A Strawsonian look at desert

Abstract

P.F. Strawson famously argued that reactive attitudes and ordinary moral practices justify moral assessments of blame, praise, and punishment. Here we consider whether Strawson's approach can illuminate the concept of desert. After reviewing standard attempts to analyze this concept and finding them lacking, we suggest that to deserve something is to justifiably receive a moral assessment in light of certain criteria – in particular, eligibility criteria (a subject's properties that make the subject principally eligible for moral assessments) and assignment criteria (particulars about the subject, act, and circumstances that justify assessments such as blame in a particular case). Strawson's analysis of the ordinary attitudes and practices of moral assessment hints at these criteria but does not unequivocally ground a notion of desert. Following Strawson's general naturalistic approach, we show that recent psychological research on folk concepts and practices regarding freedom, moral responsibility, and blame illuminates how people actually arrive at moral assessments, thus revealing the very eligibility criteria and assignment criteria we suggest ground a concept of desert. By pushing the Strawsonian line even further than Strawson did, by empirically investigating actual moral practice and folk understandings, we can illuminate desert and lend credence to Strawson's general anti-metaphysical position.

Keywords:

• free will
• determinism
• responsibility
• blame
• folk concepts
• desert

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Big Questions in Free Will project, supported by the John Templeton Foundation/FSU Research Foundation (Prime Award No. 15462/Subaward SCI05 and Subaward TU03). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. We also thank the Princeton University Center for Human Values, George Sher, Derk Pereboom, and anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes

In this paper, ‘Strawson’ will always refer to P.F. Strawson. When we mention Galen Strawson, we will always indicate this by explicitly referring to him as such or as G. Strawson.

The act that is the desert base is usually thought by many to precede desert, but see Feldman (1995) for an alternative view.

With respect to moral responsibility, it is useful to distinguish between what Pereboom (2001) calls ‘basic’ and ‘non-basic’ desert, where desert is basic in the sense that an agent would deserve blame just in virtue of having performed the action in the way in which he did and not just in virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations. Only the former is truly at issue in the context of determinism and the free will debate, and it is this notion with which we concern ourselves here.

The idea of criteria can be pushed in interesting directions. For example, in addition to moral desert, we also talk of people deserving respect, admiration, compensation, etc. – all of which vary in their criteria of justification and certainly differ from criteria of moral assignments of blame, praise, etc. Framing desert in this way allows a unified account of moral and nonmoral desert.

In other words, for a moral assessment (e.g. praise, blame) of an agent to be deserved, the object of the assessment (e.g. a behavior, an outcome) must be something that the agent was morally responsible for.

There are complications in determining exactly what is involved in being morally responsible for an event – with control being only one, and an imperfect, index of responsibility. We will take up this thorny issue further below.

Not everyone agrees with the RR (Feldman 1995, 1996). For example, Feldman and Vilhauer (Feldman 1995; Vilhauer 2009) have argued that personhood is a desert base that is independent of responsibility. People are not responsible for being people; that is just something that happened to them. However, the argument goes, just in virtue of being persons, individuals deserve respect, autonomy, and basic human rights. Thus, some things are deserved even if the subject has no control over the desert base. However, a careful analysis of desert suggests that human rights are properly seen as entitlements, not objects of moral desert. Freiman and Nichols (2011), after introducing the brute luck constraint, used findings from a survey to question whether moral common sense really is committed to this constraint. They found that when participants were asked in the abstract to ‘suppose that some people make more money than others solely because of genetic advantages’, participants judged this as unfair and that those people did not deserve the extra money, consistent with the brute luck constraint. By contrast, when asked about a concrete case, in which two specific individuals were described as having differential monetary success because of their different talents or capacities, which they had solely because of differences in their genetics, participants made quite different judgments: They judged that the more talented individual did deserve greater financial rewards, thus seemingly rejecting the brute luck constraint. However, the concrete case in this survey was described as a rich causal chain: from genetics to dispositions to effort to action to popularity to monetary reward, whereas the abstract case described monetary rewards directly because of genetics. Thus, the abstract case met none of the candidate criteria of responsibility whereas the concrete case met several. Moreover, monetary reward for talent-based performance is arguably not a moral desert but a societal entitlement. Thus, it is doubtful whether these results call into question the RR.

Some may disagree with this anti-pragmatic conception of desert. If one believes that social utility has an evolutionary dimension, a species that has these kinds of concepts and practices might survive more successfully in increasingly large communities than a species that does not have those concepts and practices. Our moral concepts and practices may have allowed the growth of culture from small to large communities. While this does not demonstrate that the practice is just or fair within a broader normative framework, it is a plausible naturalistic account that clarifies the genesis and utility of the practices.

More recently, there has been some debate regarding whether the kinds of abilities that are compatible with determinism are the ones necessary for free will and/or moral responsibility (see Clarke 2009).

Thus, although Strawson does not frame his argument in terms of eligibility and assignment criteria, his discussion of capacities on the one hand, and of the excusing conditions for suspending our reactive attitudes on the other, nicely illustrates the two classes of criteria.

Others have followed Strawson in this belief. Miller, for instance, claims that the basis for appraising attitudes (a class of attitudes that include the reactive attitudes Strawson discusses, but may extend more widely) coincides with bases for desert (Miller 1976). His view, like Strawson's, is that the triggers for our appraising attitudes are sufficient justification for holding them.

That Strawson considers this internal justification sufficient is evident when, for example, he writes:

It might be said that all this leaves the real question unanswered … It is a question about the rational justification of ordinary inter-personal attitudes in general. To this I shall reply, first, that such a question could seem real only to one who had utterly failed to grasp the purport of the preceding answer, the fact of our natural human commitment to ordinary inter-personal attitudes. This commitment is part of the general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases can come up for review within this general framework. (Strawson 1993)

See, for example, Parfit (2011), who argues that even if moral responsibility exists, we cannot deserve to suffer. Scanlon (2010) makes a similar point.

Some experiments seem inconsistent with this finding. For example, Nichols and Knobe (2007) suggest that, under certain circumstances, ordinary people give up their commitment to moral attributions if freedom is threatened by a deterministic universe. These circumstances, however, are entirely removed from ordinary moral practice. When pushed to imagine a universe in which ‘each decision has to happen the way that it does’ and asked whether it is ‘possible for a person to be fully morally responsible for their actions’, they are willing to say No. However, when their normal moral thinking is engaged by a concrete case of a man who ‘stabs his wife and children to death so that he can be with his secretary’, then even in a deterministic universe, 50–72% of respondents insist that the man is ‘fully morally responsible’. (See also Roskies and Nichols 2008, in which people were willing to ascribe responsibility and blame when the deterministic universe was our own.) Many questions can be raised about such studies, including the considerable experimental demands, ambiguous terms (e.g. ‘fully morally responsible’?), limited response options, and confounds of transgression severity. However, we certainly consider it the right approach to clarify people's assumptions and interpretations empirically, rather than ‘from the armchair’. Philosophical manipulation arguments (e.g. Pereboom 2001) have also been used to challenge compatibilist views; however, they tend to complicate the picture by adding other intentional agents.

If the event is a behavior, the agent judgment comes for free.

Eligibility considerations are located in the model in at least two places: as part of the causal agency node (‘Was the event caused by an eligible agent?’) and as part of the capacity component. See Malle, Guglielmo, and Monroe (2012, 316, 318), for more details.

Is the folk conception of choice consistent or inconsistent with determinism? Some of emerging data (Monroe, Dillon, and Malle 2013) suggest that ascriptions of choice presuppose having options or reasonable alternatives, which then raises questions about the status of such ‘alternative possibilities’. Choice among options may involve the intelligibility of counterfactuals, and counterfactuals (such as ‘he could have avoided the harmful outcome’) are reconcilable with determinism. Moreover, counterfactuals may psychologically function as mental simulations, serving as much the understanding of past behaviors as the guidance for similar future behaviors. However, no empirical data are currently available on these issues.

In many cases in which we ordinarily use the term ‘deserve’ (e.g. deserving a day off, a raise, an answer), we in fact mean ‘is entitled to’, which is a distinct concept (Feinberg 1970). However, there is a second, derivative meaning of deserve that characterizes responses other than social blame or praise that an agent faces – such as being struck by misfortune after a wrongdoing or unexpected fortune after a life of selfless dedication. Such cases of ‘poetic justice’ are best analyzed as substituting a worldly event of a certain degree of valence for a social−moral blame or praise response of that degree of valence. Presumably people go through very similar information processing of the agent's (im)moral act (in terms of causal−mental criteria) as in the case of human moral responses, and they apply some calculus of ‘proportional’ worldly outcomes to determine whether the agent ‘deserved’ a given outcome. Proportional means nothing but a reliable correlation (holding constant causal−mental criteria) between the rank-ordered severity of moral norm violations and the rank-ordered severity of worldly outcomes (obviously, these rank orderings will be influenced by historical, cultural, and idiosyncratic factors). This secondary meaning of deserving thus exhibits the same structure as the primary meaning: an agent's (im)moral behavior is analyzed in terms of causal−mental criteria that dictate an appropriate, justified, and thus deserving (here, worldly) response.