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Agora exibindo 1 - 5 de 5
  • Artigo Científico
    Are There Cross-Cultural Legal Principles? Modal Reasoning Uncovers Procedural Constraints on Law
    (2021) Tobia, Kevin P.; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Donelson, Raff; Dranseika, Vilius; Kneer, Markus; Strohmaier, Niek; Bystranowski, Piotr; Dolinina, Kristina; Janik, Bartosz; Keo, Sothie; Lauraityt, Egle; Liefgreen, Alice; Próchnicki, Maciej; Rosas, Alejandro; Hannikainen, Ivar R.
    Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have arguedthat laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. Inthe present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different coun-tries. Are there cross-cultural principles of law? In a between-subjects design, participants (N = 3,054)were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our pre-registered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there aresuch laws. These results document cross-culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the conceptof law which defy people’s grasp of how legal systems function in practice.
  • Artigo Científico
    A dual character theory of law
    (2024) GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA
    One persistent question in jurisprudence relates to the role of morality in the concept of law. For instance, consider the question of whether unjust statutes are laws. Legal positivists say that they’re laws in every relevant sense, while natural lawyers say that they’re not. This article considers a different answer inspired by recent findings in experimental philosophy: there is one relevant sense in which unjust statutes are laws, but also a different relevant sense in which they aren’t. After considering the ways in which this alternative differs from some of the mainstream theories in general jurisprudence, the article argues that it provides more elegant solutions to two problems that have puzzled legal philosophers in the past: the paradox of customary international law and the shifts in legal discourse over history.
  • Artigo Científico
    Do Formalist Judges Abide By Their Abstract Principles? A Two-Country Study in Adjudication
    (2021) Bystranowski, Piotr; Janik, Bartosz; Próchnicki, Maciej; Hannikainen, Ivar Rodriguez; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Struchiner, Noel
    Recent literature in experimental philosophy has postulated the existence of the abstract/concrete paradox (ACP): the tendency to activate inconsistent intuitions (and generate inconsistent judgment) depending on whether a problem to be analyzed is framed in abstract terms or is described as a concrete case. One recent study supports the thesis that this effect influences judicial decision-making, including decision-making by professional judges, in areas such as interpretation of constitutional principles and application of clear-cut rules. Here, following the existing literature in legal theory, we argue that the susceptibility to such an effect might depend on whether decision-makers operate in a legal system characterized by the formalist or particularist approach to legal interpretation, with formalist systems being less susceptible to the effect. To test this hypothesis, we compare the results of experimental studies on ACP run on samples from two countries differing in legal culture: Poland and Brazil. The lack of significant differences between those results (also for professional legal decision-makers) suggests that ACP is a robust effect in the legal context.
  • Artigo Científico
    Apply the Laws, if They are Good: Moral Evaluations Linearly Predict Whether Judges Should Enforce the Law
    (2024) Engelmann, Neele; GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Sousa, Felipe Oliveira de; Prochownik, Karolina; Hannikainen, Ivar R.; Struchiner, Noel; Magen, Stefan
    What should judges do when faced with immoral laws? Should they apply them without exception, since “the law is the law?” Or can exceptions be made for grossly immoral laws, such as historically, Nazi law? Surveying laypeople (N = 167) and people with some legal training (N = 141) on these matters, we find a surprisingly strong, monotonic relationship between people’s subjective moral evaluation of laws and their judgments that these laws should be applied in concrete cases. This tendency is most pronounced among individuals who endorse natural law (i.e., the legal-philosophical view that immoral laws are not valid laws at all), and is attenuated when disagreement about the moral status of a law is considered reasonable. The relationship is equally strong for laypeople and for those with legal training. We situate our findings within the broader context of morality’s influence on legal reasoning that experimental jurisprudence has uncovered in recent years, and consider normative implications.
  • Artigo Científico
    Exploring the psychology of LLMs’ moral and legal reasoning
    (2024) GUILHERME DA FRANCA COUTO FERNANDES DE ALMEIDA; Nunes, José Luiz; Engelmann, Neele; Wiegmann, Alex; Araújo, Marcelo de
    Large language models (LLMs) exhibit expert-level performance in tasks across a wide range of different domains. Ethical issues raised by LLMs and the need to align future versions makes it important to know how state of the art models reason about moral and legal issues. In this paper, we employ the methods of experimental psychology to probe into this question. We replicate eight studies from the experimental literature with instances of Google's Gemini Pro, Anthropic's Claude 2.1, OpenAI's GPT-4, and Meta's Llama 2 Chat 70b. We find that alignment with human responses shifts from one experiment to another, and that models differ amongst themselves as to their overall alignment, with GPT-4 taking a clear lead over all other models we tested. Nonetheless, even when LLM-generated responses are highly correlated to human responses, there are still systematic differences, with a tendency for models to exaggerate effects that are present among humans, in part by reducing variance. This recommends caution with regards to proposals of replacing human participants with current state-of-the-art LLMs in psychological research and highlights the need for further research about the distinctive aspects of machine psychology