Browsing by Subject "Punishment"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access A Dilemma for Criminal Justice Under Social Injustice(2019) Ariturk, DenizA moral dilemma confronts criminal justice in unjust states. If the state punishes marginalized citizens whose crimes are connected to conditions of systemic injustice the state has failed to alleviate, it perpetuates a further injustice to those citizens. If the state does not punish, it perpetuates an injustice to victims of crime whose protection is the duty of the criminal justice system. Thus, no reaction to crime by the unjust state appears to avoid perpetuating further injustice. Tommie Shelby proposes a new solution to this old dilemma, suggesting that certain theoretical and practical qualifications can save the unjust state from perpetuating injustice. He argues that punishment can be just even as society remains unjust if it is: (a) administered through a fair criminal justice apparatus; (b) only directed at mala in se crimes; and (c) not expressive of moral judgment. In the first part of this thesis, I explore Shelby’s solution to show that certain aspects of his framework are superior to alternative ones, but that it nonetheless fails to resolve the dilemma. In Part 2, I use a novel technological reform that promises to make criminal justice fairer, the AI risk assessment, as a case study to show why even punishment that meets Shelby’s criteria will continue to perpetuate injustice as long as it operates under systemic social injustice. Punishment can only be just if society is.
Item Open Access Animals as Moral Agents(2022) Bischof, AngelaSince Peter Singer’s (1975) Animal Liberation, sentience has been the dominant justification for increasing non-human animal (hereafter ‘animal’) welfare. This dissertation is an attempt to discover a different reason to treat animals better: their moral agency. If animals are moral agents, then they deserve additional moral rights, rights that arise independently from their sentience.
To find out whether animals are moral agents, I focus on whether animals are ever morally responsible for their actions. More specifically, I examine whether animals punish each other. I focus on a special type of punishment: third-party retributive punishment. This is punishment issued by an unaffected bystander for a moral wrongdoing.
Humans do not treat animals as moral agents, but this does not mean that animals are never morally responsible. I evaluate animal behavior from the contexts of their own communities. Rather than focus on the ways in which humans treat animals, I focus on the ways in which animals treat one another.
This dissertation is highly interdisciplinary, utilizing principles of philosophy alongside empirical evidence from psychology, evolutionary anthropology, animal behavior, and ecology. Both the theoretical and empirical evidence support my main conclusion: animals are moral agents.
Item Open Access Anxiety as a determinant of differential responsivity to reward and punishment(1952) Barger, Benjamin, 1920-Reward and punishment have been studied in the laboratory for their relative effects on learning processes and on perceptual processes they have been studied in the classroom for their relative effects on learning and on modification of performance of various motor and mental tasks; they have been studied in relation to intellectual, age and sex factors, and temperamental or personality factors; and they have recently been studied in a clinical setting in connection with problems of psychopathology, The studies concerned with personality variables reflect a broadening concern with personality dynamics that has accompanied the recent rapid expansion of interest in the clinical area of psychology. They strongly suggest that there are differences related to personality factors in the effects and perhaps the effectiveness of rewarding and punishing incentive conditions. It was to explore some of the implications of these studies and to extend the empirical data in this area that the present research was designed. It was to explore some of the implications of these studies and to extend the empirical data in this area that the present research was designed. To provide a framework for the discussion which follows the major aspects of two studies will be outlined.Item Open Access Correlates and Consequences of Spanking and Verbal Punishment for Low-Income White, African American, and Mexican American Toddlers(Child Development, 2009) Berlin, LJ; Malone, PS; Ayoub, CA; Ispa, J; Fine, M; Brooks Gunn, J; Brady Smith, C; Bai, YThis study examined the prevalence, predictors, and outcomes of spanking and verbal punishment in 2,573 low-income White, African American, and Mexican American toddlers at ages 1, 2, and 3. Both spanking and verbal punishment varied by maternal race/ethnicity. Child fussiness at age 1 predicted spanking and verbal punishment at all 3 ages. Cross-lagged path analyses indicated that spanking (but not verbal punishment) at age 1 predicted child aggressive behavior problems at age 2 and lower Bayley mental development scores at age 3. Neither child aggressive behavior problems nor Bayley scores predicted later spanking or verbal punishment. In some instances, maternal race/ethnicity and/or emotional responsiveness moderated the effects of spanking and verbal punishment on child outcomes.Item Open Access Dissociable Influence of Reward and Punishment Motivation on Declarative Memory Encoding and its Underlying Neurophysiology(2012) Murty, Vishnu PradeepMemories are not veridical representations of the environment. Rather, an individual's goals can influence how the surrounding environment is represented in long-term memory. The present dissertation aims to delineate the influence of reward and punishment motivation on human declarative memory encoding and its underlying neural circuitry. Chapter 1 provides a theoretical framework for investigating motivation's influence on declarative memory. This chapter will review the animal and human literatures on declarative memory encoding, reward and punishment motivation, and motivation's influence on learning and memory. Chapter 2 presents a study examining the behavioral effects of reward and punishment motivation on declarative memory encoding. Chapter 3 presents a study examining the neural circuitry underlying punishment-motivated declarative encoding using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and compares these findings to previous studies of reward-motivated declarative encoding. Chapter 4 presents a study examining the influence of reward and punishment motivation on neural sensitivity to and declarative memory for unexpected events encountered during goal pursuit using fMRI. Finally, Chapter 5 synthesizes these results and proposes a model of how and why motivational valence has distinct influences on declarative memory encoding. Results indicated that behaviorally, reward motivation resulted in more enriched representations of the environment compared to punishment motivation. Neurally, these motivational states engaged distinct neuromodulatory systems and medial temporal lobe (MTL) targets during encoding. Specifically, results indicated that reward motivation supports interactions between the ventral tegmental area and the hippocampus, whereas, punishment motivation supports interactions between the amygdala and parahippocampal cortex. Together, these findings suggest that reward and punishment engage distinct systems of encoding and result in the storage of qualitatively different representations of the environment into long-term memory.
Item Open Access Gender, Institutions, and Punishment: Examining the Experiences of Formerly Incarcerated Women(2020) Umeh, ZimifeWhile men account for 93 percent of the U.S. prison population, women have seen an increase of over 700 percent in incarceration rates since the 1980s. Despite this, most sociological and criminological research examines the incarceration and reentry experiences and consequences of men. Existing research on system-involved women rarely disentangles the role of race in women’s criminal justice involvement. Thus, this dissertation uses an intersectional approach to explore how formerly incarcerated women navigate various institutions during the incarceration and reentry period. For this project, I use 40 semi-structured interviews with women primarily in North Carolina. The chapters in this dissertation explore the following research questions; 1) How do institutional responses to women’s childhood victimization and adult entrapment shape women’s pathways to prison? 2) How do mothers define and construct their maternal identities while imprisoned? 3) What strategies do women use to navigate reentering the paid labor market?
Item Open Access Moral Luck and Responsibility(2019-04-11) Semler, JenThis paper will argue that we should take moral luck seriously. In Section 2, I explain the problem of moral luck and the assumptions on which it rests. In Section 3, I evaluate several proposed solutions to the problem of moral luck, arguing that none of these approaches is effective in resolving the problem. In Section 4, I consider the implications of moral luck on moral responsibility, concluding that ultimate moral responsibility does not exist. In Section 5, I return to the concept of control and how it influences our moral judgments.Item Open Access Moral masochism: on the connection between guilt and self-punishment.(Emotion, 2013-02) Inbar, Yoel; Pizarro, David A; Gilovich, Thomas; Ariely, DanDo people sometimes seek to atone for their transgressions by harming themselves physically? The current results suggest that they do. People who wrote about a past guilt-inducing event inflicted more intense electric shocks on themselves than did those who wrote about feeling sad or about a neutral event. Moreover, the stronger the shocks that guilty participants administered to themselves, the more their feelings of guilt were alleviated. We discuss how this method of atonement relates to other methods examined in previous research.Item Open Access Revising Justice: Punitory Thought and Action in the Work of Atwood, Jordan, and Oates(2016-05-05) Barker, Natalya*Designated as an exemplary master's project for 2015-16*
This paper examines how contemporary literature contributes to the discussion of punitory justice. It uses close analysis of three contemporary novels, Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last, Hillary Jordan’s When She Woke, and Joyce Carol Oates’s Carthage, to deconstruct different conceptions of punitory justice. This analysis is framed and supported by relevant social science research on the concept of punitivity within criminal justice. Each section examines punitory justice at three levels: macro, where media messages and the predominant social conversation reside; meso, which involves penal policy and judicial process; and micro, which encompasses personal attitudes towards criminal justice. The first two chapters evaluate works by Atwood and Jordan, examining how their dystopian schemas of justice shed light on top-down and bottom-up processes of punitory justice in the real world. The third chapter uses a more realistic novel, Oates’s Carthage, to examine the ontological nature of punitory justice. It explores a variety of factors that give rise to and legitimize punitory justice, both at the personal level and within a broader cultural consensus. This chapter also discusses how both victim and perpetrator can come to stand in as metaphors to both represent and distract from broader social issues. As a whole, analysis of these three novels illuminate how current and common conceptualizations of justice have little to do with the actual act of transgression itself. Instead, justice emerges as a set of specific, conditioned responses to perceived threats, mediated by complex social, cultural, and emotive forces.