Episode 13: Beanballs, Blood Feuds, and Collective Moral Responsibility (With Fiery Cushman)

Our classiest episode yet (OK, that's not saying much, but still...)--Psychologist Fiery Cushman joins us for a discussion about collective punishment and collective responsibility. We use Fiery's recent paper on the practice of "beaning" in baseball (punishing one player for a teammate's offense by throwing a 95 MPH fastball at the player's head) to illustrate the phenomenon. Is the "innocent" player being punished because he is somehow morally responsible for his teammate's offense? Or does deserve have nothing to do with it? Also in this episode: listener feedback (sort of, we're just psyched to have a Norwegian stand-up comic as a listener), and Fiery solves the 3,000 year-old problem of moral responsibility just so he can get out of Dave's hotel room.

Links

• Fiery Cushman [brown.edu]
• Beanball [wikipedia.org]
• Hatfield-McCoy Blood Feud [wikipedia.org]
• Major League (1989) [imdb.com]
• Revenge: A story of hope, by Laura Blumenfeld
• Blood Revenge, by Christopher Boehm
• "The Two Faces of Revenge: Moral Responsibility and the Culture of Honor." T Sommers.
• "John Kruk and Desert." [Flickers of Freedom blog post]

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