The Effect Of Authority On Punishable Harm Judgment

Each of us will suffer from physical or mental harm. A lot of people think it is wrong to deliberately harm others, but there are also some people think that harming others is reasonable in some cases. For example, medical treatment, self-defense, etc. The harm with different kinds exists in life, according to the motives and causes of the harm.The harm can be divided into simple harm and complex harm. People’s judgment to harm are also different, someone think it is moral, some think it is immoral, there may be disagreement about what qualifies as an adequate justification for harm (Gert,2004). When a person makes mistake and to be punished, most people tend to relax their condemnation. But how exactly do people balance wrongness and the causation of pain or suffering in their judgments of punishable harm? Could the sanction or proscription of a recognized authority or authority figures make a difference in these judgments?From philosophy, authority is invisible, intangible, not a physical existence, but it is an objective existence of the relationship, which will obey the relationship between the receiver and exerter (Yuan,2010). According to the conventional understanding, authority is either as convincing power and prestige or most prestige and status people or things in a certain range (Modern,2012). Authority is everywhere in our lives, but it is not the same as power, it is natural product in the process of development of society. Existing research shows that the influence on the judgment of the authority in any of the harm are also different. Sousa, Holbrook,& Piazza (2009) found that there was no significant influence on the judgment of the authority to punishable harm involving injustice and rights violations, that is, the subjects that punishable harm is authority independently and universally applicable. Piazza, Sousa,& Holbrook (2013) found to authority having significant influence on the judgment of the utilitarian harm with the new method, under the condition of the authority prohibiting and prescribing, more participants depending authority to judge. Comprehensive authority and punishable harm associated with the study, we put forward a new point of view that it have a significant influence on the judgment of the authority of the punishable harm, but when the consequences of a serious mistake behavior, not depending authority to judge. This article will use the research methods by Piazza et al, increasing the boundary conditions on the basis of study by Sousa et al. This article will examine authority to the influence of the punishable harm judgment from the angle of authority.This article uses the form of experimental study, college students as subjects, and designing three experiments to examine the judgment of punishable harm under different conditions of the authority (whether harm behavior is right or wrong according to the authority rules). It asked participants to judge the behavior right or wrong in the first experiment, an officers punishing a soldier who was dereliction in the military authority conditions (prohibited vs. prescribed).The second experiment established a boundary condition with regard to the influence of authority, which was the soldier’s negligence leading the definetely serious consequences rather than predictablly serious consequences, and asked participants to judge the behavior right or wrong. Finally, the third experiment replicated the findings of the first and the second experiment in a completely different context---a primary school teacher punishing a student who make mistakes under the condition of the domestic law and the authority of the principal.The study got the following conclusions:(1) Authority condition has a significant effect on the punishable harm with the definite and undefinite consequences of error behavior., namely, compared to condition of the prohibiting, the more participants under the condition of prescribing make judgment of right to punishable harm behavior, the less participants make judgment of wrongness to punishable harm behavior.(2) Boundary condition that the consequence of the error behavior is sure does not significant on the judgment of punishable harm.