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The evolution of punishment

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Abstract

Many researchers have assumed that punishment evolved as a behavior-modification strategy, i.e. that it evolved because of the benefits resulting from the punishees modifying their behavior. In this article, however, we describe two alternative mechanisms for the evolution of punishment: punishment as a loss-cutting strategy (punishers avoid further exploitation by punishees) and punishment as a cost-imposing strategy (punishers impair the violator’s capacity to harm the punisher or its genetic relatives). Through reviewing many examples of punishment in a wide range of taxa, we show that punishment is common among plant and animal species and that the two mechanisms we describe have often been important for the evolution of punishment.

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Notes

  1. We do not claim that the evolution of punishment was never influenced by the benefits resulting from the punishee modifying its behavior. Rather, looking at many diverse taxa, we argue that this was often not the case.

  2. In this article, the concept of action should be understood very broadly so as to apply to plants, bacteria, etc.

  3. Our reviewers objected that the notion of short-term fitness made no sense. However, first, whether or not this notion makes sense depends on how fitness is conceptualized. In particular, this notion makes perfect sense if fitness is conceptualized as a propensity (roughly, a probabilistic disposition to survive and reproduce), as many philosophers of biology have proposed (e.g., Beatty and Mills 1979) since the strength of this disposition can vary across time. Second, in using this notion we are simply following some evolutionary biologists’ discussion of punishment and cooperation (e.g., Bergmüller et al. 2007, 64; West et al. 2007a, R666; West et al. 2011, 235). Third, if the reader’s views about fitness are incompatible with the notion of short-term fitness, the notion of a decrease in short-term fitness may be replaced with the notion of immediate payoff loss. .

  4. Harassment (e.g., Gilby 2006 for harassment in chimpanzees) is thus not a form of punishment since the harassed individual (e.g., those chimpanzees that possess some food) did not cause any harm.

  5. This definition has the disadvantage to apply to some forms of conditional harming that do not count as punishment, such as defense against predators. We note that it is difficult to define punishment so as to include all actions that intuitive count as punishment and to exclude traits such as defense against predators.

  6. West et al. (2007b, 422) write that “[p]unishment can be selfish or altruistic (like cooperation) or even spiteful, and so without detailed analysis of particular situations, the word ‘punishment’ should not be given a prefix such as ‘altruistic’.” Punishment is altruistic when it reduces the long-term fitness of the actor, but increases the long-term fitness of other organisms, e.g., apparented organisms.

  7. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) obtained in December 2011 (http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov).

  8. Gardner and West (2004b, 754) are explicit that humans provide the prototype for this approach: “We discuss our model in terms of humans because this is where much of the recent theoretical literature has been focused. However, the implications are general and could be applied to a variety of organisms.”

  9. This very simple idea also can be extended to interactions in a larger group. See Hirshleifer and Rasmusen (1989) for a formal treatment.

  10. See West et al. (2007b) for a useful clarification of the distinction between direct and indirect benefits.

  11. Our reviewers noted that we did not discuss the possibility that the function of punishment is deterrence. The reason is that, for most of the cases considered in this article, deterrence is more likely to be a by-product of the evolution of punishment than its evolutionary function. That is, in these cases, after punishment evolved for a reason other than deterrence, punishees then evolved to modulate their behavior as a function of the capacity and likelihood of the victim of a violation to punish (Cant and Johnstone 2006). This scenario is likely because, for deterrence to be the function of punishment, the punishee would have had to be sufficiently behaviorally flexible to modulate their behavior in response to punishment. This is unlikely to be the case for most of the cases we consider in this article. (Recall that we do not discuss punishment among human beings).

  12. Soybeans do not always recognize the lineages of cheating rhibozia (Kiers et al. 2003, 79).

  13. The same is true of the cooperation between male and female cleaners that work in pairs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Social Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science, Nagoya University, Furocho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya, 464-8601, Japan

    Hisashi Nakao

  2. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 1017 CL, Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA

    Edouard Machery

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  1. Hisashi Nakao
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  2. Edouard Machery
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Correspondence to Edouard Machery.

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Nakao, H., Machery, E. The evolution of punishment. Biol Philos 27, 833–850 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-012-9341-3

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