Behavioral Economics
The Drama of the Reluctant Executioner
Third-party punishment can be motivated by moral dudgeon, but also by fear.
Updated December 13, 2025 Reviewed by Margaret Foley
Key points
- A person who punishes a social defector is a third-party punisher.
- Fourth parties are often ready to punish a third party who fails to punish.
- The captivity tale of Cervantes, the author of "Don Quixote," involves a third-party punishment dilemma.
In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd. ―Cervantes
The recent Spanish–Italian movie El Cautivo (The Captive) tells the tale of Miguel de Cervantes’s five-year captivity in Algiers in the 1580s. Cervantes had been captured at sea, and he was held for ransom with other Spanish nobles and men of means. His captors fail to realize that no one would put up the ransom they ask, and so Cervantes languishes in the Qasbah—with a view of the Mediterranean Sea but no freedom. His attempts to escape fail.
Gradually, Cervantes discovers his talent for storytelling. This brings him respect, but also jealousy, from fellow captives, and it attracts the attention of Hasan Bey, the Italian-born satrap of Sultan Murad III, his overlord in Constantinople. The key to the movie’s appeal is the developing relationship between Miguel and Hasan, with a homoerotic element that is being disputed by some pedantic historians. Nonetheless, the men grow close, and Hasan tries to seduce Miguel with promises of luxuries and a curated form of freedom.
When an attempt to escape fails and fellow captives betray Cervantes, Hasan Bey faces a dilemma: Execute Cervantes or risk exposing himself to Sultan Murad’s wrath. Hasan is caught in the executioner’s dilemma.
Before continuing, let us not forget that the Cervantes episode is but a convenient illustration of a deeper and more general dilemma. A person (here: Hasan) may find himself pressured to don the mantle of a third-party punisher. If he fails to punish a malefactor, he himself may become the object of retribution or be made an example. This can happen to any Hasan-like character at the hands of fourth parties, such as a higher-up boss, an angry mob, or moralists with an X account. Hasan is the example du jour. Famously, Pontius Pilate found himself in a similar predicament, but movie characters carry less metaphysical baggage.
Third-party punishment has become a popular topic of research in behavioral economics and moral psychology (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). Conventionally, the third-party punisher is cast as a noble enforcer, a person willing to pay a price for the sake of upholding norms of cooperation, and thus the fabric of society. Hobbes (1651) anticipated the need for third-party punishment in modern society—and the futility of delegating the threat of retribution to the metaphysical plane—and therein grounded modern political science.
The would-be third-party punisher may not feel noble; instead, he may be keenly aware of being pressured into this role. The dilemma is not just one of material costs but also of the reputational consequences. Let’s take a closer look. In the preference matrix shown below, the Agent (Hasan) is the row player, the would-be third-party punisher. The monitoring overlord (Sultan Murad) is the column player. Each player has two strategies at their disposal, a punitive one and a compassionate one. Note that Hasan might punish Cervantes, whereas Murad might punish Hasan for not punishing Cervantes. There are thus four possible outcomes at the intersections of the two sets, which can be ranked from the most (4) to the least (1) preferred. Within each cell, Hasan’s preferences are on the left and Murad’s on the right.
Hasan wishes most to deal with a compassionate Murad, while the sultan wants his lieutenant Hasan to do his punitive duty. Their preferences are misaligned at r = -.26. If Hasan knew Murad would punish him, he himself would punish Cervantes; if he knew Murad to be lenient, he too would be lenient. Murad, in contrast, does not play tit-for-tat. If Hasan punishes Cervantes, he will be lenient with Hasan; if Hasan shows mercy, Murad’s response will be punitive.
Hasan’s dilemma is poignant because it offers no dominating strategy, and the game cannot settle into an equilibrium (Krueger et al., 2020). Recall that a dominating strategy is one that yields a better payoff than its alternative regardless of the other player’s strategy. An equilibrium is a combination of strategies that leaves no incentive to either player to switch strategy. As the preference matrix shows, the joint outcomes in each cell are unstable because there is always one player who can do better by switching strategy; then the other player has an incentive to switch, and so on, ad infinitum.
What is Hasan to do, lacking an optimal and conventionally rational decision rule? Hasan can look to heuristics, simple rules of thumb that yield better results than throwing darts or acting out of despair (Gigerenzer, 2021; Krueger, 2014). Being prudent, Hasan may ask which strategy will protect him from the worst outcome. Hence, he could choose to punish Cervantes and be sure to avoid Murad’s wrath. Having chosen punishment, he can expect Murad to be compassionate so that the two players will settle into the upper right cell of the outcome matrix. Murad gets what he wants most, and Hasan at least gets his second-best.
Recall that this outcome is not at equilibrium. Hasan now has to resist the temptation to defect from Murad and forgive Cervantes. This should be achievable if Hasan has the gift of prospective cognition. The movie plot is instructive, telling us that Hasan finds a solution by creatively challenging the constraints of the game. He commutes Cervantes’s sentence from death by impalement to the comparatively gentle death by hanging. He has Cervantes strung up, waits until his apparent death, and then has the rope cut. “Enough!” he shouts. Cervantes lives, Hasan releases him to Spain, and Don Quixote becomes the greatest novel of all time.
Sultan Murad's ultimate response is neither known nor relevant. What matters is how a would-be third-party punisher resolves the dilemma. Game theory can help to shed light. It acknowledges uncertainty, but it is not meant to eliminate it. Hasan, it may be noted with a lukewarm injection of humor, finds himself in a quixotic situation.
References
Captive, The (2025 film).
Fehr, E. & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment and social norms. Evolution & Human Behavior, 25, 63–87.
Gigerenzer, G. (2021). Axiomatic rationality and ecological rationality. Synthese, 198, 3547–3564.
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan. Andrew Crooke.
Krueger, J. I. (2014). Heuristic game theory. Decision, 1, 59-61.
Krueger, J. I., Heck, P. R., Evans, A. M., & DiDonato, T. E. (2020). Social game theory: Preferences, perceptions, and choices. European Review of Social Psychology, 31, 322-353.
