Abstract
In recent decades, participants in the debate about whether we are free and responsible agents have tended with increasing frequency to begin their papers or books by fixing the terms “free” and “responsible” in clear ways to avoid misunderstanding. This is an admirable development, and while some misunderstandings have certainly been avoided, and positions better illuminated as a result , new and interesting questions also arise. Two ways of fixing these terms and identifying the underlying concepts have emerged as especially influential, one that takes the freedom required for responsibility to be understood in terms of accountability and the other in terms of desert . In this paper, I start by asking: are theorists talking about the same things, or are they really participating in two different debates? Are desert and accountability mutually entailing? I tentatively conclude that they are in fact mutually entailing. Coming to this conclusion requires making finer distinctions among various more specific and competing accounts of both accountability and desert. Ultimately, I argue, that there is good reason to accept that accountability and desert have the same satisfaction conditions.
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Notes
David Shoemaker argues for a tripartite distinction between attributability, answerability, and accountability. But his account of accountability resembles Watson’s in at least key ways. As he puts it, “…to be accountable for something is to be liable to being appropriately held to account for it, which is to be eligible for a range of fitting responses with a built-in confrontational element.” (Shoemaker 2015: 87) Those fitting responses include agential anger, which includes “action tendencies to revenge or retribution (communicated as such).” (Shoemaker 2015: 90) See also Fischer and Tognazzini (2011) for a fine-grained cataloging of notions of attributability and accountability.
For example, Shoemaker acknowledges that he has not discussed desert. But he argues that this is not problematic because questions about desert will concern moral questions about harsh treatment that arise after questions about responsibility (including accountability) have already been answered. (Shoemaker 2015: 222) Michael McKenna also raises the question of desert only after offering and defending a detailed conversational theory of accountability in McKenna (2012: Chapters 1–5). At that point, he defends the consistency of a basic desert thesis with his account of accountability, but does not see it as required. (McKenna 2012: 171–172)
At the same time, I am happy to acknowledge that the word “desert” is used in a number of ways even in debates about free will and moral responsibility. Sometimes it seems to be used interchangeably with “appropriate”, for example, and it is important to recognize this. It may be that blame in general is deserved in the broader sense of “desert”—that is, that it is appropriate—while only some species of blame are deserved in the narrower sense I identify in the text.
Here I use “sanction” to refer to an intentional setting back of a person’s interests as a response to wrongdoing.
This view is similar to the principle that Joel Feinberg calls “Fault Forfeits First.” (Feinberg 1970a, b) According to that principle, “[i]f someone must suffer, it is better, ceteris paribus, that it be the faulty than the meritorious.” (Feinberg 1970b: 218) It is not clear that Feinberg intends “the faulty” to be equated with “the deserving” in the context of his discussion of torts, and in this way his principle is different from the view described in the text. Further, the account of the object of desert that I have elaborated above is a broader category than suffering, and the view I set out is framed in terms of reasons rather than primarily about what it is better to do. But there is a common core idea. Richard Arneson motivates the principle in (Arneson 2006) and in (forthcoming), where he explicitly equates “fault” and “culpability.” Kagan (2012) presents the principle, as well, and explores in both graphic and prose form a variety of views that incorporate it. He also assumes at the start that people getting what they deserve is intrinsically valuable; importantly, in contrast, on the view I present above, there is no entailment or assumption of this further thesis.
(2)–(5) and (CR) are all deontological theses in that they concern having reasons, permissibility, and obligation. Another thesis that is neither axiological nor obviously deontological might be added to the list, namely: (6) X’s being deserving of sanction provides a necessary condition for justified sanction. If we understand that X’s being deserving serves as a necessary part of the justification of sanction, then it is a stronger variant of (2). Since I argue against (2) in the text, those arguments will also apply to (6). However, we could understand (6) such that being deserving is not any part of the justification itself, but only a necessary condition thereof. It is difficult to understand how this would be. But for all I have said, this is a possibility I have not ruled out.
Showing that we accept that an important thesis is entailed by the possession of desert even as we reject these others might help us to understand some philosophers’ reluctance to accept the existence of desert at all. T. M. Scanlon, notably, once rejected it altogether. In his most recent work (Scanlon 2013), he accepts what he describes as a limited desert thesis (so that it can justify reactive attitudes and withdrawal of good will and participation in relationships, but not anything like institutional punishment). But even here I think the limitation depends on his having assumed that desert provides a justification. I am also not entirely sure that Scanlon thinks that what is deserved must be harmful, as opposed to simply typically harmful, say. And, relatedly, I am not sure that ultimately what Scanlon is really acknowledging as desert is desert rather than a more general sort of fittingness. It is hard to judge this since desert is not analyzable. But one potentially discriminating test is whether what is claimed to be deserved is harmful or beneficial, as opposed to simply “appropriate”. The key point for Scanlon is that a person’s actions make such responses appropriate simply by what he or she does. And this is not obviously desert, as opposed to a more general, or other, kind of fittingness.
See Watson (1996).
See Nelkin (forthcoming) for a survey of accounts of the nature of blame.
An important notion of forgiveness is then the flip side of blame on this understanding. It is centrally the release by the victim of the offender from obligations to the victim.
Alternatively, emphasizing other aspects of Watson’s particular account of accountability, we could think of it as being liable to the consequences backing the legitimate demands that constitute one’s accountability. Degrees of blameworthiness refer to the degree of severity of appropriate consequences in question—degree of strength of the reactive attitudes that are appropriate, degree of unwelcome or adverse treatment. I prefer the approach in the text, but recognize this as an alternative that could also secure the reconciliation of desert and accountability.
As noted in note 3, it would seem that Shoemaker (and possibly McKenna) would take issue with Watson here, despite other similarities in their accounts of accountability. (Shoemaker 2015: 220–224) But perhaps an apparent disagreement could be resolved if we read Watson as speaking of non-basic desert, or at least as being open to whether desert is basic or not. Relatedly, I believe that Manuel Vargas would be open to a neutral reading of “desert” (see Vargas 2015: 666–671).
Pereboom argues for a view that is similar in some ways: “[on] the view that seems most plausible to me, the attitudes of moral resentment and indignation include the following two components: anger targeted at an agent because of what she's done or failed to do, and a belief that the agent deserves to be the target of that anger just because of what she has done or failed to do.” (Pereboom 2014: 128)
Alternatively, one might agree that the reactive attitudes presuppose desert without agreeing that they presuppose basic desert. Perhaps Vargas would be open to this thesis. (see Vargas 2015)
The account also has the advantage of capturing the most plausible parallels between moral and legal accountability (Brink and Nelkin 2013).
One might take it that the opportunity to act well is not related to desert, but is an additional condition for fairness of imposing sanctions. This is a logical possibility that would need to be ruled out, but I think that the most natural role for such a condition is via desert.
See Eshelman (2014) for a defense of this kind of position.
This is the option I prefer. It is important to note that Matt King (2014) rejects a notion of accountability praise and takes this to be a significant cost of the view that takes accountability to be associated with desert in a way that makes it an adequate theory of responsibility. While I recognize the challenge, I part ways with King’s subtle approach in several ways: (1) if it can be shown that blameworthiness in the accountability sense and desert of sanction have the same satisfaction conditions, then we have at least a positive reason to seek an adequate counterpart to blame in the accountability sense for a stance of praise, even if it does not parallel that for blame on every dimension; (2) While King takes it that “desert as fairness” offers at least an initially promising way to understand blameworthiness in the accountability sense, I think that desert here is not basic, and I have argued that desert and fairness come apart (see Nelkin 2013c); (3) I do not assume that accountability purports to be the theory of responsibility.
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Nelkin, D.K. Accountability and Desert. J Ethics 20, 173–189 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9230-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9230-0