Navegando por Autor "Flanagan, Brian"

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    Artigo Científico
    Lawful, but not Really: The Dual Character of the Concept of Law
    (2024) Flanagan, Brian; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA
    Disagreement on law’s relationship to morality has long been driven by disagreement about our ordinary concept. Until recently, however, there had been no systematic investigation of lay intuitions. In this paper, we advance this nascent effort. Across two studies (N = 697), our findings reveal that most people consider law to be more than a matter of political circumstance alone. Contrary to the expectations of most contemporary philosophers, morality (both substantive and procedural) emerges as a key influence on judgments of legal validity: many people say that conduct prohibited by immoral statutes is not truly illegal, and that immoral conduct which was never explicitly prohibited is truly illegal. This suggests that people often treat law as a dual character concept that, like the concepts of scientist or of artist, features autonomous concrete and abstract dimensions.
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    Moral appraisals guide intuitive legal determinations
    (2023) Flanagan, Brian; Almeida, Guilherme F. C. F. de; Struchiner, Noel; Hannikainen, Ivar R.
    We sought to understand how basic competencies in moral reasoning influence the application of private, institutional, and legal rules. Hypotheses: We predicted that moral appraisals, implicating both outcome-based and mental state reasoning, would shape participants’ interpretation of rules and statutes—and asked whether these effects arise differentially under intuitive and reflective reasoning conditions. Method: In six vignette-based experiments (total N = 2,473; 293 university law students [67% women; age bracket mode: 18–22 years] and 2,180 online workers [60% women; mean age = 31.9 years]), participants considered a wide range of written rules and laws and determined whether a protagonist had violated the rule in question. We manipulated morally relevant aspects of each incident—including the valence of the rule’s purpose (Study 1) and of the outcomes that ensued (Studies 2 and 3), as well as the protagonist’s accompanying mental state (Studies 5 and 6). In two studies, we simultaneously varied whether participants decided under time pressure or following a forced delay (Studies 4 and 6). Results: Moral appraisals of the rule’s purpose, the agent’s extraneous blameworthiness, and the agent’s epistemic state impacted legal determinations and helped to explain participants’ departure from rules’ literal interpretation. Counter-literal verdicts were stronger under time pressure and were weakened by the opportunity to reflect. Conclusions: Under intuitive reasoning conditions, legal determinations draw on core competencies in moral cognition, such as outcome-based and mental state reasoning. In turn, cognitive reflection dampens these effects on statutory interpretation, allowing text to play a more influential role.