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The Three-Case Argument against the Moral Justificatory Significance of Basic Desert

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Abstract

This paper challenges the moral justificatory significance of the notion of basic desert. The notion of basic desert is commonly used in the literature to distinguish a specific sense of moral responsibility that depends on free will. In this sense, a person is morally responsible for an action if this action belongs to her in such a way that she would deserve to be blamed if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve to be praised if she understood that it was morally exemplary. The central question of the paper concerns the role of the notion of basic desert in moral justifications of social practices including responsibility practices. I argue that the significance sometimes attributed to the notion of basic desert is largely a byproduct of its isolation from a larger context of other moral reasons and moral justifications. First, I introduce the concepts of special and general moral justifications and defend the central assumption behind these concepts. Next, I present a three-case argument that challenges the justificatory moral significance of the notion of basic desert by considering various logical roles that it might play in the general moral justification of various social practices. Finally, I apply this argument to Derk Pereboom’s theory of hard incompatibilism in order to show that moral justification of the revisionary part of his project does not depend on the belief in free will necessary for moral responsibility in the sense of basic desert.

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Notes

  1. There are, in fact, many models of moral responsibility that are discussed in the context of the problem of free will: ultimate responsibility (Kane 1996), responsibility as accountability and responsibility as attributability (Watson 1996), responsibility as answerability (Shoemaker 2011), the conversational model of moral responsibility (McKenna 2012) and others. In this paper, I focus exclusively on the notion of basic desert. This notion was introduced in Feinberg (1970) and prominently developed by Derk Pereboom (Pereboom 2001, 2014). In this paper, in general, I follow Pereboom’s explication of this notion. The general overview of the topic of moral responsibility see (Talbert 2019).

  2. I prefer to talk about practices as relatively stable patterns of intentional agency that might be instantiated by various agents. These practices include the practices of moral blame and moral punishment which play a paradigmatic role in the discussion of free will and moral responsibility. However, in this paper, I often talk about social practices in general because the problem of the moral significance of the notion of basic desert, as I present it, concerns not only those practices that are directly associated with moral praise and moral blame. One might, for instance, think about religious practices that are related to the notion of basic desert, although they do not explicitly involve moral praise or moral blame. Responsibility practices themselves, however, might be much more diversified than various forms of praise and blame, punishment and reward. Thus, Scanlon (2008: 128-129) talks about modifications of relationship as an effect of holding responsible. This modification, however, might take a variety of forms quite different from the expressions of resentment, indignation or gratitude. In some cases, a morally justified modification of relationships might involve taking care of a blameworthy wrongdoer without expressing moral anger or indignation. “Taking care” in no way excludes “holding responsible”, on the contrary, while a wrongdoer is, in fact, responsible (e.g. if his behavior reflects his judgements) he might be considered an appropriate subject of care (see, however, for criticism of this sort of “civilizing” view of holding responsible in McGeer 2013).

  3. The notion of general moral justification is defined in the first section of the paper.

  4. Both consequentialist and contractualist reasons might be considered as moral reasons as opposed to epistemic, prudential or other sorts of reasons. However, one might claim that in some narrow sense of “moral” only, for instance, deontological reasons count as moral reasons. I will discuss this at the end of the first section.

  5. For a contractualist account of moral responsibility, see Scanlon (1998). For Scanlon’s discussion of the significance of desert-justifications, see Scanlon (2013). Contrary to Scanlon’s position, I argue that the justificatory (not explanatory) significance of desert justifications for moral responsibility practices (e.g. moral blame and gratitude) is as dubious as its significance for legal practices.

  6. See an account of moral responsibility based on the notion of fairness in Wallace (1996). Angela Smith discusses the relevance of the “considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability” for holding them responsible (see Smith 2007).

  7. It is important to emphasize that I do not argue that the justification by basic desert is in some sense “external” to all other types of reasons and justifications. I only assume that there are other sorts of moral considerations that are independently relevant to the moral justification of social practices. I further discuss this point at the end of the next section. On the alleged difference between “external” and “internal” challenges for moral justifications of social practices, see Pereboom (2014: 153-155).

  8. By morally significant practice I mean the practice that might be considered as morally right or morally wrong.

  9. There are, obviously, other sorts of justifications (e.g. the justification of the economic efficiency of some practices) and other sorts of reasons (e.g. prudential reasons). Some of these justifications and non-moral reasons might be relevant for moral justifications. To keep things clear, I talk only about moral reasons and moral justifications. However, one could argue that moral reasons are partially constituted by non-moral reasons and moral justifications partially depend on non-moral reasons and non-moral justifications. Nothing in what follows turns on this point.

  10. I do not take any stance here on the nature of moral reasons, or reasons in general.

  11. Surely, one is expected to explain in more detail the way in which the action should belong to the agent. However, this general account of basic desert serves here only to explain the idea of special justification.

  12. Moreover, Pereboom clearly states that many axiological judgements do not depend on the notion of basic desert (Pereboom 2014: 127), but axiological judgements are prima facie candidates for the role of moral reasons.

  13. One might also think about other configurations of special moral justifications. The three cases that I discuss are introduced to develop an argument against the moral justificatory significance of the notion of basic desert.

  14. In fact, I think this might generate some interesting results that would shed further light on the role of the notion of basic desert in the structure of moral justification of particular social practices.

  15. One can replace the practice of praising people for charity with any other practice that seems to be justified in all sorts of ways, except (possibly) the basic-desert type of justification. It is important however, that the first case does not involve controversial practices or practices that might be easily criticized independently of the notion of basic desert.

  16. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for drawing my attention to these issues.

  17. Many relevant ideas about the relation between the belief in free will and legal practices are discussed in Pereboom (2019).

  18. E.g. in the domain of religion where the belief in eternal damnation and related practices seem to depend on their general moral justification on the belief in basic desert. But even in these cases it requires a lot of work to explain how this might work and alternative explanations might be present (e.g. moral justifications of eternal damnation that do not appeal to the notion of free will).

  19. The importance of being aware of the moral status of the action might obviously be reduced to consequentialist and other types of moral reasons.

  20. For more on the reason-responsiveness account of moral responsibility see Fischer (2012).

  21. In fact, it seems that the discussions of basic desert tend to isolate it from other sorts of consideration, as in Pereboom’s definition above.

  22. Obviously, the notion of basic desert might have an important explanatory role. This explanatory role, however, should be clearly distinguished from the justificatory role if by moral justification we do not mean merely rationalization. I discuss this point in the next section.

  23. Here I do not want to engage in the discussion on whether it might be morally right to reject true belief while knowing that it would lead to morally wrong actions. This is a tricky question at the intersections of ethics and epistemology. I discussed it in another paper.

  24. Something very similar might be said about “rationalization” in a week sense (Davidson 1963). The belief in basic desert might show us the minimal rationality of the action (by supplying belief-part of the belief-desire pair of reasons for action) but this sort of rationalization is not equal to moral justification.

  25. One can, for instance, rationally justify the expressions of moral indignation as a way to deter the wrongdoer or as a way (probably, not very effective) to calm down.

  26. In fact, the argument in this section does not depend on whether a particular amelioration project is justified. My point here is that if some of these projects are well justified in terms of non-basic-desert reasons, then our having free will and being responsible in the sense of basic desert does not justify the rejection of this project.

  27. Pereboom makes a similar point (see Pereboom 2014: 152)

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sergei Levin, Elia Zardini and the reviewers of Philosophia for their extensive and very helpful comments. The text was prepared with the support of the Higher School of Economics, project "Naturalisation of Ethics: Natural Science Approaches to Free Will and Moral Responsibility".

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Correspondence to Aleksandr Mishura.

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Mishura, A. The Three-Case Argument against the Moral Justificatory Significance of Basic Desert. Philosophia 50, 1327–1340 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00442-3

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