Determinism, Moral Responsibility and Retribution
AbstractIn this article, we will identify two issues that deserve greater attention from those researching lay people ’s attitudes to moral responsibility and determinism. The first issue concerns whether people interpret the term “moral responsibility” in a retributive way and whether they are motivated to hold offenders responsible for pre-determined behaviour by considerations other than retributivism, e.g . the desires to condemn the action (as opposed to the actor) and to protect society. The second issue concerns whether explicitly rejecting moral responsibility and retributivism, after reading about determinism, would have any impact on “implicit” retributivism when recommending a sentence for a hypothetical offender. We will report the results of an exploratory study that investigated these questions. Our preliminary findings raise the possibility that a significant proportion of participants either i) may not interpret “moral responsibility” in the basic, retributive sense of the t erm, which is at issue in the determinism debate, or ii) may be unconsciously motivated by non-retributive considerations to judge that the offender is morally responsible, in the basic, retributive sense. If this is confirmed by future research, a wider implication would be that theorists’ argume nts against retributivism are more likely to affect public attitudes to punishment when non-retributive ways of achieving important punishment goals are emphasised. Our preliminar...
Source: Neuroethics - Category: Medical Ethics Source Type: research