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Reasonable Pluralism about Desert-Presupposing Moral Responsibility: A Conditional Defense

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Notes

  1. Allen, W. (2005). Match Point. Home Entertainment.

  2. As Joel Feinberg has it, “To say that a person deserves something is to say that there is a certain sort of propriety in his having it," independent of any given institutional rules and independent of whether he in fact has it. See Feinberg, J. 1970. Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 56.


  3. Although everyone admits that determinism is a prima facie threat to our desert-presupposing responsible agency, many philosophers argue that this thought does not survive reflection, adopting some version of compatibilism. Compatibilists hold that moral responsibility and freedom are ultimately compatible with determinism. In addition to Strawson, whose compatibilist position is a focal point of what follows, see, e.g., Fischer, J. and Ravizza, M. (1998). Responsibility and Control. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Nelkin, D. (2011). Making Sense of Freedom and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford UP; Nahmias, E. Morris, S. Nadelhoffer, T., and Turner, J. (2006). “Is Incompatibilism Intuitive?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73(1): 28–53; Nahmias, E. and Murray, D. (2014). Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88(2), 434–467, and many others.

  4. On these questions, see: Kane (2014) “Quantum Physics, Action and Free Will: How Might Free Will be Possible in a Quantum Universe,” in Uwe Meixner & Antonella Corradini (eds.), Quantum Physics Meets the Philosophy of the Mind: New Essays on the Mind-Body Relation in Quantum-Theoretical Perspective.

  5. See, e.g., Nelkin, D. (2014). “Moral Responsibility, the Reactive Attitudes, and the Significance of (Libertarian) Free Will,” In Libertarian Free Will. Ed. David Palmer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 142–160; Pereboom, D. (2009). “Free Will, Love, and Anger.” Ideas y Valores: Revista de Colombiana de Filosofía, pp. 5–25; Pereboom, D. (2014). Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. Oxford: Oxford UP; Pereboom, D. (2014). “The Dialectic of Selfhood and the Significance of Free Will." Libertarian Free Will: Essays for Robert Kane, David Palmer, ed., New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 161–175; Shabo, S. (2012). "Incompatibilism And Personal Relationships: Another Look at Strawson's Objective Attitude". Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 90(1), 131–147; Kane, R. (1998). The Significance of Free Will. New York: Oxford UP, 1998; and Mele, A.R. (2006). Free Will and Luck. Oxford: Oxford UP.

  6. Tamlar Sommers arrives at a different conclusion. Given cultural differences about moral responsibility, he claims that the correct conclusion is a kind of metanormative skepticism about moral responsibility. For reasons beyond the scope of this paper, I take his inference from the fact of (even reasonable) disagreement to skepticism to be too quick. See Sommers, T. (2012). Relative Justice: Cultural Diversity, Free Will, and Moral Responsibility. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

  7. Strawson, op. cit., p. 79

  8. Wolf, S. (1981). "The Importance of Free Will." Mind, 90(359), 386–405.

  9. See, e.g., Sommers, T. (2007). "The Objective Attitude." The Philosophical Quarterly, 57(228), 321–34.

  10. Bok, H. (1998). Freedom and Responsibility, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 168–169

  11. Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, p. 187

  12. Pereboom, D. (2009). “Free Will, Love, and Anger.” Ideas y Valores: Revista de Colombiana de Filosofía, pp. 5–25.

  13. Pereboom, “The Dialectic of Selfhood,” p. 18.

  14. The distinction between the reactive attitudes and practices that presuppose and do not presuppose deservingness has been productively interrogated by Pereboom, who claims that we can blame one another even if we do not deserve anything. Blame, on this understanding, has the purpose of communicating to another caught in wrongdoing our attitude toward her quality of will. Any such reactive attitudes will be grounded in forward looking considerations, among them protection of potential victims, reconciliation with the moral community, and formation of moral character. See Pereboom, D. (2015). “A Notion Of Moral Responsibility Immune To The Threat From Causal Determination.” The Nature of Moral Responsibility, Randolph Clarke, Michael McKenna and Angela Smith, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Compare McKenna, M. (2011). Conversation and Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford UP.

  15. Sommers, “The Objective Attitude,” p. 326.

  16. Wolf, op. cit., p. 391.

  17. Saul Smilansky goes so far as to argue that incarceration and social isolation for forward-looking reasons involves inflicting undeserved suffering on the wrongdoer, which implies a duty to compensate her. He takes it that such a duty is a reductio against hard-incompatibilism. See: Smilansky, S. (2011). “Hard Determinism and Punishment: A Practical Reductio,” Law and Philosophy 30(3): 353–367; and Smilansky, S. (2017). “Pereboom on Punishment: Funishment, Innocence, Motivation, and Other Difficulties.” Criminal Law and Philosophy 11 (3): 591–603.

  18. Shabo, “Incompatibilism and Personal Relationships,” p. 139.

  19. Ibid., p. 143.

  20. Ibid. Compare Pereboom, “Free Will, Love, and Anger.”

  21. We might nevertheless experience “agent regret,” a sense of regret for being involved in wrongdoing, even faultlessly. On the rationality of agent regret, see: Sussman, D. (2018). “Is Agent Regret Rational?” Ethics, 788–808.

  22. I’m reminded of a course I took on modern philosophy as an undergraduate. We were reading Spinoza’s Ethics, and were coming along to the parts of the book where Spinoza says that every perception of evil is simply imperfect cognition. At this point, one of my classmates raised her hand and asked: “Is he really saying that there’s no evil—that everything we judge to be evil is so judged from a position of ignorance?” The professor confirmed that this was so. The student burst into tears and left the room in a hurry. To understand her response requires only imagining her to have been on the receiving end of some seriously unjust treatment. Her reaction was plausibly produced by entertaining that what she suffered her were mere happenings; that the persons she was holding to account could not be rightly held to account; that her normal sentimental responses were inapt; that, emotionally speaking, she was a poor fit for the world.

  23. One might object that if it’s true that our behavior really is determined in a way that renders guilt inappropriate, it makes little sense to speak of tolerating the resulting self-conceptions. They would, by hypothesis, be the appropriate ones (and we could do little to change that) and, in such a case, toleration of the self-conceptions makes little sense. I think this is wrong. I find it intolerable to live in a world where many human beings, often through no fault of their own, live in conditions of poverty and disease. The fact that I do inhabit such a world does not change my evaluation. Likewise, the fact that we might live in a world in which rational and reflective beings do not have a certain kind of agency might well be thought intolerable, even if that’s our world.

  24. Kane, The Significance of Free Will, p. 99

  25. Mele op. cit., p. 98

  26. Kane, op. cit., pp. 99–100

  27. Spinoza, B. (2002). Ethics. Trans. Samuel Shirley. Spinoza's Complete Works. Ed. Michael L. Morgan. Indianapolis: Hackett, II.P49.S.

  28. An anonymous referee draws my attention to Smilansky’s view that the entire free-will debate is biased toward optimism of the following kind. Parties to the debate tend to either (i) accept immediately that we will have to revise our practices and proceed very quickly to argue that the changes will leave the most important parts of our lives untouched; or (ii) deny that we will have to make changes and claim that therefore things will go on fine as before. The suggestion is that this optimism owes less to the merits of the case and more to what we want to believe. If this is right, then there is a danger that optimists underestimate the costs of the imagined changes. It’s hard to know whether this danger is stronger than the danger of too dearly valuing the status quo and overestimating the costs of reform. If it is, we should rationally discount some of the optimism about change expressed by Pereboom, Spinoza, and others of this disposition. If it is not, we should discount the pessimism about change expressed by Shabo, Wolff, and Strawson. See: Smilansky, S. (2010). “Free Will: Some Bad News,” in Action, Ethics and Responsibility. Ed. Joseph Keim Cambell, Michael O’Rourke, and Harry S. Silverstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 190–192.

  29. Rawls, J. (1993). Political Liberalism. New York, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 56.

  30. Ibid., p. 57

  31. One might worry that the employment of the burdens of judgment in the context of the significance question is unnecessary, since the burdens of judgment seem to apply directly to the justifiability of our desert presupposing practices. But notice: the whole business of trying to come to terms with the Significance Question is aimed at generating the conclusion that everyone ought to agree that these practices are justified—that we do not treat others unfairly when we subject them to sanctions under them, that this is so in part because giving the practices up and freeing those subject to them from them would leave their lives less significant by their own lights. My analysis here shows that this strategy is likely unsuccessful in resolving disagreement about the justifiability of the DPRPs.

  32. Strawson, op. cit., p. 83

  33. It is unclear what the relevant notion of inability is here. Following David Estlund, I suggest that the relevant notion is as follows: A is able to X if and only if “were she to try and not give up, she would succeed” (See Estlund, D. (2011). “Human Nature and the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, 39, no. 3, p. 212.) For those of us genuinely committed to the reactive attitudes, even if we were to try and not give up to abandon or disavow them, we would fail.

  34. Strawson, op. cit., pp. 81–83. Compare Shabo, S. (2011). “Where Love and Resentment Meet: Strawson's Intrapersonal Defense of Compatibilism.” The Philosophical Review, 121(1), 95–124. My interpretation presupposes that our inability to envision abandoning the reactive attitudes owes to their significance. Strawson suggests this when he says that it is because of our “natural human commitment to the reactive attitudes” that abandoning them due to a proposition affirming determinism is impossible (Strawson op. cit., p. 82). Of course, if the grounds of the impossibility lie elsewhere, then Strawson may still have a good argument against abandoning them.

  35. This presupposes a roughly cognitivist picture of attitudes like resentment. To subject someone to resentment entails, at least initially, believing that she is the appropriate target of such resentment. This is the kind of view that Pereboom defends. Indeed, he thinks that a proposal like this “should be acceptable to all parties,” for, “[w]hen a mature, normal human beings makes some agent the target of an overt expression of her genuine resentment or indignation, it’s at least close to psychologically impossible that she doesn’t also believe that the agent basically deserves to be blamed” (Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, p. 129). I’m less confident that such a cognitivist account will be acceptable to all parties; nevertheless, I think it is plausible, and, importantly, I think that Strawson would have accepted it.

  36. Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, p. 129.

  37. Ibid., pp. 129–130.

  38. Compare Smilansky, S. (2000). Free Will and Illusion. Oxford: Clarendon.

  39. As an anonymous referee points out, it also depends upon whether and to what degree “a modern society could actually work without belief in free will, moral responsibility and desert”. Facts about the significance of a practice to our lives, relationships, and sense of meaning do not exhaust the instrumental case that can be made in its favor.

  40. As with the previous argument, perhaps the lesson is that fictionalism is not a plausible position. But it’s also not obviously wrong, and it is one to which, philosophers seem increasingly to accept in practical domains (see e.g., Alfano, M. (2013). Character as Moral Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press.).

  41. Pace, M. (2011). “The Epistemic Value of Moral Considerations: Justification, Moral Encroachment, and James' ‘Will To Believe’”. Noûs, 45(2), 248.

  42. James, W. (1897). The Will to Believe. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York, Longmans Green and Co., p. 2.

  43. Pace, op. cit., p. 249.

  44. Jeremy Byrd presents for a case for agnosticism concerning moral responsibility. See: Byrd, J. (2010). “Agnosticism about moral responsibility.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 40(3): 411–432. It strikes me that agnosticism isn’t an option here. We either treat people like they’re morally responsible or we fail to do so.

  45. Surveying philosophers, experts on this question, provides additional reason for thinking that this question is not at present decideable on intellectual grounds. For only 12% of professional philosophers surveyed deny the existence of free will of one kind of another. Given that free will is commonly taken to be necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility, it would seem that the majority of philosophers believe that the evidence justifies a greater (probably significantly greater) than 50% chance that our DPRPs are justified. See Bourget, D., & Chalmers, D. (2013). What Do Philosophers Believe? Philosophical Studies.

  46. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to strengthen my argument on this point.

  47. Vilhauer, B. (2015). “Free Will And The Asymmetrical Justifiability Of Holding Morally Responsible.” Philosophical Quarterly 65(261), 772–289.

  48. Ibid., p. 775.

  49. Rudner, R. (1953). "The Scientist Qua Scientist Makes Value Judgments." Philosophy of Science, 20(1), 1–6.

  50. Nietzsche, F.W. (1998). On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic. Ed. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub, pp. 109–110

  51. See Rawls, op. cit., p. 137, p. 216.

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Correspondence to J. P. Messina.

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Thanks to Dana Nelkin for helpful feedback on this piece, for her support, and for encouraging me to pursue this project.

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Messina, J.P. Reasonable Pluralism about Desert-Presupposing Moral Responsibility: A Conditional Defense. J Value Inquiry 55, 189–208 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09746-1

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