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11 - Brains Punishing Brains

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2014

Morris B. Hoffman
Morris B. Hoffman
Affiliation:
University of Colorado Boulder
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Summary

You shall [punish] your crooked neighbor

With your crooked heart

With apologies to W. H. Auden

The Punishment Ethos

We have been punishing each other for 100,000 years. We do it because we are intensely social creatures, more tightly interconnected by far than any other genetically heterogeneous species on the planet. We do it because through those connections evolution has bequeathed us rules for group living, grounded on the importance of property and promises, and has armed us with exquisite sensitivities to when other group members violate those rules.

But of course we are both the cheaters and the cheated, the punishers and the punished. Our unmatched predisposition to cooperate with one another is just one side of natural selection’s schizophrenic coin. Yes, we cooperate, but we also cheat, because in the end it is our individual survival, and the survival of our genes, that evolution cares about, not the survival of our groups. So our brains come equipped with deeply incoherent urges – the urge to cooperate and the urge to cheat, the urge to punish cheaters and the urge to forgive them.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Punisher's Brain
The Evolution of Judge and Jury
 , pp. 329 - 350
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

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References

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Weisberg, Robert, Reality-Challenged Philosophies of Punishment, 95 Marq. L. Rev. 1203 (2012)Google Scholar

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