Press 2021). 2. Derk Pereboom defines basic desert moral responsibility as follows: 'For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in this sense is for it to be hers in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if she understood that it was morally exemplary. The desert at issue here is basic in the sense that the agent would deserve to be blamed or praised just because she has performed the action, given an understanding of its moral status, and not, for example, merely by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations' (D Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford University Press 2014) 2). Understood this way, free will is a kind of power or ability an agent must possess in order to justify certain kinds of desert-based judgments, attitudes, or treatmentssuch as resentment, indignation, moral anger and retributive punishmentin response to decisions or actions that the agent performed or failed to perform. These reactions would be justified on purely backward-looking groundsthat is what makes them basicand would not appeal to consequentialist or forward-looking considerations, such as future protection, future reconciliation or future moral formation (see D Pereboom, Living Without Free Will
As philosophical and scientific arguments for free will skepticism continue to gain traction, we are likely to see a fundamental shift in the way people think about free will and moral responsibility. Such shifts raise important practical and existential concerns: What if we came to disbelieve in free will? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings?Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of belief in free will? In this chapter we consider the practical implications of free will skepticism and argue that life without free will and basic desert moral responsibility would not be as destructive as many people believe. We argue that prospects of finding meaning in life or of sustaining good interpersonal relationships, for example, would not be threatened. On treatment of criminals, we argue that although retributivism and severe punishment, such as the death penalty, would be ruled out, preventive detention and rehabilitation programs would still be justified. While we will touch on all these issues below, our focus will be primarily on this last issue.We begin in section I by considering two different routes to free will skepticism. The first denies the causal efficacy of the types of willing required for free will and receives its contemporary impetus from pioneering work in neuroscience by Benjamin Libet, DanielWegner, and John-Dylan Haynes. The second, which is more common in the philosophical literature, does not deny the causal efficacy of the will but instead claims that whether this causal
One of the most frequently voiced criticisms of free will skepticism is that it is unable to adequately deal with criminal behavior and that the responses it would permit as justifi ed are insuffi cient for acceptable social policy. This concern is fueled by two factors. The fi rst is that one of the most prominent justifi cations for punishing criminals, retributivism, is incompatible with free will skepticism. The second concern is that alternative justifi cations that are not ruled out by the skeptical view per se face signifi cant independent moral objections (Pereboom, 2014, p. 153). Yet despite these concerns, I maintain that free will skepticism leaves intact other ways to respond to criminal behavior-in particular incapacitation, rehabilitation, and alteration of relevant social conditions-and that these methods are both morally justifi able and suffi cient for good social policy. The position I defend is similar to Derk Pereboom's (2001, 2013, 2014), taking as its starting point his quarantine analogy, but it sets out to develop the quarantine model within a broader justifi catory framework drawn from public health ethics. The resulting model-which I call the public healthquarantine model-provides a framework for justifying quarantine and criminal sanctions that is more humane than retributivism and preferable to other non-retributive alternatives. It also provides a broader approach to criminal behavior than Pereboom's quarantine analogy does on its own.
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