Why do we punish negligence? Some current accounts raise the possibility that it can be explained by the kinds of processes that lead us to punish ordinary harmful acts, such as outcome bias, character inference, or antecedent deliberative choices. Although they capture many important cases, these explanations fail to account for others. We argue that, in addition to these phenomena, there is something unique to the punishment of negligence itself: People hold others directly responsible for the basic fact of failing to bring to mind information that would help them to avoid important risks. In other words, we propose that at its heart negligence is a failure of thought. Drawing on the current literature in moral psychology, we suggest that people find it natural to punish such failures, even when they do not arise from conscious, volitional choice. This raises a question: Why punish somebody for a mental event they did not exercise deliberative control over? Drawing on the literature on how thoughts come to mind, we argue that punishing a person for such failures will help prevent their future occurrence, even without the involvement of volitional choice. This provides new insight on the structure and function of our tendency to punish negligent actions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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一个人的想法太少：惩罚疏忽的适应性理由。


为什么我们要惩罚疏忽行为？一些经常账户提出了一种可能性，即它可以通过导致我们惩罚普通有害行为的过程来解释，例如结果偏见、性格推断或先前的深思熟虑的选择。尽管它们捕捉到了许多重要的案例，但这些解释未能解释其他案例。我们认为，除了这些现象之外，对过失的惩罚本身还有一些独特之处：人们要求其他人对未能想起有助于他们避免重要风险的信息这一基本事实负有直接责任。换句话说，我们认为疏忽的本质是思想的失败。根据当前道德心理学文献，我们认为人们会自然而然地惩罚此类失败，即使它们不是出于有意识、自愿的选择。这就提出了一个问题：为什么要因为某人没有经过深思熟虑控制的心理事件而惩罚他们？借鉴有关思想如何浮现在脑海的文献，我们认为，即使不涉及意志选择，惩罚一个人的此类失败也将有助于防止其未来再次发生。这为我们惩罚疏忽行为的倾向的结构和功能提供了新的见解。 （PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2024 APA，保留所有权利）。