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Full-Text Articles in Law
Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
Internal And External Challenges To Culpability, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This article was presented at “Guilty Minds: A Virtual Conference on Mens Rea and Criminal Justice Reform” at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. It is forthcoming in Arizona State Law Journal Volume 53, Issue 2.
The thesis of this article is simple: As long as we maintain the current folk psychological conception of ourselves as intentional and potentially rational creatures, as people and not simply as machines, mental states will inevitably remain central to ascriptions of culpability and responsibility more generally. It is also desirable. Nonetheless, we are in a condition of unprecedented internal challenges to …
Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse
Is Executive Function The Universal Acid?, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This essay responds to Hirstein, Sifferd and Fagan’s book, Responsible Brains (MIT Press, 2018), which claims that executive function is the guiding mechanism that supports both responsible agency and the necessity for some excuses. In contrast, I suggest that executive function is not the universal acid and the neuroscience at present contributes almost nothing to the necessary psychological level of explanation and analysis. To the extent neuroscience can be useful, it is virtually entirely dependent on well-validated psychology to correlate with the neuroscientific variables under investigation. The essay considers what executive function is and what the neuroscience adds to our …
Who’S To Blame? Blame Attributions And Obesity-Related Law And Policy, Lindsey E. Wylie
Who’S To Blame? Blame Attributions And Obesity-Related Law And Policy, Lindsey E. Wylie
Department of Psychology: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research
Obesity is a foremost public health concern that has received considerable attention. Because of this so-named “epidemic,” law-makers are challenged with implementing effective policies that the public supports. Little is known, however, about the antecedents and consequences of these policies—especially attributions of blameworthiness. Study 1 developed the Obesity Blame Attribution Scale (OBAS). Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that controllability, responsibility and dispositional blame were separate constructs and were part of a higher-order dispositional blame factor. Situational blame was a separate higher-order factor, not correlated with dispositional blame, consisting of blame toward the food industry and towards government policy. Using the OBAS, …
Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, And Limiting Retributivism: A Reply, Paul H. Robinson, Joshua Samuel Barton, Matthew J. Lister
Empirical Desert, Individual Prevention, And Limiting Retributivism: A Reply, Paul H. Robinson, Joshua Samuel Barton, Matthew J. Lister
All Faculty Scholarship
A number of articles and empirical studies over the past decade, most by Paul Robinson and co-authors, have suggested a relationship between the extent of the criminal law's reputation for being just in its distribution of criminal liability and punishment in the eyes of the community – its "moral credibility" – and its ability to gain that community's deference and compliance through a variety of mechanisms that enhance its crime-control effectiveness. This has led to proposals to have criminal liability and punishment rules reflect lay intuitions of justice – "empirical desert" – as a means of enhancing the system's moral …
Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell
Moral Character, Motive, And The Psychology Of Blame, Janice Nadler, Mary-Hunter Morris Mcdonnell
Faculty Working Papers
Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor's intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm's foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to …
Severe Environmental Deprivation (Aka Rsb): A Tragedy, Not A Defense, Stephen J. Morse
Severe Environmental Deprivation (Aka Rsb): A Tragedy, Not A Defense, Stephen J. Morse
All Faculty Scholarship
This article is a contribution to a symposium issue of the Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review devoted to whether severe environmental deprivation, sometimes termed rotten social background, should be a defense to crime and why it has not been adopted. I begin by presenting the framework I apply for thinking about such problems. I then identify the main theses Professors Richard Delgado and Andrew Taslitz present and consider their merits. Next, I turn to the arguments of the other papers by Professors Paul Robinson, Erik Luna and Angela Harris. I make two general arguments: first, that SED …
Trends. The Annan Apologia: Still Missing The Point, Ibpp Editor
Trends. The Annan Apologia: Still Missing The Point, Ibpp Editor
International Bulletin of Political Psychology
This article discusses Kofi Annan's apology for the United Nations' failure to intervene in the atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda.