Abstract
Much of the recent philosophical discussion about free will has been focused on whether compatibilists can adequately defend how a determined agent could exercise the type of free will that would enable the agent to be morally responsible in what has been called the basic desert sense (see, e.g., Pereboom in Living without free will, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001; Pereboom in Free will, agency, and meaning in life, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014; Strawson in Freedom and belief, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986; Strawson in Philos Stud 75(1):5–24, 1994; Fischer in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Four views on free will, Wiley, Hoboken, 2007; Vargas in Philos Stud, 144(1):45–62, 2009). While we agree with Derk Pereboom and others that the compatibilist’s burden should be properly understood as providing a compelling account of how a determined agent could be morally responsible in the basic desert sense, the exact nature of this burden has been rendered somewhat unclear by the fact that there has been no definitive account given as to what the basic desert sense of moral responsibility amounts to. In Sect. 1 we set out to clarify the compatibilist’s burden by presenting our account of basic desert moral responsibility—which we call retributivist desert moral responsibility for purposes of clarity—and explain why it is of central philosophical and practical importance to the free will debate. In Sect. 2 we employ a thought experiment to illustrate the kind of difficulty that compatibilists of any stripe are likely to encounter in attempting to explain how determined agents can exercise the kind of free will needed for retributivist desert moral responsibility.
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Notes
According to Thomas Scanlon, for instance, to blame an agent for an action is to judge that it reveals something about the agent’s attitudes toward oneself and/or others that impairs the relations that she can have with them, and to take one’s relationship with her to be modified in a way that this judgment of impaired relations justifies as appropriate (Scanlon 2009, 128–31). Derk Pereboom has argued that there is an epistemic or evidential interpretation of Scanlon that is perfectly consistent with free will skepticism (see 2012).
An additional advantage of our conception of retributive desert moral responsibility is that it is less likely to be clouded by earthly considerations of punishment and reward. There are many reasons for people to be opposed to retributivism in our Earthly criminal justice system that has nothing to do with the existence of moral responsibility per se (see Pereboom 2014 for examples). People might, for instance, be opposed to retributivism because they believe that in real life we will often end up punishing too harshly, or that innocent people will be punished, etc. Just like people might seem more compatibilist than they actually are when considering Earthly punishment, because they allow considerations of utility to sneak in, others might seem more incompatibilist than they actually are in the same context, because they allow Earthly problems with retributivism to influence their intuitions. Invoking an all-knowing judge in the afterlife solves both problems.
A similar link between the belief in free will and retributivist attitudes was suggested by the studies of Carey and Paulhus (2013). In the third of their studies, Carey and Paulhus presented two scenarios portraying serious crimes (child molestation and the rape of an adult woman) and tested the degree to which subjects’ attitudes towards punishment of the criminals would be impacted by factors including the criminal having been abused as a child and assurance that a medical procedure would prevent the criminal from ever perpetrating similar crimes again. The fact that subjects who expressed the strongest belief in free will were essentially the only group of subjects whose attitudes towards punishment were not mitigated by environmental or consequentialist considerations led the researchers to conclude that “free will belief is related to retributivist punishment” (2013, 138).
Studies 3 and 4 further found that exposure to neuroscientific findings implying a mechanistic basis for human action—in the form of having participants read popular-science articles (study 3) or take an introductory neuroscience class in college (study 4)—similarly produced a reduction in retributivism.
Waller denies that restorative free will is a revisionist account, but see Caruso (2016b) for why it is accurate to call it a form of revisionism.
Extending free will downward on the phylogenetic scale may have the effect of making us feel more connected to the rest of the living world and less special or unique, something Waller stresses, but these issues are really tangential to the historical debate and don’t cut one way or the other with regard to the debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists. In the spirit of fairness, however, Waller’s conception of free will—while not sufficient for desert-entailing moral responsibility and not related to what compatibilists and incompatibilists have disagreed about all along—may still be important when it comes to other issues. For example, whether animals have Waller-style free will may have moral implications for animal rights, etc. Nonetheless, we maintain that it would be problematic to understand the term “free will” along the lines suggested by Waller for the reasons provided in this essay (the term is not really relevant to the debates between compatibilists and incompatibilists, etc.). Given, however, that the capacities captured by Waller-style free will are relevant in terms of moral considerations, etc., we recommend that such capacities be noted by a term other than free will—perhaps something along the lines of “behavioral variability”.
While one may worry that the above diagram is too simplistic to serve the present purposes, we would counter that it effectively captures the relevant factors at play in a standardly conceived deterministic universe with regard to human decisions and actions. With this in mind, it is reasonable to expect that one could construct a more detailed diagram consisting of however many deterministic “gears” one wanted without altering either the general deterministic view of behavior depicted by our diagram or the relevant intuitions with regard to free will and moral responsibility that would be elicited by a diagram of this sort.
It is worth stressing here another advantage of using punishment in the afterlife but not eternal torment in hell (as Strawson does). It is possible that one might have generally compatibilist intuitions and yet recoil at the thought of punishing someone with eternal torment in hell. We cannot be certain, then, that if one does not believe that an agent who has committed a moral wrong deserves eternal torment, this is because they have incompatibilist intuitions. It might just as well be the case that they do not believe anyone should deserve that much torment. Letting the punishment in the afterlife include any difference in treatment between Maya and Marina, as our view does, solves this problem.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to send their sincere gratitude to Alfred Mele, Manuel Vargas, Bruce Waller, and two anonymous referees for the helpful feedback they provided during the writing of this essay.
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Caruso, G.D., Morris, S.G. Compatibilism and Retributivist Desert Moral Responsibility: On What is of Central Philosophical and Practical Importance. Erkenn 82, 837–855 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9846-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9846-2