Just Deserts. Daniel C. Dennett
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for rational response to stimuli in our natural and social environment, which has developed in our species in its evolutionary history and matures in individuals as they become adults. This is clearly a valuable capacity, and I think that Dennett’s proposal is defensible.
But a question that arises about Dennett’s characterization is whether it works for dividing the sides in the debate. Because few believe that Dennett’s notion of free will is incompatible with determinism, his definition results in a challenge for defining compatibilism so that it’s controversial. Caruso, by contrast, defines free will as the control in action required for attributions of desert in its basic form, as do a number of other participants in the current debate. In the basic form of desert, someone who has acted wrongly deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because she has acted for morally bad reasons, and someone who has acted rightly deserves credit or praise and perhaps reward just because she has acted for morally good reasons. Such desert is basic because these desert claims are fundamental in their justification; they are not justified by virtue of further considerations, such as anticipated good consequences of implementing them. According to Caruso, in order to facilitate the free will debate, so that there are substantial numbers of participants on each side, free will should be defined as the control in action required for basically deserved praise and blame, reward and punishment.
Dennett and Caruso disagree about the prevalence of the notion of basic desert. By contrast with Dennett, Caruso believes it is widespread. He supports his view by using a thought experiment that derives from Immanuel Kant, in which there are no good consequences to be achieved by punishing a wrongdoer (1785: Part II). Here is a version of such an example. Imagine that someone on an isolated island brutally murders everyone else on that island, and that he is not capable of moral reform, due to his inner hatred and rage. Add that it is not possible for him to escape the island, and no one else will ever visit because it’s too remote. There is no longer a society on the island whose rules might be determined by a social contract aimed at good consequences, since the society has been disbanded. Do we have the intuition that this murderer still deserves to be punished? If so, then punishment would be basically deserved if the example in fact does eliminate the options for non-basic desert, as it seems to.
But on Dennett’s side, do we want to define “free will” so that anyone who rejects basic desert counts as denying free will, or so that anyone who denies that we have the control in action required for attributions of basic desert counts as denying free will? Perhaps enough of the role that the concept “free will” has in our thought and practice would survive the rejection of basic desert and the control in action required for it. We have many concepts that we’ve retained even though we’ve revised how they are characterized, say due to scientific advance.
Dennett contends that enough of the role of the concept “free will” would indeed survive the rejection of basic desert because we have a notion of non-basic desert that can do the work we want. Practice-level justifications for blame and punishment invoke considerations of desert, while that desert is not basic because at a higher level the practice is justified by good anticipated consequences, such as deterrence of wrongdoing and moral formation of wrongdoers. On Dennett’s account, our practice of holding agents morally responsible in this non-basic desert sense should be retained because doing so would have the best overall consequences relative to alternative practices.
One might object that penalties and rewards justified by anticipated consequences on Dennett’s model do not really qualify as genuinely deserved, since on such a view they ultimately function as incentives. In reply, citing the type of analogy Dennett provides in the exchange, it seems legitimate to say that someone who commits a foul in a sport deserves the penalty for that foul. But such sports-desert isn’t basic – it’s instead founded in considerations about how the particular sport works best. Similarly, suppose penalties for criminal behavior are justified on deterrence grounds, by the anticipated good consequence of safety. Imagine that lawyers and judges consider only backward-looking reasons to convict and punish, while their practice is justified on forward-looking grounds that lawyers and judges never consider or invoke. Arguably, it then would make sense for the lawyers and judges to think of the penalties as deserved.
Accordingly, the exchange between Dennett and Caruso involves substantive issues, and some conceptual and verbal issues as well. The conceptual issues are important, and their resolution depends on whether the role of the relevant concepts can be retained. Neither Dennett nor Caruso contends that the role of the concept of “basic desert” in justifying actual practice is worth preserving. But Dennett argues that “desert” and its role should be retained, while Caruso disagrees. Throughout the exchange, separating the verbal and conceptual from the substantive issues is a challenge, as it is generally in philosophy. Caruso and Dennett take it on in the classic way, by regularly prodding each other to clarify terms.
My sense is that Caruso’s and Dennett’s positions are substantively quite close on the basics of the free will debate, but that they do differ on other matters, such as the value of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, the discussion of which is especially intense. They also diverge on recommendations for treatment of criminals, despite both agreeing that current American practice requires serious reform. But it is not clear whether they differ on this issue because Dennett endorses justifications in terms of desert, while Caruso rejects them, or for some other reason. The reader will enjoy sorting out these issues in this valuable and timely dialogue.
Preface
The genesis of this book can be traced back to May of 2018, at a rooftop bar in Beirut, Lebanon, where the two of us first met and spent an enjoyable evening eating, drinking, and debating our respective views on free will during a conference on moral psychology at the American University of Beirut. We stayed in touch after that conference and eventually decided to work out our differences in the form of a conversation or debate, which resulted in a published exchange in Aeon Magazine on October 4, 2018 under the title: “Just Deserts: Can we be held morally responsible for our actions? Yes, says Daniel Dennett. No, says Gregg Caruso. Reader, you decide.” After that exchange was published, Pascal Porcheron from Polity Books approached us about continuing our conversation and expanding it into a book. We both agreed to the project immediately, since we have mutual respect for each other and thought there would be great value in continuing our conversation. The result is this book. It begins with a brief introduction in which Caruso discusses the problem of free will and defines some terminology. This is designed to aid readers unfamiliar with the problem of free will and to provide a brief summary of the various positions on the issue. The introduction is followed by three separate exchanges. The first is an edited and expanded version of our initial Aeon exchange, while the second and third are new and appear here for the first time.
D. D. and G. C.
Introduction
Gregg D. Caruso
The problem of free will has real-world implications for our self-understanding, our interpersonal relationships, and our moral and legal practices. The assumption that we have free will lurks behind the justification of many of our everyday attitudes and judgments. For instance, when someone morally wrongs us, not only do we experience resentment and moral anger, we typically feel that we are justified in doing so, since we assume that, absent any excusing conditions, people are free and morally responsible for what they do and are therefore appropriate targets for such responses. We also typically assume that when individuals “act of their own free will,” they justly deserve to be praised and blamed, punished and rewarded for their actions since they are morally responsible for what they do. Similar assumptions are made in the criminal law. The US Supreme Court, for instance, has asserted: “A ‘universal and persistent’ foundation stone in our system of law, and particularly in our approach to punishment, sentencing, and incarceration, is the ‘belief in freedom of the human will and a consequent ability and duty of the normal individual to choose between good and evil’” (United States v. Grayson, 1978). But does free will really exist? What if it turns out that no one is ever free