islam is a religion of mercy, but someone has blamed it as a   religion of violence. one reason for this accusation is frequency of words which referred to the suffering in the quran. the expressions referred to the punishment in the qur'an have some deferent meaning, such as: warning, as a traditional action for god, clarifying the sins which caused punishments in the day of judgment, and...

This paper provides a sketch of a contractarian approach to punishment, according to a version of contractarianism one might call “rational contractarianism,” by contrast with the normative contractarianism of John Rawls. Rational contractarianism suggests a model according to which rational agents, with maximal, rather than minimal, knowledge of their life circumstances, would agree to the out...

In this experimental study we analyse three collective and one individual punishment rule in a public good setting. We show that under all punishment rules cooperation is stronger and more sustainable than reported from settings without punishment. Moreover, we present evidence and explanations for differences between the rules concerning punishment intensity, contribution and profit levels, as...

We report evidence from public goods experiments with and without punishment which we conducted in Russia with 566 urban and rural participants of young and mature age cohorts. Russia is interesting for studying voluntary cooperation because of its long history of collectivism, and a huge urban-rural gap. In contrast to previous experiments we find no cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment....

We report evidence from public goods experiments with and without punishment which we conducted in Russia with 566 urban and rural participants of young and mature age cohorts. Russia is interesting for studying voluntary cooperation because of its long history of collectivism, and a huge urban-rural gap. In contrast to previous experiments we find no cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment....

The fact that many people take it upon themselves to impose costly punishment on free riders helps to explain why collective action sometimes succeeds despite the prediction of received theory. But while individually imposed sanctions lead to higher contributions in public goods experiments, there is usually little or no net efficiency gain from them, because punishment is costly and at times m...

Humans everywhere cooperate in groups to achieve benefits not attainable by individuals. Individual effort is often not automatically tied to a proportionate share of group benefits. This decoupling allows for free-riding, a strategy that (absent countermeasures) outcompetes cooperation. Empirically and formally, punishment potentially solves the evolutionary puzzle of group cooperation. Nevert...