Moral Rules, the Moral Sentiments, and Behavior: Toward a Theory of an Optimal Moral System
By Louis Kaplow, S. Shavell. Journal of Political Economy, 2007
144 citations recorded by the source corpus.
How should moral sanctions and moral rewards—the moral sentiments involving feelings of guilt and of virtue—be employed to govern individuals’ behavior if the objective is to maximize social welfare? In the model that we examine, guilt is a disincentive to act and virtue is an incentive because we assume that they are negative and positive sources of utility. We also suppose that guilt and virtue are costly to inculcate and are subject to certain constraints on their use. We show that the moral sentiments should be used chiefly to control externalities and further that guilt is best to employ when most harmful acts can successfully be deterred whereas virtue is best when only a few individuals can be induced to behave well. We also contrast the optimal use of guilt and virtue to optimal Pigouvian taxation and discuss extensions of our analysis.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7a9797c57eb3130410b8da1ddf5e67a557c0e054
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Citations in the corpus
- Culture and Institutions (2015, unknown): “This definition, also used in psychology (Pinker 1997; Kaplow and Shavell 2007) emphasizes the role of emotions in motivating human behavior.”
- A Theory of Tolerance (2009, background): “Kaplow and Shavell (2007) offer a general model of completely centralized norm formation, where feelings of guilt associated with some acts are inculcated by a central planner so as to maximize social welfare.”
- The Combinatorial Assignment Problem: Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes (2010, background): “This last finding suggests that a utilitarian social planner, who does not regard fairness as a design objective per se (cf. Kaplow and Shavell 2001, 2007), prefers A-CEEI to both the draft and the dictatorship in this context.”