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Punishment in Humans: From Intuitions to Institutions
Author(s) -
Cushman Fiery
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
philosophy compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.973
H-Index - 25
ISSN - 1747-9991
DOI - 10.1111/phc3.12192
Subject(s) - punishment (psychology) , exaptation , mechanism (biology) , set (abstract data type) , psychology , epistemology , exploit , social psychology , order (exchange) , social order , sociology , criminology , law and economics , law , political science , computer science , philosophy , business , genetics , computer security , finance , politics , biology , programming language
Humans have a strong sense of who should be punished, when, and how. Many features of these intuitions are consistent with a simple adaptive model: Punishment evolved as a mechanism to teach social partners how to behave in future interactions. Yet, it is clear that punishment as practiced in modern contexts transcends any biologically evolved mechanism; it also depends on cultural institutions including the criminal justice system and many smaller analogs in churches, corporations, clubs, classrooms, and so on. These institutions can be thought of as a kind of ‘exaptation’: a culturally evolved set of norms that exploits biologically evolved intuitions about when punishment is deserved in order to achieve cooperative benefits for social groups.