Hostname: page-component-669899f699-tpknm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-25T00:30:58.373Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Moral Foundations, Intuitions of Justice, and the Intricacies of Punitive Sentiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Jasmine R. Silver
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Research on punitive attitudes has, so far, focused largely on people's retributive attitudes toward offenders. However, a large theoretical body of research indicates that concerns about different types of offenses and victims may be just as important in structuring punitive attitudes. Particularly, Moral Foundations Theory suggests that distinct punitive attitudes may be based in intuitive moral concerns (“moral foundations”) about offenses that victimize individuals, groups, and the “divine,” referring to bodily purity or sanctity. In this study, I develop measures of what I term “victim-centered punitiveness,” and use data from a nationwide survey of adult Americans (N = 915) to compare the sources of offender- and victim-centered punitiveness. As expected, different moral foundations shape offender- and victim-centered punitiveness in different ways, suggesting that they have distinct intuitive, moral bases. Other factors, including racial resentment, also have distinct effects on each type of punitiveness.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 413 - 450
Copyright
© 2017 Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abascal, Maria (2015) “Us and Them Black-White Relations in the Wake of Hispanic Population Growth,” 80 American Sociological Rev. 789–813.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Aharoni, Eyal, & Fridlund, Alan J. (2012) “Punishment Without Reason: Isolating Retribution in Lay Punishment of Criminal Offenders,” 18 Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 599–625.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alter, Adam L., et al. (2007) “Transgression Wrongfulness Outweighs Its Harmfulness as a Determinant of Sentence Severity,” 31 Law and Human Behavior 319–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Applegate, Brandon K., et al. (1996) “Assessing Public Support for Three-Strikes-And-You're-Out Laws: Global Versus Specific Attitudes,” 42 Crime & Delinquency 517–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barkan, Steven E., & Cohn, Steven F. (1994) “Racial Prejudice and Support for the Death Penalty by Whites,” 31 J. of Research in Crime and Delinquency 202–09.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beckett, Katherine (1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Brown, Elizabeth K., & Socia, Kelly M. (2016) “Twenty-First Century Punitiveness: Social Sources of Punitive American Views Reconsidered,” J Quant Criminol 1–25. doi: 10.1007/s10940-016-9319-4.Google Scholar
Brubacher, Michael Ray (2014) “From Crime to Punishment: Moral Violations and the Social Function of Emotion .” PhD diss., DePaul Univ.Google Scholar
Bruce, Steve (2002) God Is Dead: Secularization in the West. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Canton, Rob (2015) “Crime, Punishment, and the Moral Emotions: Righteous Minds and their Attitudes Towards Punishment,” 17 Punishment and Society 54–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlsmith, Kevin M., et al. (2002) “Why Do We Punish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment,” 83 J. of Personality and Social Psychology 284–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chandler, Jesse, et al. (2014) “Nonnaïveté Among Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers: Consequences and Solutions for Behavioral Researchers,” 46 Behavior Research Methods 112–30.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Chiricos, Ted, et al. (2004) “Racial Typification of Crime and Support for Punitive Measures,” 42 Criminology 358–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cullen, Francis T., Fischer, Bonnie S., & Applegate, Brandon K. (2000) “Public Opinion about Punishment and Corrections,” 27 Crime and Justice 1–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cushman, Fiery, et al. (2006) “The Role of Conscious Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgment: Testing Three Principles of Harm,” 17 Psychological Science 1082–89.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Darley, John M. (2009) “Morality in the Law: The Psychological Foundations of Citizens' Desires to Punish Transgressions,” 5 Annual Rev. of Law and Social Science 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darley, John M., et al. (2000) “Incapacitation and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment,” 24 Law and Human Behavior 659–83.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dattalo, Patrick (2013) Analysis of Multiple Dependent Variables. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Durkheim, Emile (1964 [1933]) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The MacMillan Company.Google Scholar
Elwert, Felix, & Winship, Christopher (2014) “Endogenous Selection Bias: The Problem of Conditioning on a Collider Variable,” 40 Annual Rev. of Sociology 31–53.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Enns, Peter K. (2016) Incarceration Nation: How the United States Became the Most Punitive Democracy in the World. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erikson, Kai T. (1962) “Notes on the Sociology of Deviance,” 9 Social Problems 307–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feinberg, Matthew, & Willer, Robb (2015) “From Gulf to Bridge When Do Moral Arguments Facilitate Political Influence?,” 41 Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 1665–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jesse, Graham, & Jonathan, Haidt, (2012) “Sacred Values and Evil Adversaries: A Moral Foundations Approach” in Mikulincer, Mario Ed, and Phillip R. Shaver, eds, The Social Psychology of Morality: Exploring the Causes of Good and Evil, 11–31. New York: APA Books.Google Scholar
Graham, Jesse, et al. (2009) “Liberals and Conservatives Rely on Different Sets of Moral Foundations,” 96 J. of Personality and Social Psychology 1029–46.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Graham, Jesse, et al. (2011) “Mapping the Moral Domain,” 101 J. of Personality and Social Psychology 366–85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greene, Joshua David (2013) Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. New York: The Penguin Press.Google Scholar
Haidt, Jonathan (2001) “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgments,” 108 Psychological Science 814–34.Google Scholar
Haidt, Jonathan (2007) “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology,” 316 Science 998–1002.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Haidt, Jonathan (2012) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon Books.Google Scholar
Haidt, Jonathan, & Graham, Jesse (2007) “When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals May Not Recognize,” 20 Social Justice Research 98–116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haidt, Jonathan, & Hersch, Matthew A. (2001) “Sexual Morality: The Cultures and Emotions of Conservatives and Liberals,” 31 J. of Applied Social Psychology 191–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haidt, Jonathan, & Joseph, Craig (2004) “Intuitive Ethics: How Innately Prepared Intuitions Generate Culturally Variable Virtues,” 133 Daedalus 55–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haidt, Jonathan, et al. (1993) “Affect, Culture, and Morality, or Is It Wrong to Eat Your Dog?,” 65 J. of Personality and Social Psychology 613–28.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Patrick J, Henry., & Sears, David O. (2002) “The Symbolic Racism 2000 Scale,” 23 Political Psychology 253–283.Google Scholar
Horberg, Elizabeth J., et al. (2009) “Disgust and the Moralization of Purity,” 97 J. of Personality and Social Psychology 963–76.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kahneman, Daniel (2003) “A Perspective on Judgment and Choice: Mapping Bounded Rationality,” 58 American Psychologist 697–720.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.Google Scholar
Kleck, Gary, & Jackson, Dylan Baker (2016) “Does Crime Cause Punitiveness?” Crime & Delinquency. doi: 10.1177/0011128716638503.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koleva, Spassena P., et al. (2012) “Tracing the Threads: How Five Moral Concerns (Especially Purity) Help Explain Culture War Attitudes,” 46 J. of Research in Personality 184–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kugler, Matthew, Jost, John T., & Sharareh Noorbaloochi (2014) “Another Look at Moral Foundations Theory: Do Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation Explain Liberal-Conservative Differences in “Moral” Intuitions?,” 27 Social Justice Research 413–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liberman, Peter (2013) “Retributive Support for International Punishment and Torture,” 57 J. of Conflict Resolution 285–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mancini, Christina, & Pickett, Justin T. (2016) “The Good, the Bad, and the Incomprehensible: Typifications of Victims and Offenders as Antecedents of Beliefs about Sex Crime,” 31 J. of Interpersonal Violence 257–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullinix, Kevin J., et al. (2015) “The Generalizability of Survey Experiments,” 2 J. of Experimental Political Science 109–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Munsch, Christin L. (2016) “Flexible Work, Flexible Penalties: The Effect of Gender, Childcare, and Type of Request on the Flexibility Bias,” 94 Social Forces 1567–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickett, Justin T. (2016) “Reintigrative Populism?,” 15 Criminology and Public Policy 131–35.Google Scholar
Pickett, Justin T., & Baker, Thomas (2014) “The Pragmatic American: Empirical Reality or Methodological Artifact?,” 52 Criminology 195–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickett, Justin T., & Chiricos, Ted (2012) “Controlling Other People's Children: Racialized Views of Delinquency and Whites’ Punitive Attitudes Toward Juvenile Offenders,” 50 Criminology 673–710.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pickett, Justin T., et al. (2013) “Vulnerable Victims, Monstrous Offenders, and Unmanageable Risk: Explaining Public Opinion on the Social Control of Sex Crime,” 51 Criminology 729–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pinker, Steven (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Robinson, Paul H. (2013) Intuitions of Justice and the Utility of Desert. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robinson, Paul H., & Darley, John M. (2007) “Intuitions of Justice: Implications for Criminal Law and Justice Policy,” 81 Southern California Law Rev. 1–62.Google Scholar
Robinson, Paul H., et al. (2007) “The Origins of Shared Intuitions of Justice,” 60 Vanderbilt Law Rev. 1633–88.Google Scholar
Sellin, Thorsten, & Wolfgang, Marvin W. (1964) The Measurement of Delinquency. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Shweder, Richard A., et al. (1997) “The “Big Three” of Morality (Autonomy, Community, Divinity) and the “Big Three” Explanations of Suffering,” in Brandt, Allan M., & Rozin, P., eds., Morality and Health, 119–169. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Silver, Jasmine, & Pickett, Justin T. (2015) “Toward a Better Understanding of Politicized Policing Attitudes: Conflicted Conservatism and Support for Police Use of Force,” 53 Criminology 650–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silver, Jasmine, & Silver, Eric (2017) “Why Are Conservatives More Punitive than Liberals? A Moral Foundations Approach,” Law and Human Behavior. doi: 10.1037/lhb0000232CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simon, Jonathan (2007) Governing Through Crime: How the War on Crime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Soss, Joe, et al. (2003) “Why Do White Americans Support the Death Penalty?,” 65 J. of Politics 397–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tannenbaum, David, et al. (2011) “Moral Signals, Public Outrage, and Immaterial Harms,” 47 J. of Experimental Social Psychology 1249–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, Tom R., & Boeckmann, Robert J. (1997) “Three Strikes and You Are Out, But Why? The Psychology of Public Support for Punishing Rule Breakers,” 31 Law and Society Rev. 237–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uhlmann, Eric Luis, et al. (2014) “When Actions Speak Volumes: The Role of Inferences about Moral Character in Outrage over Racial Bigotry,” 44 European J. of Social Psychology 23–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uhlmann, Eric Luis, et al. (2015) “A Person-Centered Approach to Moral Judgment,” 10 Perspectives on Psychological Science 72–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Unnever, James D., & Cullen, Francis T. (2010) “The Social Sources of Americans’ Punitiveness: A Test of Three Competing Models,” 48 Criminology 99–129.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Unnever, James D., et al. (2007) “A Liberal Is Someone Who Has Not Been Mugged': Criminal Victimization and Political Beliefs,” 24 Justice Quarterly 309–334.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weinberg, Jill D., et al. (2014) “Comparing Data Characteristics and Results of an Online Factorial Survey Between a Population-Based and a Crowdsource-Recruited Sample,” 1 Sociological Science 292–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Welch, Kelly (2007) “Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling,” 23 J. of Contemporary Criminal Justice 276–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhou, Haotian, & Fishbach, Ayelet (2016) “The Pitfall of Experimenting on the Web: How Unattended Selective Attrition Leads to Surprising (Yet False) Research Conclusions,” 111 J. of Personality and Social Psycholgy 493–504.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

A correction has been issued for this article:

Corrigendum