexual arousal) on people’s financial decisions,” said study author Tobias Otterbring, an associate professor at Aarhus University.

To conduct the experiment, the researchers recruited 265 university students (51% female). All participants were randomly divided into three groups: one experimental and two controls. In the experimental condition, participants were shown sexual ads, while the two control groups viewed neutral ads or no ads at all. After this, all participants were asked to choose between receiving $35 in 20 days or $30 tomorrow. Lastly, participants rated how hungry they were during their participation in the study.

The results indicate that being exposed to sexual ads while being hungry increases the likelihood of making impatient financial decisions for men. For women, the combination of hunger and sexual ads, on the contrary, is linked to greater chances of being patient in one’s financial choices.

“Our findings indicate that men and women (or at least male and female undergraduates, which constituted our sample) make different financial decisions after visual exposure to ads with sexually arousing content, but that such sex differences only seem to apply to hungry rather than satiated individuals. According to our results, satiated men and women do not differ in their financial decisions after viewing sexually arousing ads,” Otterbring told PsyPost.

The info is here.

Workism Is Making Americans Miserable

Derek Thompson
The Atlantic
Originally published 24 Feb 20

Here is an excerpt:

The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.

What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.

Homo industrious is not new to the American landscape. The American dream—that hoary mythology that hard work always guarantees upward mobility—has for more than a century made the U.S. obsessed with material success and the exhaustive striving required to earn it.

No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States. Americans “work longer hours, have shorter vacations, get less in unemployment, disability, and retirement benefits, and retire later, than people in comparably rich societies,” wrote Samuel P. Huntington in his 2005 book Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity.

One group has led the widening of the workist gap: rich men.

In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure time more than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves into the world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries.

This shift defies economic logic—and economic history. The rich have always worked less than the poor, because they could afford to. The landed gentry of preindustrial Europe dined, danced, and gossiped, while serfs toiled without end. In the early 20th century, rich Americans used their ample downtime to buy weekly movie tickets and dabble in sports. Today’s rich American men can afford vastly more downtime. But they have used their wealth to buy the strangest of prizes: more work!

The info is here.

The Answer to a COVID-19 Vaccine May Lie in Our Genes, But ...

Ifeoma Ajunwa & Forrest Briscoe
Scientific American
Originally posted 13 May 2020

Here is an excerpt:

Although the rationale for expanded genetic testing is obviously meant for the greater good, such testing could also bring with it a host of privacy and economic harms. In the past, genetic testing has also been associated with employment discrimination. Even before the current crisis, companies like 23andMe and Ancestry assembled and started operating their own private long-term large-scale databases of U.S. citizens’ genetic and health data. 23andMe and Ancestry recently announced they would use their databases to identify genetic factors that predict COVID-19 susceptibility.

Other companies are growing similar databases, for a range of purposes. And the NIH’s AllofUs program is constructing a genetic database, owned by the federal government, in which data from one million people will be used to study various diseases. These new developments indicate an urgent need for appropriate genetic data governance.

Leaders from the biomedical research community recently proposed a voluntary code of conduct for organizations constructing and sharing genetic databases. We believe that the public has a right to understand the risks of genetic databases and a right to have a say in how those databases will be governed. To ascertain public expectations about genetic data governance, we surveyed over two thousand (n=2,020) individuals who altogether are representative of the general U.S. population. After educating respondents about the key benefits and risks associated with DNA databases—using information from recent mainstream news reports—we asked how willing they would be to provide their DNA data for such a database.

The info is here.

Self-Nudging and the Citizen Choice Architect

Samuli Reijula, Ralph Hertwig.
Behavioural Public Policy, 2020
DOI: 10.1017/bpp.2020.5

Abstract

This article argues that nudges can often be turned into self-nudges: empowering interventions that enable people to design and structure their own decision environments—that is, to act as citizen choice architects. Self-nudging applies insights from behavioral science in a way that is practicable and cost-effective but that sidesteps concerns about paternalism or manipulation. It has the potential to expand the scope of application of behavioral insights from the public to the personal sphere (e.g., homes, offices, families). It is a tool for reducing failures of self-control and enhancing personal autonomy; specifically, self-nudging can mean designing one’s proximate choice architecture to alleviate the effects of self-control problems, engaging in education to understand the nature and causes of self-control problems, and employing simple educational nudges to improve goal attainment in various domains. It can even mean self-paternalistic interventions such as winnowing down one’s choice set by, for instance, removing options.  Policy makers could promote self-nudging by sharing knowledge about nudges and how they work. The ultimate goal of the self-nudging approach is to enable citizen choice architects’ efficient self-governance, where reasonable, and the self-determined arbitration of conflicts between their mutually exclusive goals and preferences.

From the Conclusion:

Commercial choice architects have become proficient in hijacking people’s attention and desires (see, e.g., Nestle 2013; Nestle 2015; Cross and Proctor 2014; Wu 2017), making it difficult for consumers to exercise agency and freedom of choice. Even in the best of circumstances, the potential for public choice architects to nudge people toward better choices in their personal and proximate choice environments is limited. Against this background, we suggest that policy makers should consider the possibility of empowering individuals to make strategic changes in their proximate choice architecture. There is no reason why citizens should not be informed about nudges that can be turned into self-nudges and, more generally, about the design principles of choice environments (e.g., defaults, framing, cognitive accessibility). We suggest that self-nudging is an untapped resource that sidesteps various ethical and practical problems associated with nudging and can empower people to make better everyday choices. This does not mean that regulation or nudging should be replaced by self-nudging; indeed, self-nudging can benefit enormously from the ingenuity of the nudging approach and the evidence accumulating on it. But, as the adage goes, give someone a fish, and you need them for a day. Teach someone to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime. We believe that sharing  behavioral insights from psychology and behavioral economics will provide citizens with a the citizen choice architect means for taking back power, giving them more control over the design of their proximate choice environments–in other words, qualifying them as citizen choice architects.

The article is here.

Humans are complicated—do we need behavioral science to get through this?

Cathleen O'Grady
Ars Technica
Originally published 16 May 20

Here is an excerpt:

Leaning on the evidence

If humans didn’t insist on being quite so messily human, pandemic response would be much simpler. People would stay physically separated whenever possible; leaders would be proactive and responsive to evidence; our fight could be concentrated on the biomedical tools we so urgently need. The problem is that our maddening, imperfect humanity gets in the way at every turn, and getting around those imperfections demands that we understand the human behavior underlying them.

It's also clear that we need to understand the differences between groups of people to get a handle on the pandemic. Speculation has been rampant about how cultural differences might influence what sort of responses are palatable. And some groups are suffering disproportionately: death rates are higher among African-American and Latinx communities in the US, while a large analysis from the UK found that black, minority ethnic, and poorer people are at higher risk of death—our social inequalities, housing, transport, and food systems all play a role in shaping the crisis. We can’t extricate people and our complicated human behavior and society from the pandemic: they are one and the same.

In their paper, Van Bavel, Willer and their group of behavioral research proponents point to studies from fields like public health, sociology and psychology. They cover work on cultural differences, social inequality, mental health, and more, pulling out suggestions for how the research could be useful for policymakers and community leaders.

Those recommendations are pretty intuitive. For effective communications, it could be helpful to lean on sources that carry weight in different communities, like religious leaders, they suggest. And public health messaging that emphasizes protecting others—rather than fixating on just protecting oneself—tends to be persuasive, the proponents argue.

But not everyone is convinced that it would necessarily be a good idea to act on the recommendations. “Many of the topics surveyed are relevant,” write psychologist Hans IJzerman and a team of critics in their draft. The team's concern isn’t the relevance of the research; it’s how robust that research is. If there are critical flaws in the supporting data, then applying these lessons on a broad scale could be worse than useless—it could be actively harmful.

The info is here.

When Is “Gay Panic” Accepted? Exploring Juror Characteristics and Case Type as Predictors of a Successful Gay Panic Defense

Michalski, N. D., & Nunez, N. (2020).
Journal of Interpersonal Violence. 
https://doi.org/10.1177/0886260520912595

Abstract

“Gay panic” refers to a situation in which a heterosexual individual charged with a violent crime against a homosexual individual claims they lost control and reacted violently because of an unwanted sexual advance that was made upon them. This justification for a violent crime presented by the defendant in the form of a provocation defense is used as an effort to mitigate the charges brought against him. There has been relatively little research conducted concerning this defense strategy and the variables that might predict when the defense is likely to be successful in achieving a lesser sentence for the defendant. This study utilized 249 mock jurors to assess the effects of case type (assault or homicide) and juror characteristics (homophobia, religious fundamentalism, and political orientation) on the success of the gay panic defense compared with a neutral provocation defense. Participant homophobia was found to be the driving force behind their willingness to accept the gay panic defense as legitimate. Higher levels of homophobia and religious fundamentalism were found to predict more leniency in verdict decisions when the gay panic defense was presented. This study furthers the understanding of decision making in cases involving the gay panic defense and highlights the need for more research to be conducted to help understand and combat LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) prejudice in the courtroom.

The research is here.

Ethical road map through the COVID-19 pandemic

Zoe Fritz and others
BMJ 2020; 369
doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m2033

The covid-19 pandemic has created profound ethical challenges in health and social care, not only for current decisions about individuals but also for longer term and population level policy decisions. Already covid-19 has generated ethical questions about the prioritisation of treatment, protective equipment, and testing; the impact of covid-19 strategies on patients with other health conditions; the approaches taken to advance care planning and resuscitation decisions; and the crisis in care homes.

Ethical questions continue to multiply as the pandemic progresses and new evidence emerges, including how best to distribute any new vaccines and treatments; how best to respond to evidence that disease severity and mortality are substantially greater in ethnic minority populations; how to prioritise patients for care as medical services re-open; how to manage assessment of immunity and its implications; and how the health system should be configured to manage any future peaks in cases.

Science and values

The UK government repeatedly states that it is “following the science” by heeding the advice provided through the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). However, this implies that the science alone will tell us what to do. Not only does this rhetoric shift the responsibility for difficult decisions on to “the science”, it is also wrong. Science may provide evidence on which to base decisions, but our values will determine what we do with that evidence and how we select the evidence to use. It is disingenuous and misleading to imply that value-free science leads the way. Both science and policy are value laden.

Values questions are being addressed primarily by professional organisations, although the UK government has independent advice, for example, from the Moral and Ethical Advisory Group. Despite such efforts to plot an ethical path, the current approach is piecemeal, confusing, and risks needless duplication of effort. Concerns are mounting about a lack of transparency around the ethical agenda underpinning decisions, a lack of coordination, and the absence of clear national leadership.

The info is here.

Global health without justice or ethics

S Venkatapuram
Journal of Public Health
https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdaa001

The great promise at the start of the twenty-first century that Anglo-American philosophers would produce transformative theories and practical guidance for realizing global health equity and justice has largely gone unfulfilled. The publication of The Law of Peoples by John Rawls in 1999 formally inaugurated the emerging academic field of global justice philosophy.1 After 2000, numerous monographs, journal articles and conferences discussed global justice. And new academic associations, journals and research centres were established.

One remarkable aspect of the new field was that the stark inequalities in health across societies were often the starting concern. Despite our diverse philosophical and ethical views, reasonable people are likely to be morally troubled about the large inequalities in life expectancies between some sub-Saharan country X and the USA or another rich country. This initially shared moral intuition or indignation, then, motivated diverse arguments about what precisely is morally bad about global health inequalities and global poverty and the possible demands of justice. Some philosophers described what ‘our’ duties are or, indeed, are not, to help ‘those people over there’. Others minimized the distinction between us and them by arguing for theories of radical global equality, the arbitrariness of political borders and duties that follow from our complicity in transnational harms experienced in other countries.

Progress in global justice philosophy seemingly promised real-world progress in global health equity and justice, because health inequality was the foremost issue in philosophical debates on global inequality, poverty and claims of the ‘global poor’. At the same time, largely driven by HIV research, bioethics went global as it was exported alongside medical research to resource poor settings. Bioethicists also began to go beyond clinical and research settings to examine public health ethics, social inequalities in health and social determinants—from local conditions all the way to global institutions and processes. Nevertheless, as of 2020, it is difficult to identify any compelling conceptions of global justice or global health justice or to identify any significant philosophical contributions to the practical improvement of global health and inequalities. What happened?

The rest of the article is linked above.