On moral education and the retribution dilemma

• Main Author: Teo, Marcus Tian Leng
• Other Authors: Andres Carlos Luco
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Humanities::Ethics; Social sciences::Education
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/79016
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The fact that people have hyper-retributive moral intuitions in response to moral wrongdoing is not novel. Such moral intuitions, however, do not stand up to moral and rational scrutiny. Hyper-retributive intuitions (1) fail to offer a proportionate account of punishment that is owed to the wrongdoer, and (2) are likely ungeneralizable as outcomes of justice. This tension forms the genesis of Mackie’s (2011) Retribution Dilemma, which this work attempts to address by employing contemporary developments from moral learning literature. This is done through Peter Railton’s (2017) and Hanno Sauer’s (2012) accounts of moral learning. To this effect, this work sketches out a rough psycho-education programme meant to allay hyper-retributive moral intuitions in favour of a more varied, mixed-theory moral intuition towards justice that is sensitive to an interdisciplinary, nuanced view of moral psychology.