Important insights concerning our intuitions about moral blameworthiness and punishment

Thanks to this post by Larry Solum, I discovered this new paper on SSRN titled “Intermediation Reduces Punishment.”  Here is the abstract:

This research experimentally identifies the belief that an action is less blameworthy when separated from the outcome by another actor.  Contrary to current economic models of fairness, keeping money at the expense of a poorer player is punished less when done through an intermediary, even when the intermediary is not at all responsible.  Even subjects who believe intermediation leads to unfair outcomes and subjects who believe others intermediate to avoid punishment, punish intermediation less.  This suggests they are not confused or lacking thoughtfulness, but rather consciously believe intermediating is the less blameworthy thing to do. The resulting profit-maximizing strategy is to intermediate and choose a selfish allocation. Consequently, in treatments when an intermediary is available, the minimum payoff (and equity) decreases substantially.

Though focused mostly on moral psychology and experimental economics, this little paper could have profound implications for punishment theory, especially concerning how we assess and value retributivist intuitions.  Consider these additional insights from the paper:

The punishment patterns [documented here find the] best explanations from Moral Psychology. Moral judgment has been shown to be an emotional, intuitive response rather than a conscious, reasoned process; we judge something to be wrong because it just feels wrong and only try to justify with reasoning after the judgment has been made… [and] the emotional part of the brain is a significant factor in moral judgment.  Subsequently, it has been suggested and demonstrated that judgment and punishment is guided by outrage rather than the outcomes or intentions.