Blame and punishment

Do we deserve blame?

The free will debate matters most where it meets the law. If nobody could have done otherwise, can anyone deserve punishment? Dennett said yes, in the only sense of desert worth having. His critics say the word should go, and the prisons should change with it.

A painted allegory of Justice: a crowned woman enthroned in a Gothic niche, holding a small figure in each hand on balanced scales, with a frieze of peaceful scenes below — Giotto, *Justice*, c. 1305. Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. One of the virtues painted along the chapel's lower walls. In one hand Justice holds a figure being rewarded; in the other, one being punished.Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Why punish?

There are three classic answers. Retributivists, of whom Kant is the most famous, say that wrongdoers deserve to suffer in proportion to their wrongdoing, and that this is reason enough, whether or not any good comes of it. Consequentialists, from Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham onwards, say that punishment is justified only by its effects: deterring crime, protecting the public, reforming offenders. And P. F. Strawson said that blame is first of all an attitude, resentment or indignation at ill will, and that our practices express these attitudes rather than resting on a theory.

The free will debate bears most directly on the first answer. Retribution in its strong form needs what philosophers now call basic desert: that someone deserves to suffer simply because they knowingly did wrong. If basic desert requires a freedom nobody has, retribution loses its foundation.

Dennett: the moral agents' club

Dennett accepted that nobody has the kind of freedom that would make cosmic, ultimate desert possible. But he argued that desert of another kind survives. A society of free people runs on rules that everyone knows, that everyone benefits from, and that include penalties for breaking them. Someone who knowingly breaks the rules has earned the penalty, in the same plain sense in which a footballer who handles the ball in the area has earned a penalty against his side. Nobody needs to settle the metaphysics of football first.

Membership of this club, Dennett pointed out, is something almost everyone wants. Being held responsible is the price of being trusted, of being free to make your own agreements and run your own life. The alternative, being treated as someone to be managed rather than reasoned with, is what we impose on small children and on people who have lost their reason, and nobody else wants it. So the practice is justified forward-looking, by its benefits, but it still makes room for a backward-looking verdict: you did it, you knew the rule, the penalty is yours.

Caruso: the quarantine model

Gregg Caruso, following Derk Pereboom, replied in their book Just Deserts (2021) that Dennett's desert is not desert at all, but a forward-looking justification wearing desert's clothes. If punishment is justified by the benefits of the system, then it is limited by those benefits, and the backward-looking verdict adds nothing except the old punitive attitudes. Better, he says, to drop the word and adopt the public health-quarantine model: incapacitate dangerous people only as far as safety requires, in humane conditions, and put most of the effort into preventing crime at its social causes.

The two agreed on more than they expected. Both reject retribution for its own sake, both want shorter and more humane sentences, and both want justice to attend to causes. Their disagreement is about whether the language of desert should be kept and reformed, or retired.

Four hard cases

Theories of blame are tested by hard cases. Choose a case to see how seven views on this site would judge it. The verdicts are our reading of each view, not quotations, and several of these thinkers never discussed these particular cases.

Choose a case.

Notice the pattern. Everyone agrees about the tumour, and almost everyone agrees about the child: excuses and exemptions that point to damaged or immature capacities are common ground. The real disagreement is about the ordinary cases, the drunk driver and the young man with a hard start. Compatibilists say a person with normal capacities is responsible, however those capacities came about. Sceptics say that the tumour case only makes vivid what is true of everyone: we are all the products of causes we did not choose.

What the law does

The law has never waited for philosophers to settle the matter. In England and Wales, the M'Naghten rules of 1843 still define the insanity defence: a defendant is not responsible if, because of a disease of the mind, they did not know the nature of what they were doing, or did not know that it was wrong. The age of criminal responsibility is ten in England and Wales and twelve in Scotland. Both tests are about capacities, what a person could understand and control, not about whether their acts had causes.

That is the strongest point in Dennett's favour. The practice of responsibility, in law as in daily life, has always tracked capacities and their absence, in degrees, case by case. The sceptics' strongest point is that the science of those capacities keeps growing, and that each new discovery, like the tumour, moves another case from the column of blame to the column of treatment. Where the line should finally fall is the question this whole site has been asking.