Moral philosophers discussing responsibility

A long read, of which I shall select some of the more interesting bits.

Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No, says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide.

Challenge accepted ! Though I already have my own opinion, and I don't think this piece managed to change it (with one interesting caveat). Many good points from both sides.

DD : There really are people, with mental disabilities, who are not able to control themselves, but normal people can manage under all but the most extreme circumstances, and this difference is both morally important and obvious, once you divorce the idea of control from the idea of causation. Your past does not control you; for it to control you, it would have to be able to monitor feedback about your behaviour and adjust its interventions – which is nonsense.

Your past certainly influences you. As I read it, this means that while you internally make a decision, you base this on your existing knowledge, but that knowledge itself does not directly control you. Something else is at work during the decision-making process.

Why do we reason with people? Why do we try to convince them of conclusions about free will or science or causation or anything else? Because we think – for good reason – that in general people are reasonable, are moved by reasons, can adjust their behaviour and goals in the light of reasons presented to them. There is something indirectly self-refuting in arguing that people are not moved by reasons.

GC : My disagreement has more to do with the conditions required for what I call ‘basic desert’ moral responsibility. As a free-will skeptic, I maintain that the kind of control and reasons-responsiveness you point to, though important, is not enough to ground basic-desert moral responsibility – the kind of responsibility that would make us truly deserving of blame and praise, punishment and reward in a purely backward-looking sense.

Consider, for example, the various justifications one could give for punishing wrongdoers. One justification, the one that dominates our legal system, is to say that they deserve it. This retributive justification for punishment maintains that punishment of a wrongdoer is justified for the reason that he/she deserves something bad to happen to them just because they have knowingly done wrong. Such a justification is purely backward-looking. For the retributivist, it is the basic desert attached to the criminal’s immoral action alone that provides the justification for punishment... I contend that retributive punishment is never justified since agents lack the kind of free will and basic-desert moral responsibility needed to ground it.

DD : It’s quite straightforward. On Monday you make me a promise, which I accept in good faith, and rely on when I adjust my own activities. On Friday, I discover you have broken your promise, with no excuse. I blame you for this. My blaming you is of course backward-looking: ‘But you promised me!’ ...So we can blame them for being duped, for getting drunk, etc. When we blame them, we are not just diagnosing them, or categorising them; we are holding them deserving of negative consequences. If this isn’t ‘basic desert’ then so much the worse for basic desert. What is it supposed to add to this kind of desert?

The difference between the madman who is physically restrained and removed to quarantine for the sake of public safety, and the deserving culprit who is similarly restrained and then punished, is large, and it is a key feature of any defensible system of government. The culprit has the kind of desert that warrants punishment (but not ‘retributive’ punishment, whatever that is).

...The sense of ‘deserve’ that I defend is the everyday sense in which, when you win the race fair and square, you deserve the blue ribbon or gold medal; and if you wrote the novel, you deserve the royalties, and if you plagiarised it, you don’t; and if you knowingly parked in a ‘No Parking’ zone, you deserve a parking ticket; and if you refuse to pay it, you deserve some escalated penalty; and if you committed premeditated murder, you deserve to go to prison for a very long time – provided, in all cases, that you are a responsible agent, a member in the Moral Agents Club, as I have called it.

I interpret this to mean that if someone acts immorally, they can expect others to inflict punishments on them, and the actions of the others will be viewed very differently (by both the guilty party, if they're reasonable and understanding, and everyone else) to the case where no immoral action had occurred. The others are entitled to punish the wrongdoer and morally justified in doing so. But I would stop short of saying there is a moral imperative to punish them; that is case dependent and cannot be generalised sensibly (or at least I can't).

The point I think you are missing is that autonomy is something one grows into, and this is indeed a process that is initially entirely beyond one’s control, but as one matures, and learns, one begins to be able to control more and more of one’s activities, choices, thoughts, attitudes, etc. Yes, a great deal of luck is involved, but then a great deal of luck is involved in just being born, in being alive.

GC : Combined, these matters of luck determine what Thomas Nagel famously calls constitutive luck – luck in who one is and what character traits and dispositions one has. Since our genes, parents, peers and other environmental influences all contribute to making us who we are, and since we have no control over these, it seems that who we are is at least largely a matter of luck. And since how we act is partly a function of who we are, the existence of constitutive luck entails that what actions we perform depends on luck.

Luck does not average out in the long run. Those who start from a disadvantaged position of genetic abilities or early environment do not always have offsetting luck later in life. The data clearly shows that early inequalities in life often compound over time rather than average out, affecting everything from differences in health and incarceration rates to success in school and all other aspects of life... What begins as a small advantage, a mere matter of luck, snowballs and leads to an ever-widening gap of achievement and success.

DD : Praise (or royalties, or your paycheck) is not just encouragement or reinforcement, and blame (or fines or incarceration) is not just deterrence or therapy. You are entitled to the praise you get for your good deeds and to the paycheck you get for your doing your job; and the criticism, the shame, the blame you get if you offend common decency or violate the laws is quite justly and properly placed at your doorstep. That is not ‘retributive’ punishment, I guess, but it hurts, and so it should... If a magic pill were invented that would turn any convict into a safe honest citizen, it would not obviate the need for punishment, for instance.

I agree with the just nature of reward and punishment, but can't for the life of me understand how this isn't retributive. I think the question of whether you should inflict punishment even if you could reform someone by other means is a very interesting, and I honestly don't know what I think the answer is, but I think that punishment for the sake of punishment is retributive by definition. Plato held the purpose of punishment to be entirely for the sake of reform... again, I'm not sure a general case is appropriate here. If someone stole a small amount of money, and then a magic pill could make them understand the error of their ways, they'd still have to give the money back. But would that then be a punishment ? They'd do it voluntarily. On the other hand if they committed murder, no action they took could ever undo it or compensate the victim's family. But if the pill then made them remorseful and prevented them from from ever killing again, would we really just let them go ? Wouldn't they deserve punishment even so ? I don't know.

GC : Consider the case of Albert Einstein. He too was a free-will skeptic who believed that his scientific accomplishments were not of his own making. In a 1929 interview in The Saturday Evening Post, he said: ‘I do not believe in free will … I believe with Schopenhauer: we can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must.’ He goes on to add: ‘My own career was undoubtedly determined, not by my own will but by various factors over which I have no control.’ He concludes by rejecting the idea that he deserves praise or credit for his scientific achievements: ‘I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control.'

... We can also say that Einstein was extremely intelligent, gifted and creative. What we cannot say, if we are free-will skeptics, is that Einstein deserves praise (in the ‘basic desert’ sense) for his attributes and accomplishments.

I know this sounds counterintuitive, but that’s only because internal to the moral responsibility system, desert-based praise and blame, punishment and reward come naturally. The problem with appealing to our everyday practices, however, is that it takes for granted the very thing in need of justification. Rather, those who reject moral responsibility reject the basic system which starts from the assumption that all minimally competent persons are morally responsible. For the free-will skeptic, it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible, no matter how reasonable, competent, self-efficacious, strong-willed and clear-sighted that person may be.

Well, Einstein probably doesn't need praise or reward to further incentivise him. But I would say he's entitled to expect it, just as a criminal is entitled to expect punishment even if they are already reformed. Again I'm wary of generalising though.

The notion of just deserts, for instance, is too often used to justify punitive excess in criminal justice, to encourage treating people in severe and demeaning ways, and to excuse and perpetuate social and economic inequalities. Additionally, resentment, indignation, moral anger and blame are often counterproductive on the interpersonal level when it comes to the goals of safety, moral formation and reconciliation.

Here I agree. The primary aim of punishment should be reform. This doesn't exclude a retributive element though.

I advocate adopting a broad public-health approach for identifying and taking action on these shared social determinants. I focus on how social inequities and systemic injustices affect health outcomes and criminal behaviour, how poverty affects brain development, how offenders often have pre-existing medical conditions (especially mental-health issues), how homelessness and education affects health and safety outcomes, how environmental health is important to both public health and safety, how involvement in the criminal justice system itself can lead to or worsen health and cognitive problems, and how a public-health approach can be successfully applied within the criminal justice system.

I argue that, just as it is important to identify and take action on the social determinants of health if we want to improve health outcomes, it is equally important to identify and address the social determinants of criminal behaviour. My fear is that the system of desert you want to preserve leads us to myopically focus on individual responsibility and ultimately prevents us from addressing the systemic causes of criminal behaviour.

I can't disagree with that. My caveat would be Billionaires Behaving Badly. Someone with all the best opportunities in life can still turn out to be morally inept and/or just plain stupid. Worse, they may themselves be living a life of comfort and luxury, yet still choose to actively harm those much less fortunate than themselves. They may be driven by ideology, over-privilege, or a host of other factors. Any method proposing to reform society must account both for the broad trends but also these exceptional and exceptionally dangerous individuals.
https://aeon.co/essays/on-free-will-daniel-dennett-and-gregg-caruso-go-head-to-head