Corporal Punishment

This paper examines the reasons why corporal punishment in the judicial sphere has fallen into moral disfavour in recent decades. Standard objections to the practice, both practical and ethical, are considered and found to be inconclusive. It is argued that corporal punishment is not inevitably more cruel or demeaning than conventionally preferred punitive methods and that consideration should be given to its limited experimental reintroduction.     

Scheid on Punishment

I critically evaluate the notion of structure Ted Sider presents in Writing the Book of the World. A prerequisite to understanding Sider's notion of structure is understanding Sider's take on ideology and ontology. In Section II, I discuss this. In Section III, I consider arguments in favor of structure. In Section IV, I examine one debate that is considered by Sider to be nonsubstantive: the debate over modality. I conclude, in Section V, by examining the reception Writing the Book of the World has received in the philosophical community.     

Pacifism and Punishment

This article seeks to expose some of the implications of certain versions of pacifism for matters of criminal punishment, arguing that the plausibility of these versions of pacifism depend on the extent to which their implicit denials of certain central punishment-related concepts are themselves reasonable.     

The Capital Punishment Debate: Public Perceptions of Crime and Punishment1

Psychophysical scales for seriousness of crime and severity of punishment were developed to aid in investigating the Eighth Amendment issue of whether the death penalty is “cruel and unusual” punishment. Using indirect crossmodality matching techniques with a quota sample of the Boston SMSA, satisfactory scales were obtained for both dimensions with most items in both scales concentrated toward the serious/severe end as planned. Further, specific case vignettes in which experimental variations were embedded were also developed; psychophysical lines production judgments for these specific cases indicated that quite complex social stimuli can be successfully judged psychophysically. Results indicated that (1) capital and noncapital offenses are thoroughly intermingled in seriousness ratings; (2) the death penalty is not rated as significantly more severe than life imprisonment without parole; (3) respondents assign the death penalty relatively rarely even to serious offenses, and then in a manner not particularly in line with capital statutes; and (4) respondents' weighing of extra-legal and legally relevant aspects of capital cases is inconsistent with current statutes. These results suggest multiple ways in which capital punishment could be defined as “cruel”, and strongly suggest the need for further research and through about the issue.     

Punishment as Fair Play

This article defends the fair-play theory of legal punishment against three objections. The first, the irrelevance objection, is the long-standing complaint that fair play fails to capture what it is about crimes that makes criminals deserving of punishment; the others are the recently raised false-equivalence and lacks-integration objections. In response, I sketch an account of fair-play theory that is grounded in a conception of the political order as a meta-cooperative practice—a conception that falls somewhere between contractual and communitarian conceptions—and draw on this account to show how the theory can overcome the objections.

Punishment of elicited aggression

Aversive shocks are known to produce aggression when the shocks are not dependent on behavior and to suppress behavior when the shocks are arranged as a dependent punisher. These two processes were studied by presenting non-dependent shock to monkeys at regular intervals, thereby producing biting attacks on a pneumatic tube. Immediate shock punishment was stimultaneously delivered for each biting attack. The attacks were found to decrease as a function of increasing punishment intensity. These results show that aggression is eliminated by direct punishment of the aggression even when the stimulus that is used as a punisher otherwise causes the aggression.     

Punishment of irritable aggression

In a series of three experiments using a restrained target procedure the influence of shock punishment of shock-induced aggression in rats was assessed. Regardless of prior experience with shock-induced aggression, punishment resulted in a suppression of the frequency and total duration of the fighting behavior. In addition, possible alternative explanations that have clouded studies of punishment of irritable aggression were ruled out by demonstrating that the suppression was not a consequence of altered parameters of shock frequency and duration.     

Punishment of shock-induced aggression

Squirrel monkeys were restrained in a chair equipped with a tail-shock apparatus and a pneumatic bite hose located in front of the subject's face. An aggressive response was recorded when the monkey bit the hose. Initial sessions in which no shocks were delivered produced some biting. When biting during these sessions stabilized at a near-zero level, regularly scheduled shocks were delivered to the monkey's tail, causing a consistently higher rate of biting. After several sessions under these conditions, a punishment phase was introduced in which the previous shock conditions were maintained, and every bite was followed immediately by another, more intense shock. Biting under these conditions was suppressed to a near-zero level. When the punishment contingency was removed, biting increased. With one subject, two additional bite-contingent stimuli were examined: (1) a milder shock that, when made contingent upon hose biting, also suppressed that response, and (2) a contingent tone that had no obvious suppressing or facilitating effect. Individual differences among subjects were extreme, but the effect of bite-contingent shock was consistent. Observations of the subjects during the punishment sessions indicated the existence of certain side effects that resulted from the use of punishment to suppress shock-induced aggression.     

公平与惩罚价格对第三方惩罚需求的影响

为了探讨第三方惩罚的影响因素,分析个体在不同公平情境下面临不同的惩罚成本时会采取怎样的第三方惩罚行为,本研究以171名大学生为被试,采用2×2的混合实验设计,通过设置高低两种不公平情境和3种惩罚价格,对被试的第三方惩罚需求进行实验研究。结果显示,个体的第三方惩罚需求都有随着惩罚价格的升高而降低的趋势;不公平程度显著影响第三方惩罚需求。研究表明,惩罚成本显著影响个体的第三方惩罚的实施;在低不公平情境中,被试面对不同惩罚成本时其第三方惩罚行为之间无显著差异,即各种惩罚成本下出现第三方惩罚行为的可能性均较小;而在高不公平情境中,被试面对不同惩罚成本时的第三方惩罚行为之间差异显著,惩罚成本越低出现第三方惩罚的可能性越大。     

Testing the Deterrent Effects of Personal and Vicarious Experience with Punishment and Punishment Avoidance

This paper reviews the current literature concerning social control in the U.S. Army with special emphasis upon the convergence/divergence debate now guiding much of the legal and sociological conceptualizing in this research. Emphasizing the weaknesses in this literature, a new socio‐legal conceptual model based upon the work of Weber (1921/1978), Rustad (1982), Nonet and Selznick (1978) as well as classical military source material is then proposed as an alternative to the current debate in the literature.