Just Deserts. Daniel C. Dennett. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Daniel C. Dennett
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509545773
Скачать книгу
whether the moral responsibility system has the forward-looking benefits you maintain” (Bedau’s point two) and “it remains an empirical question whether, on balance, we would be better off without a system of desert. I believe we would be” (Bedau’s point three). Indeed, these are open empirical questions, but not very open! I cannot see how you can think we would be better off without a system of desert – unless you are granting me my kind of desert and merely saying we’d be better off without some as yet undescribed sort of “basic” desert (and I am quite sure we are better off without that). For without my kind of desert, no one would deserve to receive the prize they competed for in good faith and won, no one would deserve to be blamed for breaking solemn promises without excuse, no one would deserve to have their driver’s license revoked for drunk-driving, no one would deserve punishment for lying under oath, and so forth. There would be no rights, no recourse to authority to protect against fraud, theft, rape, murder. In short, no morality.

      I was astonished by your sentence: “For the free will skeptic, it is never fair to treat anyone as morally responsible, no matter how reasonable, competent, self-efficacious, strong-willed and clear-sighted that person may be.” Do you really want to return humanity to the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish and short? If you have some other vision of how a stable, secure, and just state can thrive without appeal to moral responsibility, you owe us the details. Waller, in The Injustice of Punishment (2018), makes a brave attempt to do that, but even he concedes that you cannot have such a society without punishment, as announced by the title of his Chapter 2: “The Unjust Necessity of Punishment.” Well, if punishment is a necessity, it isn’t a logical or physical necessity; it’s a necessity for a viable state in which as much justice as practically possible might be achieved. In what way would such a necessity be “unjust”? In the same way, it seems to me, that it is “unfair” that everyone can’t be above average – in beauty, strength, intelligence, whatever. Life is tough, but not ipso facto unjust, and we can use our reason to make life, and its institutions, more and more just, more and more fair, a better world for all.

      You go on to say: “I cannot see how you can think we would be better off without a system of desert.” Well, for me, the notion of basic desert, which has been my target all along, is a pernicious one that does more harm than good. If that is not the sense of desert you have in mind, then so be it. But my claim is that basic-desert moral responsibility, and with it the notion of just deserts, is too often used to justify punitive excess in criminal justice, to encourage treating people in severe and demeaning ways, and to excuse and perpetuate social and economic inequalities. Consider, for example, punitiveness. Researchers have found that stronger belief in free will is correlated with increased punitiveness. They also found that weakening one’s belief in free will makes them less retributive in their attitudes about punishment (for details, see Shariff et al. 2013; Clark et al. 2014; Clark et al. 2018; Clark, Winegard, and Sharrif 2019; Nadelhoffer and Tocchetto 2013). These empirical findings concern me.

      Caruso: I would also like to explore further your thoughts on determinism, since thus far we’ve said very little about it. Determinism,