Description
Empirical research has shown that judges find it difficult to ignore relevant but inadmissible evidence with which they have come into contact. One of the phenomena that scholars have analysed to explain this difficulty is mental contamination. In mental contamination, (I) information is considered by the agent to be relevant at least at one stage (it may be debunked later), (II) the agent wants to neglect this information, and (III) the agent believes that she is successfully neglecting it, but (IV) despite her efforts, her behaviour is influenced by the information. This phenomenon has different articulations, such as contaminated information processing and belief persistence, but the general scheme is that the agent has difficulty compartmentalising her practical thoughts, distinguishing what is usable from what is forbidden data. The main difference with other psychological distortions of judgement is that the agent is aware of the distorting factor she faces - even though she believes she is successfully ignoring it.In the above research, the forbidden information does not contaminate the normative evaluation of facts, but rather the reconstruction of the facts themselves. In this paper, we aim to contribute to the conceptual analysis of mental contamination by exploring the possibility of applying this concept to the normative evaluation of facts. More specifically, our aim is to apply the notion of mental contamination to the relationship between law and morality. We will call this type of mental contamination "moral contamination", to contrast it with its factual analogue.
Our starting point is that moral judgement is not only, nor primarily, conscious. Haidt's theory of moral judgement, for example, depicts morality as a set of layered standards of judgement in which higher - socially accepted, rational and conscious - levels often fail to control the responses of lower - individual, emotional and instinctive - levels. In other words, according to Haidt, our morality is often beyond our rational moral control. In the first part of this talk, we will discuss whether the category of moral contamination can usefully be applied to Haidt's account of morality.
We will then move on to the legal domain. We will try to argue that moral contamination can help to describe the conflict between law and morality from a psychological point of view. Contaminating pieces of information are those features of the case that are immaterial to the legal system, but which evoke a moral response in the agent and are not successfully ignored. Finally, we ask whether there is any hope that moral judgement outside our own conscious moral control can be constrained by the law.
| Period | 26 Jul 2023 |
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| Held at | Jagellonian University (Krakow), Poland |