Date: December 9, 2025 (Tuesday)

Time: 2pm – 3pm

Venue: Room 723, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong

Speaker: Vincent Chiao, Professor, Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law, University of Toronto

The instinct to blame, resent, and punish norm violations is deeply engrained in human nature. While the norms vary widely, it is difficult to imagine a society that did not respond to violations of the normative order with some form of condemnatory response. Moreover, it is unclear whether such a society would amount to a utopia of unconditional empathy or a dystopia of selfish indifference. After all, the retributive sentiments are tightly bound up with recognizing each other as subject to normative expectations in the first place. 

I have three objectives in this paper. First, I show how the characteristic moral psychology of the retributive sentiments—retrospective, non-calculating, and impersonal—emerges from their role in stabilizing cooperation in informal contexts. Second, I contrast their role as decentralized mechanisms of norm enforcement with that of centralized institutions. Because institutions do not rely on the retributive sentiments to prevent free riding, formal social orders are freer to adopt forward-looking, instrumental approaches to cooperation. This explains the perennial tension between the moral logic of retribution and the more utilitarian logic of criminal justice. Finally, I sketch some of the complex ways in which formal and informal social orders interact. 

Vincent Chiao, B.A. (University of Virginia), Ph.D. (Northwestern), J.D. (Harvard), researches and teaches primarily in the area of criminal law and criminal justice, with a particular interest in the philosophical examination of its doctrine and institutions. He is the author of Criminal Law in the Age of the Administrative State (Oxford University Press 2018). 

Moderator: Peter Chau, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong

To register, please visit https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=103605.

For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at  / 3917 4727.