When will is not the same as should: The role of modals in reasoning with legal conditionals

Abstract

Naïve reasoners reject logically valid conclusions from conditional rules if they can think of exceptions in which the antecedent is true, but the consequent is not. However, when reasoning with legal conditionals (e.g., “If a person kills another human, then this person should be punished for manslaughter”) people hardly consider exceptions but evaluate conclusions depending on their own sense of justice. We show that participants’ reluctance to consider exceptions in legal reasoning depends on the modal auxiliary used. In two experiments we phrased legal conditionals either with the modal “should” (i.e., “ . . . then this person should be punished”), or with “will” (i.e., “ . . . then this person will be punished”) and presented them as modus ponens or modus tollens inferences. Participants had to decide whether the offender should or will be punished (modus ponens) or whether the offender indeed committed the offence (modus tollens). For modus ponens inferences phrased with “should” we replicate previous findings showing that participants select conclusions on the basis of their own sense of justice (Experiments 1 and 2). Yet, when the legal conditional is phrased with the modal “will” this effect is attenuated (Experiments 1 and 2), and exceptions are considered (Experiment 1). The modal auxiliary did not affect modus tollens inferences.

Keywords:

• Conditionals
• Reasoning
• Modals
• Legal reasoning

Notes

¹Strictly speaking, for deontic conditionals instances of p and ¬q are not exceptions, but violations (e.g., Beller, 2008, 2010). If somebody kills somebody else but is not punished, this can be considered a violation of the manslaughter rule, for instance when the lack of punishment is due to malpractice. However, for legal conditionals this is not always the case. Penal code includes several instances that actually permit cases of p and ¬q. For instance, if somebody is not punished for manslaughter because of self-defence, it is not a violation to the manslaughter rule, but an exception. Given this peculiarity of legal conditionals, and in order to facilitate readability, in this paper we use the word “exception” for both factual and deontic conditionals.

²Standardized mean differences (d) were computed as described by Borenstein (2009).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by DFG grants [grant number KN 465/10-1], [grant number KN 465/10-2] to Markus Knauff within the DFG Priority Program “New Frameworks of Rationality” (SPP1516).