Abstract
A familiar claim in the free will debate is that the freedom in dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists is limited to the type required for an agent to deserve blame for moral wrongdoing, and to deserve it in a sense that is basic. In this paper, I seek a rationale for this claim, offer an explanation of basic desert, and then argue that the free will debate can persist even when divorced from basic desert.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I restrict my attention to Scanlon’s view of responsibility set out in What We Owe to Each Other (1998). More recently, Scanlon has developed an intriguing desert thesis that differs from his earlier view (2008: 188–189). Nevertheless, the Scanlon of 1998 clearly counts as someone who, according to Pereboom, would be changing the subject in applying his account of responsibility to the free will problem.
This is similar to the retributivist thesis that Wallace rejects (see the quotation from Sect. 1).
Although it is an open question whether freedom is required. See, for example, Robert Adams’s paper “Involuntary Sins” (1985).
Other philosophers, like G. Strawson (1994), also operate under the assumption that we can discern from our moral responsibility practices a commitment to the notion of something like basic desert.
Note that Lenman does defend the thesis that a person can deserve to be blamed for wrongdoing. But on his view, the desert is not basic. It is, as Rawls (1971) might put it, a form of post-institutional desert. The desert itself as a normative basis for evaluating conduct is justified in more basic, contractualist terms.
References
Adams, Robert Merrihew. 1985. Involuntary Sins. Philosophical Review 94: 3–31.
Bennett, Christopher. 2002. The Varieties of Retributive Experience. Philosophical Quarterly 52 (201): 145–163.
Bok, Hilary. 1998. Freedom and Responsibility. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Clarke, Randolph. 2013. Some Theses on Desert. Philosophical Explorations 16: 153–164.
Feinberg, Joel. 1970. Doing and Deserving. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Feinberg, Joel. 1986. Harm to Others. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fischer, John Martin, and Mark Ravizza. 1998. Responsibility and Control: An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ginet, Carl. 1990. On Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Haji, Ishtiyaque. 1998. Moral Appraisability. New York: Oxford University Press.
Lenman, J. 2006. Compatibilism and Contractualism: The Possibility of Moral Responsibility. Ethics 117: 7–31.
Macnamara, Coleen. 2015. Reactive Attitudes as Communicative Entities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (3): 546–569.
McKenna, Michael. 2012. Conversation and Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.
McKenna, Michael. 2013a. Directed Blame and Conversation. In ed. D.J.Coates and N.A. Tognazzini, Vol. 2013, 119–140.
McKenna, Michael. 2013b. Reasons-Responsiveness, Agents, and Mechanisms. In Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 1, ed. David Shoemaker, 151–184. New York: OUP.
Mele, Alfred. 2006. Free Will and Luck. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pereboom, Derk. 2013. Free Will Skepticism, Blame, and Obligation. In ed. D. J.Coates and N. A. Tognazzini, Vol. 2013, 189–206.
Pereboom, Derk. 2014. Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pereboom, Derk, J.M. Fischer, R. Kane, and M. Vargas. 2001. Living Without Free Will. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pereboom, Derk, J.M. Fischer, R. Kane, and M. Vargas. 2007. Four Views on Free Will. Malden: Blackwell Press.
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sartorio, Carolina. 2016. Causation and Free Will. Oxford: OUP.
Scanlon, T.M. 1988. The Importance of Choice. In The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, ed. Sterling M. McMurrin, Vol. 8 149–216.
Scanlon, T.M. 1998. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scanlon, T.M. 2008. Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame. Cambridge: Belknap Harvard Press.
Scanlon, T.M. 2013. Giving Desert its Due. Philosophical Explorations 16: 101–116.
Schlick, Moritz. 1939. When is a Man Responsible? In Problems of Ethics, ed. Schlick, 143–156. Prentice-Hall. Reprinted in Berofsky, 1966: 54–62.
Shoemaker, David. 2015. Responsibility from the Margins. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smart, J.J.C. 1963. Free Will, Praise, and Blame. Mind 70: 291–306.
Strawson, Galen. 1994. The Impossibility of Moral Responsibility. Philosophical Studies 75: 5–24.
Strawson, P.F. 1962. Freedom and Resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 187–211.
van Inwagen, Peter. 2008. How to Think about the Problem of Free Will. Journal of Ethics 12 (3–4): 327–341.
Vargas, Manuel. 2013. Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press.
Vihvelin, Kadri. 2013. Causes, Laws, & Free Will: Why Determinism Doesn’t Matter. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wallace, R. Jay. 1994. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Watson, Gary. 1987. Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme. Schoeman 1987: 256–286.
Zimmerman, Michael J. 1988. An Essay on Moral Responsibility. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield.
Acknowledgements
For helpful comments, I would like to thank Dana Nelkin, Derk Pereboom, Carolina Sartorio, and Manuel Vargas.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
McKenna, M. The Free Will Debate and Basic Desert. J Ethics 23, 241–255 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-019-09292-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-019-09292-4