This chapter compares the impact of different regulatory tools (command and control, mandates, and incentives relative to reasoning, honesty oath, and nudge) on the crowding out of different types of intrinsic compliance motivations.

This chapter shows that the faculty of the will was presented as a ubiquitously dangerous facet of selfhood in Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, when used to gratify selfish or sinful desires. ‘Punishing the Transgressive Will’ explains how this convention helped define how the limitations of human ambition and the boundaries of moral transgression were depicted. I do so primarily through a comparative analysis of the notorious acts of wilfulness performed in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Dr Faustus, and Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam. Enticing as it was dangerous, the capacity for the will to incite violence or disorder was commonly shown to be the primary cause of its own ruin. This literary topos is, however, importantly refuted in Cary’s play through the character of Salome. Among all of the excessively wilful characters who feature in Renaissance drama, Salome proves to be an exceptional type of Neo-Senecan villain whose will functions without limit: her will is not self-defeating, nor is she punished for exercising it. I propose that Salome’s fate can help to redefine our understanding of transgressive acts in Renaissance tragedies.

Chapter 2 examines the circulation and application of medical and ritual knowledge in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, including Venezuela and Panama, and is based upon Inquisition trial records and secular court cases. The chapter approaches healing and ritual as intimately connected and often inseparable activities for African-descended practitioners who were solicited by clients of all ethnicities. Where clients were also people of colour, they were often hired to perform work of community healing. The chapter outlines the gendered and racialised patterns of prosecution and punishment of defendants of African descent tried by the Inquisition of Cartagena de Indias. This is followed by an analysis of the mobility and exchange of healing knowledge in Caribbean and Pacific New Granada, an examination of the marketplace of ideas, and an exploration of the social worlds in which black specialists practiced. Case studies include that of three Kongolese bondsmen, who had hired Joseph and Thomas to poison his owner in 1740s Cartagena, and that of enslaved man Aja, who was accused by fellow bondspersons, other members of the cuadrilla on the gold mines of San Antonio in the Cauca valley mines (owned by the Convent of the Encarnación in the city of Popayán) in the 1770s.

This chapter begins by acknowledging punitive damages’ status as the paradigmatic proof of punishment’s place in the law of torts. A brief overview of current punitive damages practices around the world first shows that the place of punishment in tort law is no longer debated only by common law scholars. Then a detailed description of the understanding, scholarly treatment, and judicial availability of punitive damages focuses on two major common law jurisdictions (England and the United States) and various civil law legal traditions (mainly Latin America and Continental Europe). This map of the unique contours and idiosyncratic features of the scholarly debates and judicial availability of punitive damages of those jurisdictions reveals a common pattern that begs further inquiry: in most jurisdictions, the tendency is to frame the debate around the place of punishment in tort law such that the root problem becomes finding a way to circumvent the fundamental punitive quest instead of addressing it head-on.

The Feyerabend lectures on natural right is Kant’s first clear statement of a view on punishment that balances retributivist and deterrence concerns. Kant’s earlier views, shown by other course lectures on ethics, were largely focused on deterrence. As Kant developed his view of human autonomy, he shifted his reasoning about punishment to include concern for the honor and dignity of the victim as well as the criminal, including right of criminals to be treated no worse than they treated others.

Although there is a substantial body of research addressing the economic motivations for drug crime, fewer studies have also considered the social influences that shape individuals’ involvement in the illicit drug economy. This chapter will draw on interviews conducted in prisons in Indonesia with people convicted of drug offences. Analysis suggests that many offenders do have economic motivations for entry into the drug trade. However, personal and relational motivations for drug use and drug trading must not be ignored, given that most of our participants were not in absolute poverty when they decided to offend. Moreover, in making decisions about participation in the drug trade, they were clearly influenced by trusted peer groups. The chapter presents this empirical data within the context of increasingly punitive penalties for drug offences in Southeast Asia, including the judicial execution of drug traffickers.

Chapter 6 details and tests our theory of IO exit by applying it to the predictors of IO suspensions. IO member states use suspension to punish states that have violated IO commitments and to incentivize domestic institutional change. We argue that suspension is not an automatic punishment for violations but instead is influenced by factors related to bargaining and institutional constraints: Violator states that are more powerful, have material resources, and have alliance relationships with regional powers are less likely to be suspended while IOs. Empirically, we analyze 101 IO suspensions from 1939 to 2022 across all IOs and states, and then focus our multivariate analyses on suspensions for political backsliding. This is because we show that most suspensions occur for human rights violations and incursions on democracy commitments (like coups d’état); and narrowing the scope allows us to control for the kinds of violations that prompt suspension. Our quantitative analysis shows that IO membership suspension is imposed against some but not all violators – and that this is partly because powerful states are able to insulate themselves from IO pressures, avoiding punishment for violations that less powerful states get suspended for. IO institutional constraints including their democratic density also affect the likelihood of suspension for political backsliding. Suspension can act as a multilateral diplomatic sanction but power and politics matter.

In 1537 in Mexico City, Zumárraga’s Inquisition pursued a massive investigation into a network of suspected African and Spanish witches. Those punished were two African slaves, probably of Senegambia, Marta and María. Two freed slaves, María de Espinosa and Margarita Pérez, a Spanish woman Isabel de Morales, and a Nahua man whose name was Antón Cuatecu or Coatecu, were also condemned. The African women were accused of performing sorcery for multiple Spanish women, who were never arrested or prosecuted. These women offered multiple forms of love magic for their Spanish women patrons. Cuatecu was the cultural intermediary and supplied both the African and Spanish women with Mesoamerican plant material, which is not identified by name, only as roots, powders, which is clear evidence that Spanish and African women communicated with Cuatecu in Nahuatl. This network was multiethnic and composed of Senegambian, Maghrebi, Spanish, and Nahua peoples.

Describe how children develop fairness, spite, and helping behaviours; understand the role of emotions, punishment, and reputation in moral development; explore cross-cultural differences and similarities in morality.

Legal rights, obligations, and liabilities bind together entities, including people, real and moveable property, and abstract objects, across time. Determining whether these rights, obligations, and liabilities exist at any particular time therefore requires the law to embed within it a theory of persistence – that is, a theory of how entities persist over time. The philosophical and psychological literature has identified multiple different theories of how objects persist over time, some of which are identity relations and some of which are not. Research in experimental jurisprudence has shown both that ordinary people’s judgments about the law often match the content of the law itself and that ordinary people’s judgments appear sensitive to multiple different persistence relations. These findings provide reason to think that the law, to the extent it reflects the judgments of ordinary people, also reflects multiple different theories of persistence – contrary to recent arguments that legal rights depend solely on numerical identity.

Modern theory of punishment generally conflates two questions. The first concerns the justification of state punishment, the second the moral–psychological damage that occurs when a person is violated. The first leads to political theory and a legally based account of wrongdoing and punishment. The second considers the moral–psychological nature of violation, grief and reconciliation. Hegel’s early theological writings provide a critical vantage point from which to view law and the dominant liberal theory of punishment, including his own ‘mature’ position as a founder of modern retributivism. Based on a metaphysics of love, he develops there his account of a perpetrator’s guilt and how a victim might deal with violation, finding a common ground in the grief both may feel. This early metaphysical ethics contrasts with the Philosophy of Right’s later rational, retributive, metaphysics of punishment. The chapter considers critically Axel Honneth’s approach and suggests that the early theological writings are worthy of more consideration than they are often given. This early work might be more mature in psychological terms than Hegel’s later legal and political theory, providing the basis for a critique of that theory that is ethically real and institutionally critical. This is a prototypical ERIC critique pointing towards penal abolition.

How should a constitutional state – one that respects subjects’ basic rights – treat civil disobedients? This chapter presents and critically engages with some of the most prominent answers legal scholars, political theorists, and philosophers have given to this question. On what I call punitive approaches, which I present in section 1, civil disobedience is first and foremost an act of resistance that threatens the constitutional order, and thus a public wrong worthy of punishment. Theorists of civil disobedience have challenged this approach since the 1960s, especially by conceiving of civil disobedience as a kind of dissent, which liberal democratic societies ought to and can ‘make room’ for. Sections 2 and 3 examine these ‘constitutionalizing’ approaches, with section 2 focusing on the case for leniency, and section 3 on the case for broad accommodation. Section 4 examines the costs of constitutionalizing approaches and reclaims the understanding of civil disobedience as a kind of resistance, alongside its uncivil counterparts, that is sometimes justified and even necessary in constitutional democracies.

Genocide is sometimes called the ’crime of crimes’. The word was coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, then declared an international crime by the United Nations General Assembly. In 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted. As the first human rights treaty of modern times, it constituted a significant intrusion into what had previously been a matter exclusively of domestic concern. This explains the narrow definition of the crime of genocide. It requires proof of an intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. Only a half century after its adoption did the Genocide Convention take on real significance with inter-State cases being filed at the International Court of Justice and many prosecutions at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The Convention requires that States Parties punish genocide but they are also required to prevent it, even when it takes place outside their own territory. More than 150 States have ratified the Genocide Convention. Genocide is also prohibited under customary international law. It is generally agreed that the duty to punish genocide is a peremptory norm of international law (jus cogens).