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

Автор: Daniel C. Dennett
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Афоризмы и цитаты
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509545773
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up getting more playing time, and as they progress through the ranks they are selected for better teams and more elite programs, receive better coaching, and play more games against better competition. What begins as a small advantage, a mere matter of luck, snowballs and leads to an ever-widening gap of achievement and success.

      This kind of phenomenon can be found throughout society. Studies show, for instance, that low socioeconomic status in childhood can affect everything from brain development to life expectancy, education, incarceration rates, and income (see my Rejecting Retributivism, ch. 7 for a detailed discussion of the relevant literature). The same is true for educational inequity, exposure to violence, and nutritional disparities. It’s a mistake, then, to think that luck averages out in the long run – it does not.

      The problem with constitutive luck is that an agent’s endowments (i.e. traits and dispositions) result from factors beyond the agent’s control. Now, I’m sure you will say that as long as an agent takes responsibility for her endowments, dispositions, and values, over time she will become morally responsible for them (and perhaps even gain some control over them). The problem with this reply, however, is that the series of actions through which agents shape and modify their endowments, dispositions, and values are themselves significantly subject to luck – and, as Levy puts it: “We cannot undo the effects of luck with more luck” (2011: 96). Hence the very actions to which compatibilists point, the actions whereby agents take responsibility for their endowments, either express that endowment (when they are explained by constitutive luck) or reflect the agent’s present luck, or both. Either way, responsibility is undermined.

      People understand that. They would be incensed by a baseball umpire who took it upon himself to call strikes balls in order to bolster the ego of the depressed batter whose dying mother was watching from the stands, and they would be incensed – and properly so, I claim – by a judge who set aside damning evidence because the defendant had suffered enough already. Jury nullification is, of course, an example of the sort of bending of the rules which we all understand, and we understand it should be reserved for very special circumstances in which the laws, as they are written, fail to treat defendants fairly. The reason is that upholding the law and respect for the law is a key “forward-looking” policy. It is the maintenance of the credibility of the law and support for its provisions that governs all adjustments and limits all exemptions, for a straightforward reason: people are not angels, and will be clever (rational) and self-interested enough to explore for loopholes and ways of gaming the system. That is why the burden of proof of moral incompetence must rest on the defendant.

      So, is the concept I am defending any kind of desert? It is not “basic desert” – a chimera fantasized by philosophers, apparently. Praise (or royalties, or your paycheck) is not just encouragement or reinforcement, and blame (or fines or incarceration) is not just deterrence or therapy. You are entitled to the praise you get for your good deeds and to the paycheck you get for your doing your job; and the criticism, the shame, the blame you get if you offend common decency or violate the laws is quite justly and properly placed at your doorstep. That is not “retributive” punishment, I guess, but it hurts, and so it should.

      You claim that adopting my non-retributive defense of punishment would require that “major elements of the criminal justice system” would need to be abandoned. I don’t see it. What would be jeopardized? I myself have urged all along that we need major reform of our penal policies, drastically reducing sentences, eliminating the death penalty, and instituting many programs to help prisoners prepare for the resumption of their full rights of citizenship, but it would still be a system of punishment, not just enforced rehabilitation processes or quarantine. If a magic pill were invented that would turn any convict into a safe honest citizen, it would not obviate the need for punishment, for instance.

      In effect, you are stuck on the wrong side of a sorites puzzle: if I am born without moral responsibility, utterly dependent on the luck of genes and environment, then how can adding a smidgen of competence ever lead me to be responsible? Two grains of sand are not a pile or heap (sorites, in Greek), and adding another does not make a pile. When is there enough sand to make a pile? When does a man lose enough hair to be bald? The gradual accumulation of the grounds for being held responsible, and holding oneself responsible, has no