The first aim of this paper was to provide an evolutionary explanation for why punitive decision-making in modern humans is motivated by emotionally-driven retributive intuitions. This aim was met in the form of an empirically-informed evolutionary exposition of the origin, phylogenetic distribution, selective function, and development of punishment, which culminated in the psychological mechanism for punishment: negative emotion. Anger, indignation, and outrage form the motivational mechanism for punishment in humans, and this explains why
humans do not consider the consequences of punishment when making practical punitive decisions.
On a more methodological note, the structure of my evolutionary exposition of human punishment—based on a modified version of Tinbergen’s framework—was advantageous, for three main reasons. First, it provided a clear demarcation between important conceptual distinctions in biology, such as the ontogeny–phylogeny distinction, and the mechanism–function distinction. Second, it divided up the explanatory labour in such a way that turned an otherwise opaque explanatory project into a relatively straightforward task. And third, it allowed for a diverse range of interdisciplinary findings to be coherently synthesised.
The second aim of this paper was to re-evaluate retributivism from an evolutionary perspective. This aim was met by applying Greene’s ground-breaking explanation for the existence of deontological moral philosophy to the evolutionary exposition of human punishment that I provided in chapter 3. The finding from this re-evaluation was that retributivism is a post hoc rationalisation of the psychological mechanism that evolved to motivate punishment in ancestral humans. Undoubtedly, this finding has serious theoretical and practical implications—of which I was only able to offer a brief sketch. In my view, however, one implication is particularly conspicuous. Retributivism should no longer be accorded the theoretical status of a justificatory theory of punishment. To continue to treat retributivism in this way is to wilfully ignore the human proclivity for cognitively interpreting the emotion-driven mechanisms that were built into our psychology by natural selection.
It is important to clarify however, that although I do not think retributivism should retain a reason-providing authority, I am certainly not of the opinion that it should be disparaged or cast aside in any way. Instead, I think that retributivism should simply be acknowledged for what it actually is—a refined linguistic expression of an ancient punitive predisposition. It is quite a remarkable fact, after all, that humans are able to philosophically reflect on, and verbally articulate
the conscious registration of the emotionally-driven psychological mechanism that evolved to secure the survival and reproductive success of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
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