New York, contemporary
Gregg Caruso
Nobody deserves to suffer for what they have done, in the sense that the suffering is good in itself. Criminal justice should work like public health: protect people from harm, prevent it at its causes, and restrict no one more than safety requires.
The view
Caruso, a philosopher at the State University of New York, Corning, is a free will sceptic. Like Derk Pereboom, he argues that we lack the free will required for basic desert: the idea that someone deserves blame or punishment just because they did wrong knowingly, not because of any good it does. He accepts that this is a radical conclusion, and has spent much of his work on what should replace retributive justice.
His answer, set out in Rejecting Retributivism (2021), is the public health-quarantine model. Society may quarantine a person carrying a dangerous disease, although they are not to blame for it, because the right to self-protection justifies it. By the same principle, it may incapacitate a dangerous offender, but only as far as safety requires, and with a duty to treat and rehabilitate. And, as in public health, the priority should be prevention: tackling poverty, poor education, abuse and the other social causes of crime.
The argument
If we would not punish a carrier of disease, we should not punish a dangerous person merely because they deserve it; we should protect ourselves and help them. After Caruso, Rejecting Retributivism (2021)
The model sets a limit that retributivism does not: the least restrictive measure that achieves safety. A person who is no longer dangerous should be released, whatever they did. Set the danger level below and see what the model allows.
In 2021 Caruso and Dennett published Just Deserts: Debating Free Will, a book-length exchange in which each set out his view and then replied to the other. It is the clearest head-to-head statement of the two positions, and Caruso's side of the debate is the main case against Dennett on the Do we deserve blame? page.
Where he meets Dennett
More than the debate's title suggests. Both reject retribution for its own sake, the idea that suffering balances a moral ledger. Both want a justice system that looks at causes and consequences, treats offenders humanely and abandons vengeance. Both agree on the science: no uncaused choices, no self-moving soul. Just Deserts shows how much of their policy they share.
Where they part
On desert, and on words. Dennett held that people can deserve blame and punishment in a real, though not metaphysical, sense: within a fair system whose rules they know and benefit from, the penalty is earned. Caruso thinks this is not desert at all, but a forward-looking justification wearing desert's clothes, and that keeping the word helps keep the old punitive attitudes alive. Dennett, in turn, feared that telling people they are not responsible would weaken the very self-control and mutual trust that make a free society work.
| Caruso | Dennett | |
|---|---|---|
| Is everything fixed by prior causes? | Perhaps; either way, we lack basic-desert free will. | Perhaps. Freedom does not depend on the answer. |
| Is free will compatible with determinism? | Not the free will needed for basic desert. | Yes. Every kind of freedom worth wanting survives determinism. |
| Do we have free will? | No, not of the kind that matters for desert. | Yes: an evolved capacity to act for reasons, which comes in degrees. |
| Does anyone deserve blame? | No. Justice should follow the public health-quarantine model. | Yes, within a fair system of rules that free agents have reason to accept. |
Further reading
- Daniel C. Dennett and Gregg D. Caruso, Just Deserts: Debating Free Will (Polity, 2021).
- Gregg D. Caruso, Rejecting Retributivism: Free Will, Punishment, and Criminal Justice (Cambridge, 2021).
- Skepticism about moral responsibility, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.