Friday30Nov 2018
ESI Lecture Series
Shaun Nichols, PhD - "Outcome-based rules, punishment, and fairness"
Friday, November 30, 2018
3:00 p.m. PST
Abstract - Most social, moral, and legal norms prohibit producing a bad outcome. For instance, there are social rules against littering, moral rules against lying, and legal rules against embezzling. Such rules are act-based. Act-based rules paralleloutcome-based rules that create responsibilities for creating or maintaining a specific state of affairs. Instead of don’t litter, these rules might have the form minimize pollution, minimize false beliefs,and minimize inefficiency. The difference between these two types of rules is reflected in the two main types of moral theories: act-centered deontological and outcome-centered consequentialist theories. Both types of normative theories have their ardent defenders. Recent work in cognitive psychology shows that people can easily learn outcome-based rules (Nichols et al. 2016; Ayars & Nichols 2017), so why are most actual social, moral, and legal norms act-based? One explanation is that we have an innate moral grammar built up from act-based rules (e.g., Mikhail 2011). Another explanation is suggested by Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban (2013). They argue that an important role of social and moral norms is to effectively and reliably coordinate punishment, and act-based rules perform this role more effectively in social groups, in particular because transgressions of an act-based rule are easier to detect.
We create a game with common knowledge that doesn’t require learning to test whether there is a general tendency to enforce act-based rules in group settings. In the base game, participants are put in groups of four with identical initial endowments. One player is randomly given the opportunity to take some of another randomly chosen player’s initial endowment at no cost to themselves. If the first player chooses to take, a third player then has the opportunity to pay to restore the money taken to the initial victim. When the first player takes and the third player chooses not to rectify the taking, the fourth participant is given an opportunity to engage in coordinated costly punishment with the victim. The punishment can affect just the initial taker, the non-rectifier, both, or neither. Given the prevalence of act rather than outcome-based norms, we predicted that participants would be less inclined to apply the outcome-based rule of punishing non-rectifiers and would think that it is fairer to punish the taker than to punish non-rectifiers. In two versions of the base game, we found that participants judged it unfair to punish non-restorers. However, to our surprise, we found that participants were also more likely to punish both the taker and the non-rectifier than they were to punish only the taker. This seems to suggest that the preference for act-based rules is at best highly defeasible.
Bio - Shaun Nichols is the Sherwin Scott Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. He who works at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive science, and his research has been funded by the National Institute of Health, the Templeton Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research. He is the author of Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment and Bound: Essays on Free Will and Moral Responsibility, and he has published over 100 articles in academic journals in philosophy and psychology.
You can contact the event organizer, Cyndi Dumas at dumas@chapman.edu.
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