Merit, fit, and basic desert

Abstract

Basic desert is central to the dispute between compatibilists and incompatibilists over the four-case manipulation argument. I argue that there are two distinct ways of understanding the desert salient to moral responsibility; moral desert can be understood as a claim about fitting responses to an agent or as a claim about the merit of the agent. Failing to recognize this distinction has contributed to a stalemate between both sides. I suggest that recognizing these distinct approaches to moral desert will help clarify a central source of disagreement between compatibilists and incompatibilists and assist both sides in resolving the current stalemate.

Keywords:

• basic desert
• moral responsibility
• four-case argument
• manipulation
• compatibilism
• merit
• fit

Acknowledgments

I had benefitted from extensive comments and discussions of earlier drafts of this article with Randoph Clarke, Ben Miller, and Mareen Redies. I owe a huge debt to both Michael McKenna and Derk Pereboom for discussing the issues raised in this article with me. Feedback from anonymous reviewers was invaluable and greatly improved the final draft. Finally, I owe thanks to Maureen Sie and Myrthe van Nus for the work they have put in behind the scenes.

Notes

For examples of the manipulation argument, see Taylor (1963), Kane (1985), van Inwagen (1983), Double (1991), Hume (1772), Kane (1996) and Fischer and Ravizza (1998).

And it is likely that both Pereboom's (2001) four-case argument and Mele's (2006) zygote Argument involve manipulation cases that are good candidates for satisfying the most robust set of compatibilist-relevant conditions on moral responsibility and free action.

The conditions cover the major compatibilist accounts of agency. Specifically, Pereboom's (2005) conditions are that the murder is caused by desires originating in Plum's durable and constant character, the desire on which he acts is not irresistible, Plum's action conforms to his higher-order wholehearted commitments, Plum is reasons-responsive, and Plum can revise his character over time. In addition, Pereboom maintains that the existing set of conditions can be supplemented if it turns out that there is a required condition for moral responsibility that Plum fails to satisfy.

Note case two of the four-case argument is similiar to Mele's zygote argument. Pereboom has also suggested that he intends case two to parallel Mele's zygote case.

I do not mean to imply that there are only two ways to understand the desert involved in moral responsibility. I intend the less ambitious claim that there are at least two distinct ways to understand moral desert.

This raises a difficult question that I will not pursue here. It is possible that “desert” is simply not doing any work that is not already done by other terms. That is, may be the fact that desert is so amorphous suggesting that what we really should do is replace the word with a less ambiguous term. When we really mean “fair”, we should use “fair”. And likewise for merit, entitlement, and other terms that desert might be substituting for.

For example, several game shows (“Golden Balls”, “The Bachelor Pad”) include components based on the prisoner's dilemma. On both “Golden Balls” and “The Bachelor Pad”, the final round of competition involves contestants, who had previously played as teammates, being asked to make a choice to share their earnings with the remaining competitor or to keep the entire jackpot for themselves. If both contestants choose to share they split the jackpot evenly. If they both choose to keep they get nothing. If one shares and the other keeps, the keeper wins the entire jackpot. Occasionally, one contestant will choose to share and the other will choose to keep. In this scenario, one might claim that the contestant who kept the jackpot deserves the entire jackpot. They followed the rules of the game and they are now entitled to those winnings. But, given that, up until this point, they were part of a team, and their teammate enabled them to get to that final stage, it might not be fair for the winner not to share the jackpot.

One could object that I am interpreting basic in a non-standard way (thanks to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.) Typically, claiming x is basic is to claim that x cannot be fully explained or justified from more fundamental resources. This is, of course, true. Yet it is not overly clarifying of what Pereboom means to point out that basic desert cannot be fully explained from more fundamental resources. Pereboom claims that the desert at issue is basic in that the agent, to be morally responsible, would deserve the blame or credit just because she has performed the action, given sensitivity to its moral status. But what this means is unclear To clarify the distinction between non-basic and basic desert and the role basic is playing here, my tactic is to take what Pereboom says about basic desert as a single concept of desert with its own technical definition, albeit one picking out a common way of understanding the desert involved in moral responsibility. I then contrast that account of desert against competing accounts and stipulate that what Pereboom means is basic desert and any alternative accounts of desert are non-basic. I think this move allows me to get at the real question in this dispute, namely whether Pereboom and his opponents mean the same thing by desert. I am skeptical that the notion of desert that Pereboom utilizes is the same notion that his opponents are using but this is not because Pereboom is appealing to desert taken as a basic concept that cannot be fully explained or justified from more fundamental resources where as his opponents are appealing to desert that is explained or justified in terms of some other resources. Rather, I think the debate between Pereboom and his opponents is more fundamental than that. I think it is about the very nature of desert (as it bears on blameworthiness) itself.

The use of “comparative” may be confusing to some readers. It might be helpful to think it terms of a distinction between views of desert that are “relational” and those that are not relational. This way of explicating the distinction is Miller's and so I use his terminology. There may, of course, be an interesting distinction between a comparative notion of desert and a relational notion of desert, but that issue would go beyond the scope of this paper. If the reader prefers to draw a distinction between relational and comparative notions, that should not significantly affect my argument. The notion of desert that Pereboom develops does not seem relational or comparative, so may be, for readers who feel there is a crucial distinction here, I should properly be stating that basic desert is non-comparative, non-relational, and pre-institutional.

Given that basic desert is in need of further explication, it is plausible that basic desert could be construed as something other than merit. That would be consistent with my claim. I merely aim to establish that basic desert is not fit, but it may be merit.

As an example of how this would work, McKenna considers a justification for the harm involved in blaming an agent in terms of burdens that an agent shoulders in virtue of performing some morally wrong action. When the agent could have avoided performing the morally wrong action, she lacks grounds for reasonably objecting to having to bare them. McKenna's proposal is inspired by Scanlon (1998), but McKenna is careful to note that it departs from Scanlon's own views (2012, 221–2).

Here, McKenna suggests Lenman (2006). Lenman uses contractualist considerations to argue that the positive value of blaming practices is a by-product of a rational, hypothetical social contract. This provides a justification for a kind of institutional desert (McKenna 2012).

Again, for readers who draw a distinction between a comparative and a relational notion, this claim could be cast in terms of basic desert being non-relational whereas fit is essentially relational.

I owe this point to an anonymous reviewer.