Moral reasoning and support for punitive violence: A multi-methods analysis
When do residents in communities affected by violent crime support punitive violence? Are they less likely to support harsh punishments when they use moral principles to guide their decisions? Does the use of dehumanizing language to describe criminals predict support for harsh punishments? We document and analyze decisions about responding to crime from 62in-depth qualitative interviews with individuals affected by violence in the Mexican state of Michoacán to address these questions. We conduct a quantitative analysis of how different forms of moral reasoning are related to punishment preferences for specific crime events, and a qualitative content analysis to investigate mechanisms. We find that two types of moral reasoning are particularly associated with support for punitive punishments: “consequentialist” reasoning that involves weighing the costs and benefits of an action, and reasoning that dehumanizes accused criminals. “Deontological” reasoning about the right or just action, while extremely common, is used more equally across arguments for and against punitive violence. Analysis of social media posts of elites provides suggestive evidence that these patterns hold with elites who have more influence on the occurrence of violence events and criminal justice policy. Our results provide micro-foundations for theories that assume that consequentialist decision-making leads to support for punitive violence in high-violence, high-impunity settings, and show how psychological processes like dehumanization can feed into those processes.