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Addressing pressing economic and social challenges – such as pandemics and other health crises, climate change, and energy scarcity – requires changes in behavior. In this talk, I will use case studies, primarily from my own research, to illustrate how human behavior and bounded rationality influences the design of institutions aimed at aligning incentives and actions with overarching goals. I will argue that economic design research and behavioral science are often complementary, rather than substitutes, in promoting effective behavioral change. [mehr]

This event will feature a short lecture by Professor Joanna Bourke, who will explore rape as a historical phe­nom­e­non, examining how its understanding has evolved over time and across different cultural and social envi­ron­ments. She will discuss how history can help us comprehend the roots of sexual violence today and reflect on broader societal constructions of will, consent, and agency. Her analysis critically examines the binary victim-perpetrator framework while addressing intersectional factors that shape experiences of sexual violence. [mehr]

Legal decisions are largely based on human information processing. Not only do they rely on human memory but they result from human decision-making. As much psychological research shows, however, human memory is fallible and malleable and human decision-making is often biased. I will present some relevant own work on three topics: (1) false autobiographical memories, (2) hindsight bias in judges’ negligence assessments, and (3) effects of pretrial publicity on the respective legal judgments. Finally, I will discuss the findings, derive implications and potential countermeasures. [mehr]

Ordering and executing the infliction of harm – as specified in the criminal law – requires both a formal as well as a substantive legitimization. Such a legitimization is typically derived from so-called punishment (or “penal”) theories (such as “absolute punishment” theories à la Kant or Hegel or “relative punishment” theories that weigh the deterrent effects of punishment against the harm it produces). These theories are inherently normative (in the sense that they work with ethical arguments), but many of these theories also make (explicit or implicit) assumptions about “human nature” (i.e., about people’s subjective punitive instincts, retributive desires, affective responses, attitudes, values, etc.). Whether or not these assumptions are tenable is not a question of plausibility or pure logic, but rather a question of whether empirical findings speak for or against them. Social psychology – and, social justice research in particular – aims to provide such empirical findings, and I will show how such findings can be used to inform punishment theory. To do so, a first necessary step is to thoroughly investigate punishment theories with regard to the explicit and implicit assumptions they make about human nature, and then, in a second step, scrutinize these assumptions against empirical findings. This is exactly what Mario Gollwitzer and Ralf Kölbel (Chair of Criminal Law and Criminology, LMU) are currently trying to do in a research project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Mario Gollwitzer will present preliminary findings from this project and, finally, reflect on the usefulness and the feasibility of their approach. [mehr]

The Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group (ACA) supports the Ukrainian Office of the General Prosecutor in its chal­leng­ing efforts to investigate and prosecute mass atrocity crimes in the context of the Russian ag­gres­­sion against Ukraine. Klaus Hoffmann, an expert member of this group will report about his work in Ukraine, the legal chal­leng­es of applying national criminal law as well as the practical problems of investigating and prosecuting war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of ag­gres­sion during the ongoing war. He will also comment on the issue of “trials in absentia”. [mehr]

Kämpfe um Anerkennung betreffen neben dem Recht, gehört zu werden, regelmäßig auch den Anspruch, geglaubt zu werden. In diesem Sinne lautet eine sich chronifizierende Kritik an Strafverfahren nicht nur hierzulande, diese würden Aussagen einiger Perso­nen­grup­pen, insbesondere von Verletzten in Sexual­straf­ver­fahren, keinen angemessenen Glauben schenken. Diese Kritik berührt die Legitimität des Strafverfahrens und betrifft nicht allein empirische Umstände. Eine der einflussreichsten Ansätze in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, die Theorie der episte­mi­schen Ungerechtigkeit (epistemic injustice) von Miranda Fricker, untersucht Formen der Unge­rech­tig­keit in der Wissensproduktion und der Zeugenschaft. Mit dieser soll ein philo­so­phi­scher Blick auf das Strafverfahrensrecht geworfen und der Frage nachgegangen werden, inwieweit epistemische Gerechtigkeit als jedenfalls impliziter strafrechtlicher Verfah­rens­grund­satz gelten kann. Darauf aufbauend werden zwei Konstellationen erörtert: Die sog. Unwahrannahme von Zeugenaussagen, die der BGH in einer Leitentscheidung zur Aussage­analy­tik aufgestellt hat, sowie der rechtliche Umgang mit psychologischen Befunden zu Biases und Denkverzerrungen, die sich vor allem zu Lasten bestimmter Gruppen auszuwirken drohen. Aus beiden ergeben sich Reformvorschläge, u.a. die Aufgabe der Unwahrannahme. [mehr]

A dominant theme in criminal law theory is that censure and punishment are appropriate only insofar as they are proportional responses to culpable actions. The problem is that much of existing criminal law does not fit this model. A number of responses to this mismatch have been proposed. Perhaps the criminal law should be reformed to match the theory; perhaps we can do more to understand how even violations of mala prohibita offenses are culpable; perhaps we need to take this connection as aspirational but not strictly binding; or perhaps we should recognize that the connection between punishment and culpable actions is just a misguided ideological fixation—in truth, we are better off using a utilitarian conception of the criminal law, according to which it is just a tool to be used to deter potential criminal action and incapacitate potential criminals in whatever way best serves society. I reject all of these options and defend a different account. I argue that the criminal justice system draws on two normative frameworks. Criminal law properly conceived calls for and licenses censure and punishment, but only insofar as they are proportional responses to culpable actions. Penal law operates as a complement to criminal law. It is not responsive (at least not in the same way) to the culpability of action, and it grounds no censure. But it allows for penalties that exceed those that would be proportional to the culpability of an action (and certainly than those that fit Ordnungswidrigkeiten). It is also responsive to, in ways the criminal law is not, the benefits of incapacitating the dangerous. It can do these things because it operates on a separate basis: not retributive response to culpable action but fair forfeiture of the right not to be penalized. These two foundations can be harmonized to provide a normative account of the criminal justice system that fits the law reasonably well but still has some revisionist force. [mehr]

The ‘Big Data Revolution’ has allowed accumulating significant amounts of statistical data covering all areas of life. Such data can have high probative value in legal trials. Still, courts in and outside the UK have been ambivalent about the possibility of making legal judgements based solely on statistics. The presen­ta­tion will seek to uncover the root of this ambivalence, and to suggest that it highlights a fundamental connection between practical normativity and epistemic normativity. The argument will be that a Razian concept of respect for persons provides reasons against legal judgments of liability based solely on statistics. This is because statistics logically bar the elimination of the risk of error, and relatedly, they cannot justify belief in the availability of reasons to make a judgment of liability. The presentation will further seek to demonstrate that the argument carries over to non-legal spheres in which the Razian notion of respect plays a role. The UK’s attempt to determine A-level grades algorithmically during the Covid-19 pandemic provides an example. [mehr]

American criminal laws and criminal justice systems are harsher, more punitive, more afflicted by racial disparities and injustices, more indifferent to suffering, and less respectful of human dignity than those of other Western countries. The explanations usually offered—rising crime rates in the 1970s and 1980s, public anger and anxiety, crime control politics, neoliberal economic and social policies—are fundamentally incomplete. The deeper explanations are four features of American history and culture that shaped values, attitudes, and beliefs and produced a political culture in which suffering is fatalistically accepted and policy makers are largely indifferent to individual injustices. The four elements are the history of American race relations, the evolution of Protestant fundamentalism, local election of judges and prosecutors, and the continuing influence of political and social values that emerged during three centuries of Western expansion. The last, encapsulated in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” is interwoven with the other three. Together, they explain long-term characteristics of American criminal justice and the extraordinary severity of penal policies and practices since the 1970. [mehr]

A now-familiar thought (associated with the idea of “strong AI”) that in the not-too-distant future, AI may come to far surpass humans’ general cognitive capacities. Some famously worry that such AI pose an existential risk to humans, either due to indifference to human aims or a hostility to humans. This paper focuses on a different cluster of questions: a series of questions in the foundations of ethics raised by the possibility that we ask AI to engage in evaluative reasoning (e.g., about what is good and bad, right and wrong, etc.). There is a natural epistemic motive for asking strong AI to engage in evaluative reasoning: one might hope that strong AI could help us to make progress in addressing persistent evaluative controversies. However, suppose that strong AIs converge on evaluative conclusions that we are independently inclined to oppose. For example, AI might come to anti-anthropocentric evaluative conclusions (two examples: maybe they really prioritize certain cognitive capacities in their evaluations, treating us the way we treat mosquitos; or maybe they don’t, treating the interests of insects as on a par with that of highly rational beings). Alternatively, AI might come to radically consequentialist conclusions, that portray the evaluative significance of, e.g., our relations to our projects and loved ones as easily swamped. We take such dissatisfaction with (by hypothesis) epistemically highly credible evaluative conclusions to raise important questions about our attitudes towards the evaluative, even if we assume a strong sort of realism about evaluative thought and talk. It is familiar for metaethical antirealists to ask the question “why care about evaluative properties?” on the supposition that realism is true. And they often argue that this is a reason to reject realism. However, we think that the sorts of possibility we are canvassing instead makes salient two other ways of thinking about alienation from evaluative standards. First, it could push us to a conceptual ethics conclusion that we ought to adopt other (perhaps: more anthropocentric) evaluative concepts. Second, it might instead push us toward a deep alienation from the evaluative: that is, we might simply embrace that the our existing evaluative concepts capture what really and truly matters, and find that we simply don’t want our lives or world to be structured by what really and truly matters, if it involves sufficient sacrifice of what we care about. In light of these issues, we then reflect on how to best think about what “the” alignment problem in AI really is, suggesting that there are in fact multiple different “alignment” problems that are worth wrestling with, and that it is a difficult evaluative question which one to prioritize in thinking about AI ethics, and why. [mehr]