Abstract
Derek Parfit has recently defended the view that no one can ever deserve to suffer. Were this view correct, its implications for the thorny problem of the justification of punishment would be extraordinary: age-old debates between consequentialists and retributivists would simply vanish, as punishment would only—and simply—be justifiable along Benthamite utilitarian lines. I here suggest that Parfit’s view is linked to uncharacteristically weak arguments, and that it ought to be rejected.
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Notes
Derek Parfit, On What Matters, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011). (Further references to this book will appear as parentheticals in the main body of the text). The enthusiasm transcended the confines of academia: see Larissa MacFarquhar “How to be Good”, The New Yorker, (Sept 5 2011) 42–53.
Whatever else can be contentious about punishment, the fact that, purely as a conceptual matter, it seeks to inflict suffering is beyond dispute. See H.L.A. Hart, Punishment and Responsibility, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2008), 4 ff. As we shall see, for current purposes, “suffering” can remain relatively unanalyzed, meaning something akin to “hard treatment”, “pain”, “unpleasantness”, and even to (Parfit’s) “being less happy”.
For problems with the Benthamite view see Leo Zaibert, Punishment and Retribution, Aldershot: Ashgate (2006).
Joel Feinberg, Doing and Deserving, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1970): 61.
For ease of exposition, unless otherwise noted, whenever I refer to Parfit’s views on the possibility of deserving to suffer, I shall include, following him, the possibility of “deserving to be less happy” as well.
Shelly Kagan, The Geometry of Desert, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2012): 12.
Shelly Kagan, op. cit., 13.
See, for example, the famous results of the Yale University’s Infant Cognition Center (http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kw77/Publications.html), which suggest that even preverbal infants may recognize wrongdoers, and seek to make them “less happy”.
Do notice, however, that Parfit recognizes that punishment can be justified by attending to values other than desert—say, by its fairness (II, 649–651); but he apparently thinks that matters are different in Hell.
To the extent that it is intelligible, the view that no one can deserve perpetual suffering is much more plausible than Parfit’s: for it is hard to imagine how anyone could deserve any treatment for all eternity. See Jonathan Bennett’s famous criticism of Jonathan Edwards’ theology in his “The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn”, Philosophy 49 (1974): 123–134.
It takes effort to see how someone who ex hypothesi believes (X) (or indeed the first part of (Y)) can also believe (Y) without thereby already being a dogmatic obscurantist—for it would be very hard to understand what, given her endorsement of (Y) she could possibly mean by “just” in (X).
Parfit finds Williams’s dismissal of intrinsic value “inexplicable” (II, 434–435). While Williams does indeed sometimes appear to dismiss the notion, other times he does not. Examples of the latter position can be found in his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London: Routledge (2006), 182, and in his “A Critique of Utilitarianism”, J.J.C. Smart and Bernard Williams, Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1973), 83.
Surely there are differences between the suffering involved in mourning and the suffering involved in regretting, and between the suffering involved in agent-regret and the suffering involved in being punished (by someone else). But for current purposes it is enough to underscore that these are all cases of suffering.
Not all skeptics about desert agree. More daring souls believe that if we could invent a pill, a moral anesthetic, that would prevent, among other things, mourners from suffering, this would be a great invention. See the recent exchange between Douglas Husak, Victor Tadros, and Leo Zaibert, in which Tadros praises such a pill (Law and Philosophy 32 (2013): 3–31, 33–58, and 241–325).
Of course, the assumption here—shared by Parfit and by me—is that those who do not mourn their loved ones exhibit callous indifference. Perhaps an enlightened Buddhist, for example, can come to see that mourning loved ones is clingy and egotistical. But, like everyone else, Buddhists must nonetheless recognize a difference between callous indifference and enlightenment.
Again, the shared assumption is that what repulses us is that the driver is callously indifferent, not that he is somehow extraordinarily enlightened.
Williams’ view was precisely that there is something beyond the “morality system”, something not fully captured by what he thought were the overly “narrow” categories of praise and blame, and desert, which explains the appropriateness of the suffering, via agent-regret, of the blameless driver.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1993): 260–261.
Moore, op. cit., 262.
Moore, op. cit., 264.
Kant’s understanding of happiness was not hedonistic. But, following Parfit, I shall here ignore this point.
Notice how the specter of the earlier contradiction reappears: Parfit here sounds like a skeptic about desert in general.
For problems with humanitarian justifications of punishment see Michael Moore, Placing Blame, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1997): 85–87.
W. D. Ross, The Right and the Good, Oxford: Clarendon Press (2002): xl.
Ross, op. cit., 138.
Ross, op. cit., 138.
Moore, op. cit., 221.
Moore, op. cit., 221–222. For discussion see Zaibert, op. cit., 208–216.
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Mary MacGregor (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2006): 7. This is hardly the hedonistic Kant Parfit sometimes depicts.
The early contradiction (Parfit allegedly being a skeptic only about deserved suffering, but also about desert in general) reappears yet again.
Acknowledgments
I began writing this article during the Fall of 2013, while I was the H. L. A. Hart Visiting Fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Ethics and the Philosophy of Law. The Centre’s support is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due too to the Department of Philosophy at SUNY Binghamton for inviting me to present (on March 21 2014) an earlier version of the article, and to the following colleagues: Felmon Davis, Stuart Green, Douglas Husak, Ingvar Johansson, Whitley Kaufman, John Kekes, Ambrose Lee, Antoine Panaïoti, Anna Schur, Barry Smith, and Mark Wunderlich.
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Zaibert, L. On the Matter of Suffering: Derek Parfit and the Possibility of Deserved Punishment. Criminal Law, Philosophy 11, 1–18 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9360-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-014-9360-z