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15 - Blame and Punishment

Two Distinct Mechanisms for Regulating Moral Behavior

from Part III - Behavior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2025

By
Bertram F. Malle
Edited by
Bertram Malle  and
Philip Robbins
Bertram Malle
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Philip Robbins
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
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Summary

This chapter of the handbook compares the major moral sanctioning behaviors of blame and punishment from two perspectives: their cultural history and their underlying psychology. The author draws a dividing line between two phases of human evolution – before and after human settlement – and proposes that, before that watershed, moral sanctions were informal, nonhierarchical, and often mild, akin to today’s acts of moral blame among intimates. Soon after settlement, hierarchies emerged, in which punishment took hold as a new form of sanctioning, typically exacted by those higher up in the hierarchy, and eventually by institutions of punishment. The author reviews the empirical evidence on the cognitive and social processes underlying each of these sanctioning tools and proposes that their distinct cultural histories are reflected in their psychological properties we can observe today. Whereas blame is, on the whole, flexible, effective, and cognitively sophisticated, punishment is often more damaging, less effective, and can easily be abused – as in past and modern forms of institutional punishment.

Keywords

moral judgmentnorm violationssanctionsnorm enforcementsocial hierarchiesculture
Type
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The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology , pp. 354 - 381
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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