Does suffering suffice? An experimental assessment of desert retributivism

Abstract

Michael S. Moore is among the most prominent normative theorists to argue that retributive justice, understood as the deserved suffering of offenders, justifies punishment. Moore claims that the principle of retributive justice is pervasively supported by our judgments of justice and sufficient to ground punishment. We offer an experimental assessment of these two claims, (1) the pervasiveness claim, according to which people are widely prone to endorse retributive judgments, and (2) the sufficiency claim, according to which no non-retributive principle is necessary for justifying punishment. We test these two claims in a survey and a related survey experiment in which we present participants (N =~900) with the stylized description of a criminal case. Our results seem to invalidate claim (1) and provide mixed results concerning claim (2). We conclude that retributive justice theories which advance either of these two claims need to reassess their evidential support. OPEN ACCESSCitation: Bauer PC, Poama A (2020) Does suffering suffice? An experimental assessment of desert retributivism. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0230304.

A Painful Message

“…Our findings both replicate and qualify the “intuitive retributivism” hypothesis, according to which people, when thinking about appropriate punishment for another person’s wrongdoing, are concerned with re-balancing the scales of justice. Our results are also consistent with other empirical research showing that cues of understanding, remorse and apology increase punishment satisfaction (Bauer & Poama, 2020; Funk et al, 2014; Gollwitzer & Denzler, 2009; Gollwitzer et al, 2011; Molnar et al, 2020). These findings suggest the psychological plausibility of communicative theories of punishment, which argue that the goals of punishment are to send a message to perpetrators that they have violated a community norm or law and that they must respond appropriately with regret, apology, and ideally offers of reparation and attempts at rehabilitation.…”

“…A self-reported punishment justification scale, adapted from Bauer and Poama (2020) and Nadelhoffer and colleagues (2013), asked participants to rank their endorsement of four distinct statements, counterbalanced for order, about the proper justification for criminal punishment. This scale was designed to capture the most salient features of the main punishment theories (retributive, consequentialist, and communicative).…”

“…One recent vignette study (Bauer & Poama, 2020) examined, in an impersonal context, the independent effects of evidence of perpetrator suffering and moral change on perceptions that justice had been achieved by prison punishment. The moral change was operationally defined as a sincere apology and desire to help crime victims, implying that the perpetrator came to understand the gravity of his offense.…”

The experimental philosophy of law: New ways, old questions, and how not to get lost

“…However, Bauer and Poama (2020) recently challenged both intuitive and explicit support for Moore's (1997) variant of retributivism, according to which the deserved suffering of the criminal wrongdoer is sufficient and is the widely shared reason for punishment. The authors presented lay participants with a short story (modelled on a thought experiment by Moore) of a man who rapes a woman but then loses the capacity to repeat this kind of crime.…”

“…24 24 For instance, Donelson and Hannikainen (2020) took a 2:1 supermajority support for the Fullerian principles as proof of their widespread acceptance; Bauer and Poama (2020) assumed that the retributivist reasons for punishment are widely shared if they are considered most important by the largest group of people. …”