Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-2jptb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-23T03:18:19.821Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

21 - Criminal Law, Intuitive Blame, and Moral Character

from Part V - Applications and Extensions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2025

By
Janice Nadler
Edited by
Bertram Malle  and
Philip Robbins
Bertram Malle
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Philip Robbins
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
Get access

Summary

This chapter of the handbook examines the sanctioning doctrines within Anglo-American criminal law and explores similarities and differences between criminal blame and ordinary social blame. The chapter explores the legal notion of actus reus in the context of intended but incomplete transgressive conduct, the distinction between intended and unintended outcomes, as well as questions of recklessness and the role of a transgressor’s character in ordinary and legal blame. It also explores the possibility that a fundamental human motivation to punish those with bad character can influence perceptions of legal questions such as consciousness of risk. Intuitions about the role of moral character in legal blame have produced legal rules restricting the consideration of prior misdeeds. At the same time, these rules and their interpretation ultimately rest on political and moral judgments, rather than psychological insights. The chapter concludes by briefly exploring some remaining questions of criminal law and intuitive blame, such as the role of cultural commitments on motivations to impose legal blame.

Keywords

criminal lawmoral characterblamepunishmentmental statecausationmotivationevidence
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Moral Psychology , pp. 523 - 548
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abele, A. E., & Wojciszke, B. (2014). Communal and agentic content in social cognition: A dual perspective model. In Reis, H. T. & Judd, C. M. (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 50, pp. 195–255). Elsevier.Google Scholar
Alicke, M. D. (1992). Culpable causation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63(3), 368–378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alicke, M. (2014). Evaluating blame hypotheses. Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 187–192.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ambady, N., Bernieri, F. J., & Richeson, J. A. (2000). Toward a histology of social behavior: Judgmental accuracy from thin slices of the behavioral stream. In Zanna, M. P. (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 32, pp. 201–271). Academic Press.Google Scholar
Armour, J. D. (2020). N*gga theory: Race, language, unequal justice, and the law. Los Angeles Review of Books.Google Scholar
Becker, G. S. (1968). Crime and punishment: An economic approach. Journal of Political Economy, 76(2), 169–217.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bilz, K. (2016). Testing the expressive theory of punishment. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 13(2), 358–392.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Capra, D. J., & Richter, L. L. (2018). Character assassination: Amending federal rule of evidence 404(b) to protect criminal defendants. Columbia Law Review, 118(3), 769–832.Google Scholar
Carlsmith, K. M., Darley, J. M., & Robinson, P. H. (2002). Why do we punish?: Deterrence and just deserts as motives for punishment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(2), 284–299.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cushman, F. (2008). Crime and punishment: Distinguishing the roles of causal and intentional analyses in moral judgment. Cognition, 108(2), 353–380.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cushman, F., Murray, D., Gordon-McKeon, S., Wharton, S., & Greene, J. D. (2012). Judgment before principle: Engagement of the frontoparietal control network in condemning harms of omission. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 7(8), 888–895.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Darley, J. M., Sanderson, C. A., & LaMantia, P. S. (1996). Community standards for defining attempt: Inconsistencies with the Model Penal Code. American Behavioral Scientist, 39(4), 405–420.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DeScioli, P., Christner, J., & Kurzban, R. (2011). The omission strategy. Psychological Science, 22(4), 442–446.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Duff, R. A. (1993). Choice, character, and criminal liability. Law and Philosophy, 12(4), 345–383.Google Scholar
Duncan, B. L. (1976). Differential social perception and attribution of intergroup violence: Testing the lower limits of stereotyping of Blacks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34(4), 590–598.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Durkheim, É. (1964). The division of labor in society. The Free Press. (Original work published 1893)Google Scholar
Eisenberg, T., & Hans, V. (2009). Taking a stand on taking the stand: The effect of a prior criminal record on the decision to testify and on trial outcomes. Cornell Law Review, 94(6), 1353–1390.Google Scholar
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment and social norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25(2), 63–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feldman, Y. (2018). The law of good people: Challenging states’ ability to regulate human behavior. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Forman, J. (2017). Locking up our own: Crime and punishment in Black America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.Google Scholar
Garland, D. (2001). Mass imprisonment: Social causes and consequences. SAGE Publications, Ltd.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Giffin, C., & Lombrozo, T. (2016). Wrong or merely prohibited: Special treatment of strict liability in intuitive moral judgment. Law and Human Behavior, 40(6), 707–720.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ginther, M. R., Shen, F. X., Bonnie, R. J., Hoffman, M. B., Jones, O. D., Marois, R., & Simons, K. W. (2014). The language of mens rea. Vanderbilt Law Review, 67(5), Article 2.Google Scholar
Ginther, M. R., Shen, F. X., Bonnie, R. J., Hoffman, M. B., Jones, O. D., & Simons, K. W. (2018). Decoding guilty minds: How jurors attribute knowledge and guilt. Vanderbilt Law Review, 71(1), 241–284.Google Scholar
Goff, P. A., Jackson, M. C., Di Leone, B. A. L., Culotta, C. M., & DiTomasso, N. A. (2014). The essence of innocence: Consequences of dehumanizing Black children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(4), 526–545.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greene, E. J., & Darley, J. M. (1998). Effects of necessary, sufficient, and indirect causation on judgments of criminal liability. Law and Human Behavior, 22(4), 429–451.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greene, E., & Dodge, M. (1995). The influence of prior record evidence on juror decision making. Law and Human Behavior, 19(1), 67–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guglielmo, S. (2015). Moral judgment as information processing: An integrative review. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 1637.Google ScholarPubMed
Guglielmo, S., & Malle, B. F. (2017). Information-acquisition processes in moral judgments of blame. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(7), 957–971.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guglielmo, S., & Malle, B. F. (2019). Asymmetric morality: Blame is more differentiated and more extreme than praise. PLoS ONE, 14(3), Article e0213544.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Imwinkelried, E. J., Giannelli, P. C., Gilligan, F. A., Lederer, F. I., & Richter, L. (2016). Courtroom criminal evidence: Related procedures. LexisNexis.Google Scholar
Jones v. State, 913 So.2d 436 (2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahan, D. M. (2009). Culture, cognition, and consent: Who perceives what, and why, in acquaintance-rape cases. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 158(3), 729–813.Google Scholar
Kahan, D. M., & Braman, D. (2008). Self-defensive cognition of self-defense. American Criminal Law Review, 45(1), 1–65.Google Scholar
Kahan, D. M., Hoffman, D. A., & Braman, D. (2008). Whose eyes are you going to believe: Scott v. Harris and the perils of cognitive illiberalism. Harvard Law Review, 122(3), 837–906.Google Scholar
Kahan, D. M., Hoffman, D. A., Braman, D., & Evans, D. (2012). “They saw a protest”: Cognitive illiberalism and the speech-conduct distinction. Stanford Law Review, 64(4), 851–906.Google Scholar
Karakatsanis, A. (2019). Usual cruelty: The complicity of lawyers in the criminal injustice system. The New Press.Google Scholar
Kleinfeld, J. (2015). Reconstructivism: The place of criminal law in ethical life. Harvard Law Review, 129(6), 1485–1565.Google Scholar
Kneer, M., & Bourgeois-Gironde, S. (2017). Mens rea ascription, expertise and outcome effects: Professional judges surveyed. Cognition, 169, 139–146.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kohler-Hausmann, I. (2019). Misdemeanorland: Criminal courts and social control in an age of broken windows policing. Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lloyd-Bostock, S. (2000). The effects on juries of hearing about the defendant’s previous criminal record: A simulation study. Criminal Law Review, 734–755.Google Scholar
Malle, B. F., Guglielmo, S., & Monroe, A. E. (2014). A theory of blame. Psychological Inquiry, 25(2), 147–186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malle, B. F., & Nelson, S. E. (2003). Judging mens rea: The tension between folk concepts and legal concepts of intentionality. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 21(5), 563–580.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McLeod, A. M. (2015). Prison abolition and grounded justice. UCLA Law Review, 62, 1156–1239.Google Scholar
Monroe, A. E., & Malle, B. F. (2017). Two paths to blame: Intentionality directs moral information processing along two distinct tracks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 146(1), 123–133.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mullen, E., & Nadler, J. (2008). Moral spillovers: The effect of moral violations on deviant behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(5), 1239–1245.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nadler, J. (2005). Flouting the law. Texas Law Review, 83, 1399–1441.Google Scholar
Nadler, J. (2012). Blaming as a social process: The influence of character and moral emotion on blame. Law & Contemporary Problems, 75(2), 1–31.Google Scholar
Nadler, J. (2017). Expressive law, social norms, and social groups. Law & Social Inquiry, 42(1), 60–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nadler, J. (2020). Ordinary people and the rationalization of wrongdoing. Michigan Law Review, 118(6), 1205–1231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nadler, J., & McDonnell, M.-H. (2012). Moral character, motive, and the psychology of blame. Cornell Law Review, 97, 255–304.Google Scholar
Papachristos, A. V., Meares, T. L., & Fagan, J. (2012). Why do criminals obey the law – the influence of legitimacy and social networks on active gun offenders. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 102(2), 397–440.Google Scholar
Pillsbury, S. H. (2000). Judging evil: Rethinking the law of murder and manslaughter. NYU Press.Google Scholar
Pizarro, D. A., & Tannenbaum, D. (2012). Bringing character back: How the motivation to evaluate character influences judgments of moral blame. In Mikulincer, M. & Shaver, P. R. (Eds.), The social psychology of morality: Exploring the causes of good and evil (pp. 91–108). American Psychological Association.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posner, R. A. (1985). An economic theory of the criminal law. Columbia Law Review, 85(6), 1193–1231.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, D. E. (2003). The social and moral cost of mass incarceration in African American communities. Stanford Law Review, 56(5), 1271–1305.Google Scholar
Robinson, P. H., & Darley, J. M. (1995). Justice, liability, and blame: Community views and the criminal law. Westview Press.Google Scholar
Shavell, S. (1985). Criminal law and the optimal use of nonmonetary sanctions as a deterrent. Columbia Law Review, 85(6), 1232–1262.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shaver, K. G. (1985). The attribution of blame: Causality, responsibility, and blameworthiness. Springer-Verlag.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shen, F. X. (2011). How we still fail rape victims: Reflecting on responsibility and legal reform. Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, 22(1), 1–80.Google Scholar
Siegel, J. Z., Crockett, M. J., & Dolan, R. J. (2017). Inferences about moral character moderate the impact of consequences on blame and praise. Cognition, 167, 201–211.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Solan, L. M., & Darley, J. M. (2001). Causation, contribution, and legal liability: An empirical study. Law and Contemporary Problems, 64(4), 265–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sood, A. M. (2015). Cognitive cleansing: Experimental psychology and the exclusionary rule. Georgetown Law Journal, 103(6), 1543–1608.Google Scholar
Sood, A. M. (2019). Attempted justice: Misunderstanding and bias in psychological constructions of criminal attempt. Stanford Law Review, 71(3), 593–686.Google Scholar
Sood, A. M., & Darley, J. M. (2012). The plasticity of harm in the service of criminalization goals. California Law Review, 100(5), 1313–1358.Google Scholar
Spellman, B. A. (1997). Crediting causality. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126(4), 323–348.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
State v. Garner, 331 N.C. 491, 509 (1992).Google Scholar
State v. Heard, 166 Wash. App. 1024 (2012).Google Scholar
State v. Lloyd, 354 N.C. 76, 90 (2001).Google Scholar
State v. McAbee, 120 N.C. App. 674, 680-681 (1995).Google Scholar
State v. Weldon, 314 N.C. 401, 404-407 (1985).Google Scholar
State v. Woodard, 210 N.C. App. 725, 728-729 (2011).Google Scholar
Tannenbaum, D., Uhlmann, E. L., & Diermeier, D. (2011). Moral signals, public outrage, and immaterial harms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(6), 1249–1254.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorndike, E. L. (1920). A constant error in psychological ratings. Journal of Applied Psychology, 4(1), 25–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tobia, K. (2018). How people judge what is reasonable. Alabama Law Review, 70, 293–359.Google Scholar
Tobia, K. (2022). Experimental jurisprudence. The University of Chicago Law Review, 89(3), 735–802.Google Scholar
Tonry, M. (2014). Remodeling American sentencing: A ten-step blueprint for moving past mass incarceration. Criminology & Public Policy, 13(4), 503–533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, T. R., & Boeckmann, R. J. (1997). Three strikes and you are out, but why? The psychology of public support for punishing rule breakers. Law & Society Review, 31(2), 237–265.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tyler, T. R., & Jackson, J. (2014). Popular legitimacy and the exercise of legal authority: Motivating compliance, cooperation, and engagement. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 20(1), 78–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Uhlmann, E. L., Pizarro, D. A., & Diermeier, D. (2015). A person-centered approach to moral judgment. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(1), 72–81.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
United States v. Benton, 852 F.2d 1456, 1467-1468 (6th Cir. 1988).Google Scholar
United States v. Smith, 789 F.3d 923, 929–30 (8th Cir. 2015).Google Scholar
Vidmar, N. (2001). Retribution and revenge. In Sanders, J. & Hamilton, V. L. (Eds.), Handbook of justice research in law (pp. 31–63). Kluwer Academic Publishers.Google Scholar
Weiner, B. (1995). Judgments of responsibility: A foundation for a theory of social conduct. The Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Wissler, R. L., & Saks, M. J. (1985). On the inefficacy of limiting instructions: When jurors use prior conviction evidence to decide on guilt. Law and Human Behavior, 9(1), 37–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yankah, E. N. (2003). Good guys and bad guys: Punishing character, equality and the irrelevance of moral character to criminal punishment. Cardozo Law Review, 25, 1019–1067.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×