Compatibilism and Retributivist Desert Moral Responsibility: On What is of Central Philosophical and Practical Importance

Abstract

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The Public Health-Quarantine Model

“…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. (2014: 2) Consistent with this definition, I have elsewhere argued that we should understand basic desert moral responsibility in terms of whether it would ever be appropriate for a hypothetical divine all-knowing judge (who didn't necessarily create the agents in question) to administer differing kinds of treatment (i.e., greater or lesser rewards or punishments) to human agents on the basis of actions that these agents performed during their lifetime (see Caruso and Morris 2017). The purpose of invoking the notion of a divine judge in the afterlife is to instill the idea that any rewards or punishments issued after death will have no further utility-be it positive or negative.…”

Free will, determinism, and the right levels of description

“…Identifying the control which is necessary for its being morally appropriate to blame a person involves getting clear about the nature of the relevant kind of blame. Do we want to know when it is morally appropriate to punish people, to aggressively confront them, to have anger emotions towards them, or something different (for some recent proposals, see Carlsson 2017;Menges 2017;Caruso and Morris 2017;McKenna 2019)? This question is important because different responses may require different kinds of control.…”

On the Compatibility of Rational Deliberation and Determinism: Why Deterministic Manipulation Is Not a Counterexample

“…(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 judgements, attitudes, or treatments-such as resentment, indignation, moral anger, and retributive punishment-in response to decisions or actions that the agent performed or failed to perform. These reactions would be justified on purely backward-looking grounds, that's what makes them basic, and would not appeal to consequentialist or forward-looking considerations, such as future protection, future reconciliation, or future moral formation (see Caruso and Morris 2017;Dennett and Caruso 2021;Pereboom 2001Pereboom , 2014.…”