2026 Theses Doctoral

Punishing Risk

Mott, Christian J.

In United States criminal law, risk plays a role in determining the punishment for non-intentional harms but not for intentional harms. Research in moral psychology, by contrast, has provided mixed evidence as to whether laypeople’s punishment judgments vary meaningfully by risk level at all, perhaps because laypeople do not meaningfully distinguish the mental states of agents who impose different levels of risk. Ten studies show that laypeople can and do distinguish culpability and punishment by risk level.

The first four studies show that laypeople do differentiate between the mental state terms used to criminalize non-intentional risk impositions. Specifically, the semantic meanings of these terms differ when they appear on their own and when they are contrasted with one another. The next four studies show that laypeople also impose different levels of punishment on agents who impose different risks of harm, whether or not the harm eventuated. These differences in punishment depend on mental state inferences (i.e., the agent’s subjective awareness of risk) as well as inferences about the agent’s values.

The final two studies show that risk also affects laypeople's punishment judgments about intentional harms. In a nationally representative sample of around 5,400 United States residents, punishment for an attempted or completed economic crime reflected the amount of intended loss, the risk of success, the agent’s dangerousness, and the amount of harm. Together, these ten studies provide evidence that laypeople distinguish risk-related mental states and punish differently based on risk, independent of outcome.