Can basic desert and retributivism be justified under Compatibilism?

Captain Homicide

From my research into the topic of free will I can support Compatibilism and the idea that the kind of free will worth wanting is where you’re free to act on your desires. Despite this I’m having difficulty understanding the moral responsibility and punishment part espoused by the likes of Daniel Dennett specifically the idea that people genuinely deserve to be punished for doing wrong for reasons other than deterrence, rehabilitation and incapacitation.

I read and watched Dennett’s discussion with Gregg Caruso about free will and Dennett often speaks about the “Moral Agents Club” and how if you want to live in a society and enjoy its benefits you have to be held morally responsible in a similar sense that people play by rules in a game and by doing so subject themselves to punishment when they make a mistake or lose. He uses the analogy of getting a red card in soccer. It has to work that way otherwise the “game” of society collapses and ceases to function properly. At the same time Dennett rejects backwards looking basic desert and retributivism. Overall Dennett’s view seems more a matter of practicality than what laymen truly mean when they say someone who has done evil things deserves to be punished or express satisfaction when something bad happens to a wrongdoer. To quote someone else desert without retribution is just another name for attribution but we don't need the concept of free will for attribution. When someone says a serial killer should be executed or it’s good that a villain gets killed by the hero in an action film they almost certainly don’t mean it in Dennett’s red card/Moral Agents Club sense. They mean that the person genuinely deserves to be punished for its own sake regardless of society’s laws or some imaginary social contract. To them it doesn’t matter if an evil person was punished in a normal society by a court or in a barren desert by a vigilante. Moral desert is moral desert in whatever context. Immanuel Kant used the example of a murderer being executed on a desert island once the society has dissipated and the citizens go their separate ways.

With all of this in mind are there any sound non consequentialist arguments for basic desert and punishment under Compatibilism or are the ideas simply too irreconcilable to be held simultaneously?

Are there any good sources on the matter that can help me understand the issue?

Cuthbert

good sources on the matter — Captain Homicide

I suggest Peter van Inwagen's anti-compatibilist argument that determinism entails no-free-will; but compatibilism entails both determinism and free will; so compatibilism is false. He tries to show that if you can attribute moral responsibility, then you have to reject compatibilism. Obviously lots to unpick and challenge. This looks ok - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DarUujNrgY

I would also suggest running the arguments against intuitions about credit as well as blame. There are red cards in soccer and courts issue punishments. There are also goals, distinctions in exam results and awards for bravery. Are the accounts that eliminate the concept 'desert' just as plausible in the case of credit?

Haglund

Free will has to be deterministic. If not, it's a free will subject to the whims of chance, which could be free I guess, but it would be an undetermined free will. One of pure chance. Who feels their actions determined by physical forces? Only if you consider yourself apart from them this could be the case.

Cuthbert

..it would be an undetermined free will. One of pure chance. — Haglund

That is true if 'determined' and 'pure chance' are exclusive and exhaustive categories. But a separate argument would be needed to establish that. For some X, X is determined. For some X, X is [the result of] pure chance. Let's grant those two premisses. We now need to make sure that (a) there is no Y such that Y is neither determined nor the result of pure chance; and (b) there is no Y such that Y is both determined and the result of pure chance. The libertarian argument is that (a) is not established. Free action is neither determined (by prior physical causes); nor is it the result of pure chance, because the actor can (at least sometimes) give reasons for action and is subject to no whims but their own. The claim is that the categories are not exhaustive. There is a third category - free action. Which is the very subject of dispute.

Joshs

↪Captain Homicide

are there any sound non consequentialist arguments for basic desert and punishment under Compatibilism or are the ideas simply too irreconcilable to be held simultaneously?

Are there any good sources on the matter that can help me understand the issue? — Captain Homicide

Doesnt P.F. Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment lay out a non-consequentialist compatibilist notion of desert?

https://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/P._F._Strawson_Freedom_&_Resentment.pdf

Haglund

↪Cuthbert

What's Y? Say in the context of a face of a die, X?

Joshs

↪Captain Homicide

Overall Dennett’s view seems more a matter of practicality than what laymen truly mean when they say someone who has done evil things deserves to be punished or express satisfaction when something bad happens to a wrongdoer. To quote someone else desert without retribution is just another name for attribution but we don't need the concept of free will for attribution. — Captain Homicide

Caruso and Morris agree with you:

“We contend that the concept of just deserts is inconsistent with Dennett’s reformed consequentialist account of moral responsibility. As Tom Clark writes in response to Dennett:

Whether as consequentialists we should still talk of just deserts is debatable, given the strong deontological, retributive connotations…What you’re advocating is the practical necessity of punishment, not its intrinsic goodness, but ‘‘just deserts’’ strongly implies that the offender’s suffering is intrinsically good, which you don’t think is the case. So I think we should drop talk of just
deserts so we don’t mislead people about what we believe are defensible justifications for punishment. (2012)

We believe Clark is correct. Given the canonical understanding of ‘‘just deserts’’ and how it is used to justify various retributive attitudes, judgments, and treatments, Dennett’s use of the term lends itself to easy confusion and gives the mistaken impression that he is setting out to preserve something that he is not.
In conclusion, Dennett’s brand of compatibilism fails to preserve retributivist desert moral responsibility—in fact, it rejects it outright. Furthermore, his justification for punishment, being consequentialist in nature, is completely consistent with the skeptic’s rejection of free will and just deserts. While Dennett himself prefers to retain the notion of just deserts, we contend that this is misleading and potentially inconsistent with his reformist conception of moral responsibility. Drawing from this
analysis, we conclude more generally that Dennett-style compatibilists who deny that determined agents could exercise retributivist free will should forego asserting the
existence of ‘‘free will’’ in humans in order to avoid terminological confusion.”

(Compatibilism and Retributivist Desert Moral Responsibility: On What is of Central Philosophical and Practical Importance. Gregg D. Caruso & Stephen G. Morris)

Captain Homicide

Dennett’s brand of compatibilism fails to preserve retributivist desert moral responsibility—in fact, it rejects it outright. Furthermore, his justification for punishment, being consequentialist in nature, is completely consistent with the skeptic’s rejection of free will and just deserts. While Dennett himself prefers to retain the notion of just deserts, we contend that this is misleading and potentially inconsistent with his reformist conception of moral responsibility. — Joshs

This sums up my issue perfectly. I’m no free will expert but at first glance it seems bizarre to say that people have compatibilist free will and are morally responsible yet deny that they’re not sufficiently morally responsible to be punished for its own sake when basic desert is an integral part of moral responsibility (at least in the general public’s mind). It’s odd for a compatibilist to say they believe in moral responsibility unlike determinists but when you probe their beliefs it’s really the same kind of consequentialist system that determinists believe in. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.

baker

I read and watched Dennett’s discussion with Gregg Caruso about free will and Dennett often speaks about the “Moral Agents Club” and how if you want to live in a society and enjoy its benefits you have to be held morally responsible in a similar sense that people play by rules in a game and by doing so subject themselves to punishment when they make a mistake or lose. He uses the analogy of getting a red card in soccer. It has to work that way otherwise the “game” of society collapses and ceases to function properly. — Captain Homicide

But this is true only for ordinary peope, not for the elites. The elites don't have to play by the rules.

Bartricks

↪Captain Homicide

Dennett is an idiot. He's barely discussed in the free will literature. All he's contributed is the phrase 'free will worth wanting'.

He's not really a compatibilist. He says he is. But he isn't. This is because a real compatibilist is someone who thinks responsibility-grounding free will is compatible with determinism. Yet all Dennett does is point out that agency is compatible with it being utile to punish some people and not others. Which is beside the point. Even incompatibilists accept that.

Here's the thing: free will (which essentially makes one deserving of punishment) requires self-creation or at least absence of external creation. Whether determinism is true or not is beside the point.

And it isn't true, because it doesn't make sense. Determinism is the thesis that every event that occurs had to occur. That is, it is the thesis that every event occurs of necessity. However, necessity doesn't make sense as a concept. There is no such thing as necessity. Thus, nothing occurs of necessity.

The same applies to contingency (the opposite of necessity). Contingency, defined as it is in terms of necessity, also makes no sense.

What matters where free will is concerned is that one is the ultimate source of what one does. And that requires self-creation or absence of external creation.

Cuthbert

What's Y? Say in the context of a face of a die, X? — Haglund

We now need to make sure that (a) there is no Y such that Y is neither determined nor the result of pure chance; and (b) there is no Y such that Y is both determined and the result of pure chance. The libertarian argument is that (a) is not established. Free action is neither determined (by prior physical causes); nor is it the result of pure chance, because the actor can (at least sometimes) give reasons for action and is subject to no whims but their own. The claim is that the categories are not exhaustive. There is a third category - free action. Which is the very subject of dispute. — Cuthbert

An example of 'Y' is 'freely willed action' from a libertarian free will point of view. Freely willed action is neither determined nor the result of pure chance. So to claim that our actions are either determined by prior physical causes or simply random begs the question.

There is also the question whether there can be a 'Y' that is both determined and the result of pure chance. I'm not sure. You ask about the die. The result of a die throw is pure chance. It's also determined by how the particular throw was made. Someone might argue that is an example of 'both determined and pure chance'. I don't think that works - but perhaps it does. Even if it does work, it doesn't help or hinder either side of the argument I think.

Joshs

Here's the thing: free will (which essentially makes one deserving of punishment) requires self-creation or at least absence of external creation. Whether determinism is true or not is beside the point.

And it isn't true, because it doesn't make sense. Determinism is the thesis that every event that occurs had to occur. That is, it is the thesis that every event occurs of necessity. However, necessity doesn't make sense as a concept. There is no such thing as necessity. Thus, nothing occurs of necessity.

The same applies to contingency (the opposite of necessity). Contingency, defined as it is in terms of necessity, also makes no sense.

What matters where free will is concerned is that one is the ultimate source of what one does. And that requires self-creation or absence of external creation. — Bartricks

Here’s my take.

If blame is a function of a belief in the arbitrariness, randomness and capriciousness of motive, then what makes Cartesian desert based approaches , which are assumed to arise from the deliberately willed actions of an autonomous, morally responsible subject, harsher and more ‘blameful’ in their views of justice than deterministic , non-desert based approaches, which rest on shaping influences (bodily-affective and social) outside of an agent’s control? Isn’t the latter account a more ‘arbitrary’ interpretation of behavior than the former?

We say that the subject who has free will wills of their own accord, chooses what they want to choose , and as such has autonomy with respect to ‘foreign’ social and internal bodily influences. The machinations of the free will amount to a self-enclosed system.

This solipsist self functions via an internal logic of values that, while rational within the internal bounds of its own subjectivity, is walled off from the wider community of selves and therefore can choose value in a profoundly irrational or immoral manner with respect to social consensus.

Therefore, the very autonomy of the Cartesian subject presupposes a profound potential laxity and arbitrariness to individual free will in relation to the moral norms of a wider social community.

Modernist deterministic moral arguments of those like Pereboom and Nussbaum surrender the absolute solipsist rationalism of free will-based models of the self in favor of a view of the self as belonging to and determined by a wider causal empirical social and natural order.

If we ask why the agent endowed with free will chose to perform a certain action , the only explanation we can give is that it made sense to them given their own desires and whims. If we instead inquire why the individual ensconced within a deterministic world performed the same action, we would be able to make use of the wider explanatory framework of the cultural and natural order in situating the causes of individual behavior.

Joshs

↪Cuthbert

There is also the question whether there can be a 'Y' that is both determined and the result of pure chance. I'm not sure. You ask about the die. The result of a die throw is pure chance. It's also determined by how the particular throw was made. Someone might argue that is an example of 'both determined and pure chance'. I don't think that works - but perhaps it does. Even if it does work, it doesn't help or hinder either side of the argument I think. — Cuthbert

I think it is helpful to get back to the moral
arguments concerning desert-based blame. It wouldn’t make sense for the advocate of free-will
to argue that the willing self is nothing but a randomness generator. If they believe that, then they wouldn’t believe in holding the immoral subject responsible. They have to believe that the choices made by the will have a certain rational consistency to them in order to hold a person accountable, a rationality that may hold for them and them alone. To put it better , there is a moral calculus that can hold for them alone.

If we look at the views of determinists, I think what is crucial isn’t that there be a strict causal determinism. After all , postmodernists share with modernist determinists the rejection of retributive blame and justice. What these two groups have in common is the belief that individual behavior belongs to a larger social system which constrains and guides it ( as well as being shaped by bodily influences). So what is central to this ‘ determinism’ in terms of allowing a rejection of desert-based blame is not that it is a strict causal determinism but that it shifts responsibility away from the solitary autonomous individual in favor of a self beholden to social and natural-biological influences.

The difference between the modernists and the postmodernists is that the latter replace linear causal determinism with a dynamical reciprocal causality

Cuthbert

It wouldn’t make sense for the advocate of free-will
to argue that the willing self is nothing but a randomness generator. — Joshs

As far as I know, that's nobody's claim.

The argument I was answering is this:

1. If actions are not determined then they are the result of pure chance. 2. They aren't pure chance. 3. Therefore they are determined.

The answer is this;

1. is a false dichotomy. The categories 'determined' and 'result of pure chance' are not exhaustive.
There is (or could be) a third category -

Free action is neither determined (by prior physical causes); nor is it the result of pure chance, because the actor can (at least sometimes) give reasons for action and is subject to no whims but their own — Cuthbert

Can basic desert and retributivism be justified under Compatibilism?

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