Purposes in Law and in Life: An Experimental Investigation of Purpose Attribution

Abstract

There has been considerable debate in legal philosophy about how to attribute purposes to rules. Separately, within cognitive science, there has been a growing body of research concerned with questions about how people ordinarily attribute purposes. Here, we argue that these two separate fields might be connected by experimental jurisprudence. Across four studies, we find evidence for the claim that people use the same criteria to attribute purposes to physical objects and to rules. In both cases, purpose attributions appear to be governed not so much by original intention or by moral value as by current practice. We argue that these findings in the cognitive science of purpose attribution have implications for jurisprudential questions involving purposivist legal interpretation.

Moral appraisals guide intuitive legal determinations.

“…Our first objective in the present research was to dissociate the influence of purpose and morality on rule application (see also de Almeida et al, 2022). Existing research documenting counter-literal determinations (Bregant et al, 2019; Garcia et al, 2014; Struchiner et al, 2020) has focused exclusively on people’s reasoning about benevolent rules, that is, rules and laws that were adopted with morally decent purposes in mind.…”

The Meaning of ‘Reasonable’: Evidence From a Corpus-Linguistic Study

“…Moa Lidén and her collaborators work almost exclusively with legal experts (principally judges from Sweden) and have found them to be as susceptible to a host of biases as laypeople (see, e.g., Lidén, 2023;Lidén et al, 2018Lidén et al, , 2019. Noel Struchiner, Guilherme Almeida, Ivar Hannikainen and colleagues, too, have conducted a plethora of studies with legal experts from Brazil on several topics (see, e.g., Almeida et al, 2023;Struchiner et al, 2020aStruchiner et al, , 2020b. Piotr Bystranowski, Bartosz Janik, Maciej Próchnicki, Izabela Skoczeń and colleagues, have published interesting data with Polish legal experts (Bystranowski et al, 2022;Skoczeń and Smywiński-Pohl, 2022).…”