ABSTRACT
Imagine the dilemma of an economist who just witnessed her six-year-old son Thomas smacking a younger child and wrenching his toy. Should she show him what it feels like to be smacked or is it preferable to try to reason with him? Corporal punishment has an unambiguous logic: at the risk of justifying barbarism, it renders violence an inappropriate means of satisfying Thomas’s ends provided he comes to expect a smack every time he hits another child. By contrast, the strategy of reasoning with the little rascal seems more enigmatic.
