The Illustrated Guide to Criminal Law
Chapter 6: Mens Rea
Page 1: Punishment must be deserved
The Criminal Lawyer’s Guide to Criminal Law (with pictures!)
Par 6: “I Didn’t Mean To!”
As we’ve seen, our sense that punishment must be DESERVED is very powerful. People seem to have an innate sense of JUSTICE that requires some proportionality between the offense and the resulting penalty.
In this section, we’ll start to explore just what that means.
Sullen, stubborn infant in a high chair
This sense of justice is POWERFUL. Studies have shown that even INFANTS share this desire that wrongdoers be punished, and that punishment be deserved.
(Perhaps fortunately for parents, particularly at feeding time, there’s not much they can DO about it.)
[Note, these Criminal Law chapters were originally posted as single long-form pages on Tumblr. When they were ported to this lawcomic website, they were broken up into shorter pages for easier reading and discussion.]
How did they study infants’ sense of justice?
They generally note what the infants pay attention to, and how they react to various situations.
Do Infants Have a Sense of Fairness
Fairness as Partiality Aversion: The Development of Procedural Justice
The Development of Socio-Moral Evaluations in Human Infants and Preschoolers
Just rewards: 17-Month-old infants expect agents to take resources according to the principles of distributive justice
Empathy and Moral Development: Implications for Caring and Justice