Intuitions of punishment

University of Chicago Law Review

Volumn 77, Issue 4, 2010, Pages 1633-1641

  Jones, Owen D ^a   Kurzban, Robert ^b  

^a VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79955736431     PISSN: 00419494     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Note

References (63)

1. Paul H. Robinson and Robert Kurzban, Concordance and Conflict in Intuitions of Justice, 91 Minn L Rev 1829 (2007).
2. Paul H. Robinson, Robert Kurzban, and Owen D. Jones, The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice, 60 Vand L Rev 1633 (2007).
3. See generally, for example, Owen D. Jones and Timothy Goldsmith, Law and Behavioral Biology, 105 Colum L Rev 405 (2005);
4. Owen D. Jones, Time-Shifted Rationality and the Law of Law's Leverage: Behavioral Economics Meets Behavioral Biology, 95 Nw U L Rev 1141 (2001);
5. Robert Kurzban and Mark R. Leary, Evolutionary Origins of Stigmatization: The Functions of Social Exclusion, 127 Psych Bull 187 (2001).
6. See also, for example, Robert Kurzban and Steven Neuberg, Managing Ingroup and Outgroup Relationships, in David M. Buss, ed, Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology 653, 659-61 (John Wiley 2005). This builds off of work by many schoolars.
7. See, for example, sources compiled on the website of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (SEAL), online at http://www.sealsite.org (visited Aug 30, 2010).
8. See generally Paul H. Robinson, Owen D. Jones, and Robert Kurzban, Realism, Punishment, and Reform, 77 U Chi L Rev 1611 (2010).
9. See Donald Braman, Dan M. Kahan, and David A. Hoffman, Some Realism about Punishment Naturalism, 77 U Chi L Rev 1531, 1551-66 (2010).
10. For an earlier critique along similar lines, see generally Christopher Jaeger, Defending a Social Learning Explanation: A Comment on the Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice, 62 Vand L Rev En Banc 25 (2009), online at http://law.vanderbilt.edu/publications/vanderbilt-law-review/online-companion/ download.aspx?id=3993 (visited Aug 30, 2010) (arguing that "general social learning" is the most plausible explanation for our shared intuitions about justice).
11. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1536 (cited in note 5).
12. See, for example, id at 1532-33.
13. See id at 1539-40.
14. See Matt Ridley, Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience, and What Makes Us Human (HarperCollins 2003
15. Robinson, Kurzban, and Jones, 60 Vand L Rev at 1640-42 (cited in note 2) (citing sources); id at 1677.
16. See Robert Kurzban, Alas Poor Evolutionary Psychology: Unfairly Accused, Unjustly Condemned, 2 Hum Nat Rev 99 (2002), online at http://human-nature.com/ nibbs/02/apd.html (visited May 17, 2010);
17. Robert Kurzban, Grand Challenges of Evolutionary Psychology, 1 Frontiers Evol Psych 1 (2010).
18. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1533 (cited in note 5).
19. For a classic description, see generally George C. Williams, Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (Princeton 1966).
20. See text accompanying notes 23-25.
21. See, for example, Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind (Penguin 1994).
22. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1538-39 (cited in note 5).
23. See also H. Clark Barrett and Robert Kurzban, Modularity in Cognition, 113 Psych Rev 628, 637-38 (2006);
24. Daniel Sperber, Modularity and Relevance: How Can a Massively Modular Mind Be Flexible and Context-Sensitive?, in Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich, eds, The Innate Mind: Structure and Content 53, 57-59 (Oxford 2005).
25. For example, it is clear from context that when BKH assert that we believe "intuitions about ⋯ crime and punishment ⋯ are innate," 77 U Chi L Rev at 1532-33 (cited in note 5), they use "innate" as a synonym for "genetically determined" or "fixed." For example, they claim that "moral judgments ⋯ are not innate insofar as they depend crucially on social meaning that varies across cultural groups." Id at 1532. See also id at 1546 n 59. In contrast, our meaning of innate, consistent with the meaning of the term in biology and psychology, is elaborated below. See text accompanying notes 21-26.
26. See Douglas Futuyma, Evolution (Sinauer 2005);
27. John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and H. Clark Barrett, The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology and the Theory of Tandem, Coordinated Inheritances: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003), 129 Psych Bull 858, 863-64 (2003);
28. Timothy Goldsmith and William Zimmerman, Biology, Evolution, and Human Nature (John Wiley 2001);
29. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture, in Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, eds, The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture 19, 83-84 (Oxford 1992).
30. See also Jones and Goldsmith, 105 Colum L Rev at 428 (cited in note 3) ("Behavior flows from brains that encounter specific environmental stimuli and possess a neural architecture that is as importantly shaped by environments as it is by genes.").
31. See Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (Viking 2002).
32. For an overview, see generally Ridley, Nature via Nurture (cited in note 9).
33. See also Owen D. Jones, Sex, Culture, and the Biology of Rape: Toward Explanation and Prevention, 87 Cal L Rev 827, 874-77 (1999).
34. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1532 (cited in note 5).
35. See, for example, Alan Slater and Gavin Bremner, eds, An Introduction to Developmental Psychology 61 (Blackwell 2003
36. Arnold Sameroff, A Unified Theory of Development: A Dialectic Integration of Nature and Nurture, 81 Child Dev 6 (2010).
37. Robinson, Kurzban, and Jones, 60 Vand L Rev at 1646 (cited in note 2).
38. See id at 1642.
39. See, for example, Pinker, Language Instinct (cited in note 14).
40. See Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (MIT 1965
41. Pinker, Language Instinct (cited in note 14).
42. See generally Ridley, Nature via Nurture (cited in note 9).
43. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1604 (cited in note 5) (emphasis altered).
44. Id at 1551 (emphasis added).
45. Id at 1592.
46. Robinson, Jones, and Kurzban, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1621-23 (cited in note 4).
47. See John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, On the Universality of Human Nature and the Uniqueness of the Individual: The Role of Genetics and Adaptation, 58 J Personality 17, 60-62 (1990).
48. This does not mean that our hypotheses regarding the causes of broadly shared intuitions of justice are unfalsifiable. No one has yet specified precisely how to measure variation in intuitions of justice; nonetheless, there are thresholds for lack of concordance that would be inconsistent with our hypotheses.
49. For example, should the denominator be the number of social groups (which would count a small tribe and an entire country the same in the balance), or should it instead- seemingly much more usefully-be the total number of individuals across the planet?
50. For example, the very notion of "wrongness" is quite universal. As has been shown, general social learning theories cannot explain this fact; there are no smaller, teachable "components" out of which wrongness can be constructed. See John Macnamara, Development of Moral Reasoning and the Foundations of Geometry, 21 J Theory Soc Behav 125, 143 (1991
51. George E. Moore, Principia Ethica 223 (Cambridge 1903).
52. Robinson, Kurzban, and Jones, 60 Vand L Rev at 1664-75 (cited in note 2).
53. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1578 (cited in note 5).
54. See id at 1533, 1598, 1599.
55. See Tooby and Cosmides, Psychological Foundations of Culture at 100-08 (cited in note 17).
56. See Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (cited in note 25
57. Tooby and Cosmides, Psychological Foundations of Culture 19 (cited in note 17).
58. See Robinson, Kurzban, and Jones, 60 Vand L Rev 1633 (cited in note 2).
59. See, for example, id.
60. See, for example, Robinson and Kurzban, 91 Minn L Rev 1829 (cited in note 1).
61. Braman, Kahan, and Hoffman, 77 U Chi L Rev at 1532 (cited in note 5).
62. See Robinson, Kurzban, and Jones, 60 Vand L Rev at 1646-49 (cited in note 2).
63. Robinson, Kurzban, and Jones, 60 Vand L Rev at 1687 (cited in note 2).