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Acknowledgments
Faculty colleagues, at Cornell and elsewhere, read and commented on the entire manuscript, and I am very grateful to them for these interactions, and for the ways in which they influenced my thinking about the issues addressed in the book. They are Rachana Kamtekar, Michael McKenna, Dana Nelkin, Shaun Nichols, Carolina Sartorio, David Shoemaker, and Robert Wallace. I would like to thank Grant Friedman for comments and discussion specifically on Chapters 1 and 2, John Doris on Chapters 2 and 3, Helen Frowe and Jonathan Quong on Chapter 3, Victor Tadros and Gregg Caruso on Chapter 4, Per-Erik Milam and Brandon Warmke on Chapter 5, and John Martin Fischer on Chapters 6 and 7.
The manuscript benefitted from seven seminars, one for each chapter, at the University of Arizona in November and December of 2020. The participants included faculty members Michael McKenna, Carolina Sartorio, and Robert Wallace, and graduate students Josh Cangelosi, Phoebe Chan, Andrew Lichter, Timothy Kearl, Max Kramer, Travis Quigley, Lucy Schwarz, Anna-Bella Sicilia, Sean Whitton, and Ke Zhang. All read the whole manuscript. These discussions shaped the final version, for which I am grateful.
Earlier versions of the material in the book were presented at a two-week seminar in the summer of 2017 in Riga, Latvia, hosted by the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies and organized by Artem Besedin and Dmitry Volkov. This material was also discussed in a combination senior undergraduate and graduate seminar at Cornell University in the fall of 2018. The books benefitted from a two-day seminar at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia in the summer of 2019, organized by Santiago Amaya and Manuel Vargas, and sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. I wish to thank all of the participants in these seminars for valuable discussion.
I am grateful to audiences at the following presentations, at which the discussion shaped the book in significant ways. Precursors to Chapter 2, “The Stance of Moral Protest,” were presented at Ohio State University, Rice University, Florida State University, Davidson College, the University of Vermont, Rutgers University, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Rochester, Renmin University-Beijing, the University of Calgary, the University of Oslo, and the Pacific Division Meetings of the American
Philosophical Association. A version of the first part of Chapter 3, “Defensive Harm and Measured Aggression,” was presented at the Conversations on War workshop organized by Helen Frowe and Massimo Renzo on the Bay of Kotor in Montenegro, and co-hosted by the Stockholm Centre for the Ethics of War and Peace, Stockholm University and the Yeoh Tiong Lay Centre for Politics, Philosophy and Law, King’s College, London. Chapter 4, “Crime, Protection, and Compassion,” in varying stages, was presented at the University of Rome III, the University of Aberdeen, Cornell University, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Ghent, the University of Warwick, and at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Seattle. Precursors of Chapter 6, “Love and Freedom,” were presented at the University of California-San Diego and at the University of California-Riverside. Earlier versions of Chapter 7, “Religion and Hope,” were presented at Yale University, Rutgers University, Georgetown University, and at a conference on analytic theology at the University of Innsbrück sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.
I also want to thank the following colleagues for interactions on these issues over the years: Marilyn Adams, Robert Adams, Gunnar Björnsson, Tad Brennan, Jennifer Chandler, Andrew Chignell, David Christensen, Randolph Clarke, Michael Corrado, Taylor Cyr, Eve Dietl, Keith DeRose, Louis DeRosset, Tyler Doggett, Austin Duggan, Laura Ekstrom, Augie Faller, Carl Ginet, Quitterie Gounot, Ish Haji, Shao-Pu Kang, Hilary Kornblith, Arthur Kuflik, Tim Kwiatek, John Lemos, Danielle Limbaugh, Don Loeb, Bill Mann, Al Mele, Mark Moyer, Matt Paskell, Ben Sales, George Sher, Angela Smith, Matt Talbert, Patrick Todd, Leigh Vicens, Ben Vilhauer, Bill Watson, Hannah Winckler-Olick, and Lyu Zhou.
Finally, I am very grateful to Peter Momtchiloff, the philosophy editor at Oxford University Press, for his ongoing support of this project, and to the three readers he recruited. Two were anonymous, and the other was Dana Nelkin.
1 Introduction Challenges to Anger
In our practice of holding people morally responsible, emotions, together with their attendant justifications for action, feature prominently. These emotions include positive attitudes such as appreciation and gratitude for the good things others do, but also negative attitudes such as anger in response to the wrongdoing of others, and guilt in one’s own case. Anger with wrongdoers is often accompanied by the supposition that its target deserves to be the recipient of an expression of this emotion, one that intentionally causes pain or harm. Insofar as anger is accompanied by a supposition of deserved pain or harm, it qualifies as a retributive emotion.
One of my aims in this book is to defend the thesis that we can do without retribution, whether it be in justifying our responses to wrongdoing, or in the emotions employed in those responses. We human beings have the capacity for a wide range of justifications and emotions in contending with wrongdoing, and we have alternatives to retributive anger, and to anger more generally, that are often practically and theoretically preferable. In the past I motivated this stance partly on the basis of skepticism about the control in action—the free will—required for retribution to be justified, and later in this chapter I will summarize that argument. But I believe that there are ethical considerations independent of the concern about control in action that serve to justify the antiretributivist stance. These ethical considerations arise in the context of treatment of criminals, as we shall see, but also in our personal and professional relationships.
Retribution is an element of our ordinary human practice of holding each other, and ourselves, morally responsible. Many authors are sanguine about our practice of holding morally responsible as it actually exists. Others contend that there are serious revisions to the practice that would better achieve its goals. Against such revisionists, P. F. Strawson wrote: “What is wrong is to forget that these practices, and their reception, the reactions to them, really are expressions of our moral attitudes and not
Wrongdoing and the Moral Emotions. Derk Pereboom, Oxford University Press. © Derk Pereboom 2021. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192846006.003.0001
merely devices we calculatingly employ for regulative purposes. Our practices do not merely exploit our natures, they express them” (Strawson 1962/2003, 93). In Strawson’s conception, to have and express the attitudes that have a part in our actual practice of holding morally responsible is a significant feature of what it is to be human. We cannot conclude that some aspect of the practice should be altered or eliminated solely on the ground that it falls short in realizing anticipated good outcomes relative to available alternatives.
Strawson and those inspired by his view emphasize the role of certain types of anger in such relationships; specifically, resentment, directed toward someone due to a wrong done to oneself,1 and indignation, the vicarious analogue of resentment, directed toward someone because of a wrong done to a third party (Watson 1987; Wallace 1994; McKenna 2012; Shabo 2012; Brink 2021). Resentment and indignation, in Strawson’s terminology, qualify as reactive attitudes. In the past I’ve argued that for normal, adult human beings, resentment and indignation always presuppose that their targets deserve—more specifically, basically deserve (discussed below)— to be recipients of expressions of these reactive attitudes (Pereboom 2014, 128–9; McKenna 2021, 64–74).2 I won’t assume that view here, however. I don’t reject out of hand the claim that one might direct anger toward a wrongdoer to forcefully communicate to him that he has done wrong, without presupposing that he deserves the pain or harm involved in being a recipient its expression. Still, here the resulting emotion seems like feigned anger to me. My sense is that genuine moral anger at least typically comes with a desert presupposition.
I contend that the basic desert presupposition of moral anger is false, and if I’m right, this raises a general challenge to anger in its retributive form. So far, this leaves non-retributive versions of moral anger in the clear. However,
1 Resentment in this sense is not in common use in American English, where its usual meaning is close to envy. But even the sense tied to moral anger is not as broad as the definitions just provided. Jean Hampton writes: “resentment is a kind of anger which protests the demeaning treatment to one who could and should have known better, and this protest is frequently linked to verbal rebuke, reprimand or complaint direct at the insulter” (Murphy and Hampton 1988, 55). However, in the philosophical literature over the past decade or two the standard use has become the broader one, denoting any anger with someone due to a wrong he has done to oneself, and this is the sense I will assume throughout. There is controversy about what Strawson himself meant by “resentment,” and I’m not relying on what he meant, specifically, by the term.
2 As I argue in Chapter 2, the presupposition that a wrongdoer deserves to be targeted by an expression of resentment or indignation involves the belief that the pain or harm of being so targeted is appropriately imposed upon him because he has done wrong.
I will argue that moral anger, whether or not it presupposes basic desert, has too prominent a place in our practice of holding morally responsible, and has too central a role in many normative accounts of that practice. That said, I maintain that resentment and indignation are sometimes practically rational, particularly in circumstances in which people are dominated or oppressed, and also that we have available a non-retributive measured aggressive stance that is in some respects similar to anger, and which facilitates legitimate defensive action.
It is widely held—and Strawson has been influential in this respect—that without reactive attitudes, and without resentment and indignation in particular, personal relationships would not retain the value that they in fact have for us. If these attitudes were excised from our practice, we would be left with a disengaged and clinical objective stance, incompatible with relationships that are genuinely personal in the way we value most deeply. I believe that this assessment underestimates the extent to which, due to the role of moral anger, the practice malfunctions in general and crucial respects. Consider first how it malfunctions in the context of personal relationships. This threat results from the alienating effect that expression of such anger has on others, and its propensity to occasion defensive or offensive reaction rather than contrition, reconciliation, and reform. Expression of anger tends to allow only either a humiliating or else a defiant response, and often those who wish to avoid humiliation are instead resistant, hindering reform and reconciliation.
As studies have confirmed, and as is true to our ordinary experience, when people are angry in these ways, they tend to misrepresent relevant features of the situation, and this tendency severely limits the potential for achieving reform and reconciliation.3 Much current political interaction features accusation and blame not intended to reform and reconcile, but to disempower and defeat. Accuracy of accusation and moral appropriateness of blame are at best a secondary consideration. Anger has a significant role in this malfunction of the practice. As is readily evident, if one’s attitudes toward others are angrily hostile, as they often are in politics, one will be predisposed to believe accusations about them, regardless of their evidential merit. This problem is manifestly not restricted to political discourse. In general, aims of the practice of holding morally responsible are frequently deflected by anger, often for the sake of personal or group advantage.
3 Studies confirming these distortions, such as Alicke et al. (1994, 2012); Alicke (2000); Lerner et al. (1998); Goldberg et al. (1999); Litvak et al. (2010), are discussed in Chapter 2.
This is not to say that controlling anger by itself will solve our current complex social and political problems. One component of this complexity is the striking degree to which human beings value relative status and relative dominance in possession of positional goods, both for themselves and the groups with which they identify.4 This tendency occasions angrily hostile attitudes toward those who are perceived as seeking too high a relative status and too great a share of positional goods. Such anger facilitates misrepresentation that degrades, such as the fabricated or exaggerated accusation of members of groups seen as relative status threatening, which in turn diminishes the potential of these groups for achieving economic progress and maintaining well-functioning communities.5 Reducing economic inequality and addressing exclusionary group identification are crucial for solving such problems. But attending to anger, and its place in these dynamics, also has a significant role to play.
A core reason why the practice of holding morally responsible malfunctions in personal and political relationships is that the angry emotions it invokes are in tension with other requirements for their value and stability. When wrongdoing is at issue, their preservation requires engagement that facilitates reform and reconciliation, not humiliation and defiance. In circumstances of conflict, maintaining good relationships requires that participants aim to believe the truth about the actions of others, and that the attitudes of the parties be compassionate and conciliatory. While angry emotions may supply an alternative to the clinical and the disengaged stance, they have destabilized countless personal relationships and weakened political institutions that have taken centuries to develop and mature. Because of its tendency to distort the truth and to distort it in different ways for different people, anger, in alliance with attitudes such as the overvaluing of relative status, issues in clashing representations of people, their actions, and their policies. Add to this the informational isolation of socio-political communities facilitated by the internet and social media, and the remarkable
4 In a study on relative standing and positional goods, Sara Solnick and David Hemenway (1989) report that “respondents chose between a world where they have more of a good than others and one where everyone’s endowment of the good is higher, but the respondent has less than others. Questions [were] asked about education, attractiveness and intelligence for one’s child and oneself, income, vacation time, approval and disapproval from a supervisor, and papers to write. Half of the respondents preferred to have 50% less real income but high relative income. Concerns about position were strongest for attractiveness and supervisor’s praise and weakest for vacation time.” For a thorough account of the economic role of relative status and positional goods, see Frank (2011).
5 For accounts of the role of groups and group identification in such dynamics, see, for instance, Herbert Blumer (1958), Lawrence Bobo (1999), and Kate Manne (2017).
imitative contagion of belief and behavior,6 and the result is the fractured array of constructed alternative worlds we now see.
Many philosophical and religious traditions worldwide have emphasized the seriousness of the problems to which anger gives rise, but perhaps none so forcefully as Buddhism. A solution that this tradition emphasizes, in particular in the Mahāyāna form, is to replace it with compassion. Charles Goodman remarks that
many modern analytic philosophers seem to think that philosophy must accept society’s way of life as it is, and restrict itself to clarifying the conceptual presuppositions of that way of life. But in Buddhism, rational thought can be part of a process that leads people to turn against the way of life they know, and to seek spiritual values instead of worldly ones . . . for Mahāyāna Buddhists, it is possible to live as a layperson, in the midst of the demands and distractions of work and family life, while attaining the perfect wisdom that destroys hatred and leads to perfect compassion. From a Buddhist perspective, ordinary interpersonal relationships, though they may have some value, are pervaded with greed, anger, and delusion.
To live the best kind of life, a Buddhist must transform the functions of his mind, as well as his relationships to others and to the world.
(Goodman 2009, 163; cf., Caruso 2020a)
Compassion, in the Buddhist conception, aims at the well-being of others impartially. Directed toward those who have acted wrongly, compassion takes account of factors beyond their control that have contributed to their wrongdoing, and aims at their moral improvement and at reconciliation with them.
One might respond by contending that human nature is not malleable in the way the Buddhist conception presupposes. However, there are examples of changes in our practice of holding responsible over the past century that indicate that this is not so. It was once considered legitimate to blame people for being mentally ill, and in particular for behavior that manifests mental illness; to blame and punish people for being gay or lesbian and specifically for gay or lesbian behavior; for husbands to beat their spouses and for parents to beat their children; for teachers to express rage in the classroom and to beat their pupils; for criminals to be severely harmed,
6 Robert Frank provides a thorough account of this phenomenon in his Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work (2020).
physically and mentally, in ways not subject to any remotely plausible moral justification. Humanity has made significant inroads against all of this, which indicates that the tendencies to negative emotions at work in the practice are malleable.
For anthropological evidence of malleability, we can turn to anthropologist Jean Briggs’s (1970) in-depth study of the indigenous Utkuhiksalingmiut Inuit of Canada’s Nunavut territory, who very rarely express anger. While the very young in this culture display familiar outbursts of angry emotion, children are educated by community role modeling and calm parental exhortation to avoid displays of anger. The process is generally successful, and the resulting dispositions persist and are ubiquitous in the community. This example illustrates how cultural regulation of emotion, understood as a process that results in the alignment of emotion with cultural values, objectives, and concerns (De Leersnyder et al. 2013), can make a significant difference for the expression and arguably for the occurrence of anger. On Briggs’s proposal, closeness and harmony are the cultural goal that underlies this case of cultural regulation, occasioned by the potential destructive effects that divisiveness would have in the harsh Arctic climate. Perhaps our global situation is analogously harsh, and similar cultural regulation of anger would be to our advantage. At the same time, as Dana Nelkin counsels,7 we would want to avoid unilateral emotional disarmament against injustice, and to cultivate confrontational emotions that facilitate the struggle against wrongdoing, an account of which I develop in Chapters 2 and 3.
Here are two themes on which I will elaborate. The first is emphasized by the Buddhist tradition, as well as by ancient Stoicism, and by strands in the great monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. A significant aspect of our actual practice is a sense of holding morally responsible that, by contrast with the model that foregrounds retributive anger, is instead largely forward looking. In this aspect of the practice, blame’s predominant objectives include protection from dangers posed by wrongdoing, moral formation of the wrongdoer, and reconciliation with those who have been wronged. This aspect of blame does not essentially involve retributive anger. It features instead a stance of moral protest, whose aim and function is to achieve these forward-looking aims. This stance may be accompanied by emotions such as disappointment or sorrow or compassion for the wrongdoer, and, in heat of defensive confrontation, a stance of measured
7 In correspondence.
aggression, none of which involve retribution. The stance of moral protest unaccompanied by retributive anger may communicate moral reasons to wrongdoers without occasioning only either humiliation or defiance, and without the truth-distorting effect of anger.
The second point is that even if, as is indeed plausible, retributive anger is inevitable for us in certain circumstances, we have the capacity to distance ourselves from this emotion. This capacity is also a distinctive feature of what it is to be human. We can distance ourselves from the retributive anger we acknowledge we feel by regarding this emotion as failing to license a response more severe than what moral protest would justify. The great twentieth-century leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King were champions of moral protest while disavowing its retributively angry forms. Their position impressively illustrates the proposal I will defend in this book. In the momentous political efforts in which they were engaged, the cost of expression of retributive anger beyond what the stance of moral protest would justify was high, and success mandated restraint.
Let me cite three concerns that have been raised for an ideal of the type we find in Mahāyāna Buddhism and in the other traditions I’ve cited. A first is that this ideal is not attainable for us, at least for those of us who live ordinary, non-monastic lives. A second is that those who believe that they have attained the ideal are often self-deceived. The recommendations of these traditions are difficult to secure, and the practitioner is apt to believe that success has been attained when it has not. What is attained may involve unacknowledged hostility and indirect expressions of retributive anger, which are apt to be destructive. A third concern is that even if the ideal is within reach, it would come at a great cost to relationships. Losing our susceptibility to retributive anger threatens to undermine the possibility of genuinely personal relationships with others. Personal connections would give way to the clinical attitude, or worse, indifference. The position I propose takes these concerns very seriously, as the ensuing discussion will show.
Skepticism about Basic Desert
As I’ve specified, a further challenge to retributive justifications and emotions is that they are not appropriate given the kinds of beings we are, situated in a natural world of law-governed causes and effects. Our character and actions are conditioned by causes that we do not control—our genetic make-up, our upbringing, and our physical environment. Given that we are
components of a natural world, does it make sense to be retributively angry when people act badly? The eighth-century Indian Buddhist philosopher Śāntideva thought not, as he indicated in his poem Bodhicaryāvatara:
I feel no anger towards bile and the like, even though they cause intense suffering. Why am I angry with sentient beings? They too have causes for their anger. Whatever transgressions and evil deeds of various kinds there are, all arise through the power of conditioning factors, while there is nothing that arises independently. Therefore, even if one sees a friend or an enemy behaving badly, one can reflect that there are specific conditioning factors that determine this, and thereby remain happy. If it is their very nature to cause others distress, my anger towards these unwise ones is as inappropriate as it would be towards fire for its nature to burn.
(Śāntideva 700/1995, 52–3)
Śāntideva is expressing skepticism about human free will, and counting this as a reason against being angry at all with people for the wrongs they have done.
The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza also advocates skepticism about free will, and a similar renunciation of anger. He contends that “in the mind there is no absolute, or free, will, but the mind is determined to will this or that by a cause which is also determined by another, and this again by another, and so to infinity” (1677/1985, Ethics II, Proposition 48, 483).
The reason we don’t have free will is that everything that happens is causally determined prior causes, resulting in chains of causes stretching to infinity. The ultimate deterministic cause of everything that happens is the divine nature; but even God does not have free will: “all things have been predetermined by God, not from freedom of the will or absolute good pleasure, but from God’s absolute nature, or infinite power” (1677/1985, Ethics I, Appendix, 439). Like Śāntideva, Spinoza maintains that the doctrine that we lack free will has salutary consequences, for
it teaches us that we must expect and bear calmly both good fortune and bad. For everything that happens follows from God’s eternal decree with the same necessity as it follows from the essence of a triangle that its three angles are equal to two right angles. This doctrine contributes to the social life by teaching us to hate no one, to disesteem no one, to mock no one, to be angry at no one, to envy no one.
(1677/1985, Ethics II, Proposition 49, Discussion, 490)
Understanding that people lack free will counteracts hostile emotions we have toward others, and that anger is among them.
Still, most of us suppose that our actions are sometimes freely willed. When we choose from among offers of admission to colleges or for employment, we typically presume that we could have chosen differently from how we actually did choose. When we are angry with wrongdoers for their immoral actions, we assume that they could have avoided acting as they did. There are, however, reasons for believing that no one has free will, reasons that stem from various sources. One such source is invoked by Spinoza: that everything that happens, including human action, is causally determined by the divine nature.8 Another is the non-theological, naturalistic view that the past in accord with the laws of nature determines a single unique future (van Inwagen 1983, 2). Given the prospect that some version of causal determinism is true, and that as a result all of our actions are causally determined by factors beyond our control and beyond our causal reach (Pereboom 1995, 2001, 2014; Sartorio 2014, 2016), is it reasonable to believe that some of our actions are freely willed nonetheless?
One concern to keep in mind in answering this question is that the term ‘free will,’ as it is used in philosophical debates, has a number of distinct senses, and the answer may depend on which sense is intended (e.g., Pereboom 2001, Latham 2004; cf. Chalmers 2011). Two of these senses have a prominent role in the historical and contemporary debate:
free will AP (for ‘alternative possibilities’): Free will is an agent’s ability, at a given time, either to act or to refrain: that is, if an agent acts with free will, then she could at that time have refrained from acting as she did. free will MR (for ‘moral responsibility’): Free will is an agent’s ability to exercise the control in acting required for her to be morally responsible for her actions.
It was traditionally assumed that the ability to act and to refrain is required for moral responsibility, and for blameworthiness in particular. How can an agent be reasonably blamed for an action if he couldn’t have refrained, if he didn’t have refraining as an alternative possibility (e.g., Widerker 2000)? However, fifty years ago this assumption became controversial due to an
8 For a current overview of theological determinism and its relation to divine foreknowledge and human free will, see Leigh Vicens and Simon Kittle (2019). Recently, Heath White (2019) has set out a comprehensive defense of this determinist perspective.
argument advanced by Harry Frankfurt (1969), and the issue continues to be hotly disputed.9 Because this book’s discussion concerns moral responsibility, I will assume free will MR, as does much of the current debate.
However, the term ‘morally responsible’ also has multiple senses (e.g., Pereboom 2001, 2014; Latham 2004). As I pointed out earlier, our practice of holding morally responsible, and blaming in particular, has a number of objectives. One such aim is backward looking and involves the attribution of desert. Other objectives are forward looking, for example, moral reform and reconciliation in relationships. I contend that the specific sense of ‘moral responsibility’ that works best to distinguish the parties to the debate is one that involves desert, of the basic variety.
The parties to the free will debate are traditionally grouped into three camps. They first of all divide into compatibilists and incompatibilists:
compatibilism: our having free will is compatible with determinism, with all of our actions being causally determined by factors beyond our control. incompatibilism: our having free will is not compatible with determinism, with all of our actions being causally determined by factors beyond our control.
Incompatibilists divide into those who hold that determinism is false and that we have free will—the libertarians—and those who hold that determinism is true and that we lack free will—the hard determinists (James 1884). Libertarians endorse:
Indeterminism: not every event has causal antecedents that render it inevitable.
Two different ways in which the world might be indeterministic can be distinguished. The world might be indeterministic because at least some of the
9 Here is Carolina Sartorio’s (2016) version of Frankfurt’s famous example: “A neuroscientist, Black, wants Jones to perform a certain action. Black is prepared to go to considerable lengths to get his way, but he prefers to avoid showing his hand unnecessarily. So he waits until Jones is about to make up his mind what to do, and he does nothing unless it is clear to him (Black is an excellent judge of such things) that Jones is going to decide to do something other than what he wants him to do. If it were to become clear that Jones is going to decide to do something else, Black would take effective steps to ensure that Jones decides to do what he wants him to do, by directly manipulating the relevant processes in Jones’s brain. As it turns out, Black never has to show his hand because Jones, for reasons of his own, decides to perform the very action Black wants him to perform” (Sartorio 2016). One’s intuition may well be that Jones is blameworthy for his action, despite his not being able to refrain. For further discussion, see Pereboom 2001, 1–37, 2014, 9–29.
fundamental laws are probabilistic, or it might be indeterministic because there are exceptions to deterministic laws (e.g., Vihvelin 2017).
Given our selection of free will MR, we can yet specify any of a number of senses of moral responsibility in the definitions of compatibilism, libertarianism, and hard determinism. Here is one principle for settling on definitions in contexts such as this one: select those that best distinguish contrasting positions that divide parties in the debate.10 Now virtually everyone holds that causal determination by factors beyond our control is compatible with our having the control in action required for our being morally responsible in some sense, for example in a forward-looking sense. But participants in the debate do disagree about whether causal determination is compatible with our having the control in action required for being morally responsible for actions in a sense involving moral desert of pain and harm, pleasure and benefit. Noa Latham (2004), for example, argues that determinism rules out such desert: “What evaluative claims would be undermined by determinism? My answer is that it is all those entailing that the intrinsic goodness of a person’s receiving pleasure or pain depends on the virtue or vice of the person. I shall call these desert principles” (Latham 2004, 154).11 And as we shall see, many contemporary compatibilists maintain that determinism does not rule out such desert principles (e.g., Fischer 2007, 82; Nelkin 2011, 2019b; McKenna 2012, 2020; Sartorio 2016; Brink 2021). So here there is a genuine conflict, one that divides parties in the debate. I contend that determinism rules out moral responsibility specifically in the basic desert sense:
For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in the basic desert sense is for the action to be attributable to her in such a way that if she was sensitive to its being morally wrong, she would deserve to be blamed or punished in a way that she would experience as painful or harmful, and if she was sensitive to its being morally exemplary, she would deserve to be
10 This isn’t the only rule that’s been proposed. Dennett (1984, 2003) favors: choose the sense of free will worth wanting. In Dennett’s view, a kind of rational responsiveness that develops in evolution and in a person over time fits that definition. One issue is that almost everyone agrees that we have this sort of rational responsiveness, so on this definition, there is no controversy. Another problem is that many libertarians maintain that libertarian free will is worth wanting. Dennett thinks it isn’t and so then the debate would be shifted to one about what sort of free will is worth wanting, and whether we have it, which is functionally equivalent to selecting the definition that divides the camps.
11 It’s clear from Latham’s (2004) discussion that by “intrinsic goodness of a person’s receiving pleasure or pain” he means what I mean when I say such pleasure or pain is basically deserved.
praised or rewarded in a way that she would experience as pleasurable or beneficial. The desert at issue is basic in the sense that the agent, to be morally responsible, would deserve such blame or punishment, praise or reward, just by virtue of having performed the action with sensitivity to its moral status, and not, for example, by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations.12
In many cases of wrongdoing, it’s intuitive that the pain of guilt is basically deserved (Clarke 2013; Carlsson 2017; Duggan 2018), or the pain upon being targeted by overt resentment or indignation. In cases in which the wrongdoer, for instance an immoral political figure, is hardened and he won’t feel guilty on account of his wrongdoing or pain upon being targeted by indignation (Nelkin 2019a), it may be intuitive that the pain resulting from public exposure of the wrongdoing is deserved. If he won’t feel pain upon such public exposure, it may be intuitive that some type of harmful setback of his career is deserved, or if he’s committed a crime, that some judicial punishment is deserved. Against the suggestion that only harm and not pain need be invoked, in certain cases only feeling guilty may be deserved, and it’s not intuitive that the pain of guilt is a kind of harm (compare the pain of grief, which is also not intuitively a kind of harm). Parallelism recommends pleasure or benefit as what’s basically deserved in the case of a morally exemplary action. In the case of wrongdoing, the claim that the agent deserves pain or harm is justified solely on the grounds of the agent’s having done wrong with sensitivity to its being wrong, and not by virtue of further considerations, such as anticipated good consequences of imposing the pain or harm (Feinberg 1970; Pereboom 2001, xx; 2014, 2;
12 This characterization can be extended to omissions. In earlier formulations (e.g., Pereboom 2001, xx, 2014, 2), included in what is specified as basically deserved is to be blamed But on my own view of blame as moral protest (Chapter 2 and Pereboom 2017a) being blamed needn’t involve any harmful or painful interaction with the person blamed, but at times only being confronted by reasons to act differently. Denying that being blamed in this sense is basically deserved doesn’t adequately represent my concern for negative basic desert. This convinced me to specify the basically deserved negative outcome in the case of blame as pain or harm, and analogously, the basically deserved positive outcome in the case of praise as pleasure or benefit (Telech 2020). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue, and suggesting a more decisively retributivist characterization of negative basic desert. In addition, in earlier formulations I specified understanding of the wrongness of the action as a requirement of negative basic desert. Michael McKenna convinced me that this is too strong. On the supposition of basic desert, genuine understanding of the wrongness of an action isn’t plausibly required for deserved pain or harm. McKenna suggested the example of an abusive partner who doesn’t fully understand the wrongness of his abusive behavior, even representing it as justified, but who is nonetheless sensitive to its wrongness.
Scanlon 2013). Accordingly, the desert invoked here is basic. We’ll consider the contrast between basic and non-basic desert in Chapter 2.
Given the selection of basic desert sense of moral responsibility in free will MR, here are the characterizations of the three traditional positions:
hard determinism: because determinism is true, we cannot have the sort of free will required for moral responsibility in the basic desert sense. compatibilism: even if determinism is true, we can have the sort of free will required for moral responsibility in the basic desert sense, and we do in fact have it.13
libertarianism: because determinism is false, we can have the sort of free will required for moral responsibility in the basic desert sense, and we do in fact have it.
Like the hard determinist, I side with a skeptical perspective on free will defined in this way.14 But this is not because I’m convinced of the truth of determinism, and that all of our actions are causally determined by factors beyond our control. Rather, I argue that any sort of indeterminism that has a good chance of being true is also incompatible with free will in the sense just defined. We’ll examine an argument for this conclusion in what follows. Critics have expressed a number of practical concerns about free will skepticism, that, for example, its rejection of basic desert moral responsibility is too costly, that it offers no viable policy for dealing with criminal behavior, and that it threatens emotional attitudes essential to personal relationships. I disagree, and this is one of the main concerns of this book.
13 There is a broader sense of compatibilism on which one might be a compatibilist and deny that we have free will of the sort specified (Strawson 1986, 6). For example, one might believe that this sort of free will is compatible with determinism, but since our actions are never produced by conscious willing, we lack such free will (e.g., Wegner 2002).
14 Historical advocates of skepticism about free will and/or basic desert include Spinoza (1677/1985), Paul d’Holbach (1770), Joseph Priestley (1788/1965), Arthur Schopenhauer (1818/1961), Friedrich Nietzsche (1888/1954); and in recent decades, C. D. Broad (1952), Galen Strawson (1986, 1994), Bruce Waller (1990, 2011, 2015), Michael Slote (1990), Derk Pereboom (1995, 2001, 2014), Saul Smilansky (2000), Daniel Wegner (2002), Gideon Rosen (2003, 2004), Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen (2004), Benjamin Vilhauer (2004, 2008, 2012); Shaun Nichols (2007, 2015), Tamler Sommers (2007, 2012), Brian Leiter (2007), Thomas Nadelhoffer (2011), Neil Levy (2011), Sam Harris (2012), Gregg Caruso (2012, 2016, 2021), ‘Trick Slattery (2014), Per-Erik Milam (2016), Robert Sapolsky (2017), Stephen Morris (2018), Elizabeth Shaw (2019), and Farah Focquaert (2019). Arguments for skepticism about free will and basic desert vary considerably; for an overview, see Caruso (2018).
Aspects of our practice of holding each other morally responsible that don’t invoke basic desert have not been a focus of contention in the free will debate. For example, someone might be held morally responsible when his tendency to act badly stands to be modified or eliminated by blaming, and his dispositions to act well strengthened by praising (Schlick 1939; NowellSmith 1948; Smart 1961). Or for a variation on this idea, someone might be held morally responsible by asking her questions such as “Why did you decide to do that? Do you think it was the right thing to do?” so that she will appreciate the reasons for changing her dispositions, attitudes, and behavior, and undertake the requisite reform; what is invoked here might be classified as the answerability sense of moral responsibility (Bok 1998; Scanlon 1998; Smith 2008, 2013), by contrast with the accountability sense, which is essentially confrontational and is standardly conceived as licensing resentment and indignation (Watson 1996; Shoemaker 2011, 2015; Jeppsson 2022). Incompatibilists would not regard the control required for answerability to be incompatible with causal determination, and it is open to free will skeptics to endorse this notion of moral responsibility. Instead, it’s the accountability sense, conceived specifically as invoking basically deserved pain or harm, that separates the parties in the debate.
Thus what I deny is that we have free will MR, the control in action required for moral responsibility, where the notion of moral responsibility specified is the one that involves basic desert. I’ll now explain why.
An Argument for Free Will Skepticism
I’ve defended my skeptical position about free will in Living without Free Will (2001) and Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (2014). Here I present my argument for this position briefly in outline. The argument features challenges to the rival views, compatibilism and libertarianism, and if these challenges are sound, only the skeptical view remains standing.
One way to resist free will skepticism is to contend that even if all of our actions are causally determined by factors beyond our control, we can still be morally responsible in the basic desert sense for some of them. This is the compatibilist option. Compatibilists point out that many of the criteria we ordinarily use to judge whether people are blameworthy are compatible with such causal determination of immoral actions. For instance, in court cases we may want to make sure that the accused was rational and that he was not compelled by someone else to commit the crime. But rationality
and absence of compulsion are conditions compatible with causal determination, and whether causal determinism itself is true is not debated in court cases. Compatibilists have proposed a range of such conditions for moral responsibility, and they hold that their satisfaction is sufficient for moral responsibility. Incompatibilists have objected that even if an agent satisfies the compatibilist conditions, causal determination by factors beyond her control rules out moral responsibility. Are we at a standoff?
I believe that the best way to argue against the compatibilist option begins with the intuition that if an agent is causally determined to act by, for example, neuroscientists who intentionally manipulate his brain, then he is not morally responsible for that action in the basic desert sense even if he satisfies the compatibilist conditions. The next step is to point out that there are no differences between such a deterministically manipulated agent and an ordinary causally determined counterpart that can justify the claim that the manipulated agent is not morally responsible while the ordinarily determined agent is responsible. The conclusion is that an agent is not morally responsible if he’s causally determined to act by factors beyond his control even if he satisfies the compatibilist conditions.15
My multiple-case version of such a manipulation argument first of all develops examples of an action that results from intentional deterministic manipulation and in which the prominent compatibilist conditions on moral responsibility are satisfied. In the setup, in each of four cases an agent commits a crime, murder, for self-interested reasons. The cases are designed so that the action conforms to the compatibilist conditions. For instance, the action meets a condition advocated by David Hume (1739/1978; cf. Hobbes, 1654, Ayer 1954): the agent is not compelled to act by other agents or constrained by other factors such as drugs (cf., Paul Russell 2020). The action also satisfies the rationality condition proposed by John Fischer (1982, 1994): the agent’s desires can be modified by, and some of them arise from, his rational consideration of his reasons, and if he understood that the bad consequences for himself that would result from the crime would be much more severe than they are actually likely to be, he would have refrained from the crime for that reason.
The individual manipulation cases serve to indicate that it’s possible for an agent to be morally non-responsible in the basic desert sense even if the
15 Manipulation arguments of this sort have been set out by Richard Taylor (1974), Robert Kane (1985, 1996), Carl Ginet (1990), Derk Pereboom (1995, 22–6; 2001, 110–20; 2014, 71–103), Noa Latham (2004), and Al Mele (2006, 2008).
compatibilist conditions are satisfied, and that, as a result, these conditions are insufficient for such moral responsibility, contrary to what the compatibilist claims. The argument gains additional force by virtue of setting out three such manipulation cases, each of which is progressively more like a fourth, in which the action is causally determined in an ordinary and natural way; that is, by virtue of the past and the laws. The cases are set up so that there is no difference relevant to basic desert moral responsibility between any two adjacent cases. So if it’s agreed that the agent isn’t morally responsible in the first case, this feature of the argument will make it difficult to affirm that he is responsible in the final, ordinary case.
Here are the four cases:
Case 1: A team of neuroscientists has the ability to manipulate Professor Plum’s neural states at any time by radio technology. In this particular case, they do so by pressing a button just before he begins to reason about his situation, which they know will produce in him a neural state that realizes a strongly egoistic reasoning process, which they know will deterministically result in his decision to kill White. Plum would not have killed White had the neuroscientists not intervened, since his reasoning would then not have been sufficiently egoistic to produce this decision.
Case 2: Plum is just like an ordinary human being, except that a team of neuroscientists programmed him at the beginning of his life so that his reasoning is often but not always egoistic (just as it is in Case 1), and at times strongly so, with the intended consequence that in his current circumstances he will be causally determined to engage in the process of deliberation that results in his decision to kill White for egoistic reasons.
Case 3: Plum is an ordinary human being, except that the training practices of his community causally determined the nature of his deliberative reasoning processes so that they are frequently but not exclusively egoistic. The resulting deliberative process is exactly as it is in Cases 1 and 2: in his current circumstances he is causally determined to engage in the process of deliberation that results in his decision to kill White for egoistic reasons.
Case 4: Everything that happens in the universe is causally determined by virtue of its past states together with the laws of nature. Plum is an ordinary human being, raised in normal circumstances, but his reasoning processes are frequently but not exclusively egoistic, and sometimes strongly so (as in Cases 1–3). In his current circumstances he is causally determined to engage in the process of deliberation that results in his decision to kill White, for egoistic reasons.
Case 1 involves intentional manipulation that is local and causally determining, and is most likely of the cases to elicit a non-responsibility intuition. Case 2 is similar to Case 1, except that it restricts the deterministic manipulation to the beginning of the agent’s life. Case 3 is distinctive in that the deterministic manipulation results from community upbringing. Case 4 is the ordinary deterministic case in which the causal determination of the action is not intentional, but results from the past and the laws. Case 4 is the kind of case about which compatibilists standardly claim that the agent is morally responsible despite being causally determined to act by factors beyond his control.
However, in Case 1, is Plum morally responsible in the basic desert sense for the crime? In this situation it seems clear that Plum is a causally determined victim of the conniving neuroscientists, and that he is not responsible. Are there responsibility-relevant differences between Cases 1 and 2 that would justify claiming that Plum is non-responsible in Case 1 but is responsible in Case 2? It was my aim to set out the cases so that it isn’t possible to draw a difference relevant to the sort of responsibility at issue between any two adjacent cases. Given this absence of relevant differences, if Plum is not responsible in Case 1, he isn’t in Cases 2, 3, and 4 either. I contend that the best explanation for Plum’s non-responsibility (and for our intuitions of non-responsibility) in each case is that he is causally determined to act by factors beyond his control. This is the argument’s anticompatibilist conclusion.
A number of objections to this argument have been raised, but one prominent concern claims that the difference between intentional manipulation by other agents and naturalistic determination is relevant to moral responsibility in the basic desert sense (e.g., Lycan 1987; Feltz 2013; Murray and Lombrozo 2015). Accordingly, a compatibilist might cite this as a justification for claiming that Plum is not responsible in this sense in Cases 1 and 2, but is in the ordinary Case 4. One might test this hypothesis by having subjects imagine further cases that are exactly the same as Case 1 or Case 2, except that the states at issue are instead produced nonintentionally. Gunnar Björnsson, for instance, constructs a scenario where all the prominent compatibilist conditions on moral responsibility are satisfied but in which a cause that isn’t an agent—an infection—slowly renders the agent in the example increasingly egoistic without bypassing or undermining his agential capacities. Björnsson predicted that if subjects were prompted to view the agent’s behavior as dependent on this non-agential cause, attributions of responsibility would be undermined to roughly the same extent as in cases of an intentional manipulator. This turned out to be true: in a study involving 416 subjects, the infection undermined attributions of free will
