Basic desert, conceptual revision, and moral justification

Abstract

I examine Manuel Vargas's revisionist justification for continuing with our responsibility-characteristic practices in the absence of basic desert. I query his claim that this justification need not depend on how we settle questions about the content of morality, arguing that it requires us to reject the Kantian principle that prohibits treating anyone merely as a means. I maintain that any convincing argument against this principle would have to be driven by concerns that arise within the sphere of moral theory itself, whereas Vargas's argument draws solely on concerns about the expensive metaphysics involved in a libertarian conception of freedom. I argue that this amounts not just to changing the concept of free will by stipulation, but also (more problematically) to changing our moral principles by stipulation.

Keywords:

• Manuel Vargas
• revisionism
• free will
• basic desert
• moral responsibility

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to anonymous reviewers and to Maureen Sie for helpful comments on this article.

Notes

However, the claim that this is the interesting sense of “desert” is not uncontested. According to Vargas, it's not obvious that desert is most fundamentally “basic” in the sense that it cannot be justified only on the basis of broadly consequentialist considerations (Vargas 2007a, 210). But the question of whether this notion is most “fundamental” appears misplaced. It's the sort of desert that's at issue, since other notions do not appear, even prima facie, to conflict with determinism or to be anchored in concerns about free will (Pereboom 2007, 86).

However, for a Strawsonian defense of the claim that we could not aim to do this, see Shabo (2012).

Of course, a question remains about how we get from statements about determinism to statements about a lack of free will. Here, incompatibilists differ: Leeway incompatibilists see the ability to do otherwise as central to free will, whereas source incompatibilists see the agent's status as the source of her own actions as the crucial feature. For the purposes of this discussion, it need not matter. The revisionist and the eliminativist agree that determinism poses an intuitive threat to free will. They disagree about the implications of this for our standard practices and attitudes.