Desert

My subject is the theory of blame recently propounded by George Sher in his book, In Praise of Blame. I argue that although Sher has succeeded in capturing a number of genuine features of the concept of blame, there is an important element that he has omitted, which is the fact that necessarily, when A blames B for something and expresses this to B, A will realise that B is likely to find this unpleasant. The inclusion of the latter element (...) renders the question of whether any agent ever deserves blame a more open one than Sher allows. (shrink)

'What addiction is, is very complicated', writes Owen Flanagan in the final chapter of his important new book, What is it like to be an addict? (p. 237). In many ways, the phrase condenses the outlook, style, and intellectual attitude that Flanagan brings to the various debates concerning substance addiction addressed in the book. At the core of Flanagan's Integrative theory is a picture of addiction as a fundamentally heterogeneous, multifarious, plural set of phenomena, not amenable to any single type (...) of causal explanation. This picture is carefully outlined in Flanagan's characteristic writing style, using plain, straightforward language. And it is motivated by a concern for staying true to the (various kinds of) relevant facts rather than arguing for the superiority of any local, partial perspective on the ample set of issues being discussed. (shrink)

Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement is about “healing and action. Everything else is a distraction” (Burke 2019). That is, Burke helps people develop local resources for survivors of sexual violence, and local strategies for the prevention of sexual violence: healing and action. This essay is focused on Burke’s “community healing circles.” These are small groups of people who meet to talk about the sexual violence they have suffered. Using her own theory of insults, Daly describes the damaging insult that results from (...) sexual violence, and proposes an explanation of how Burke’s community healing circles help survivors to overcome that harm. She then briefly considers how similar practices could be used in other contexts. Her central contention is that sexual violence expresses a profound lack of respect, and that this tends to diminish survivors’ sense of self-worth. Sharing these experiences with similarly-situated people can help survivors recover their dignity. She proposes two mechanisms involved in this recovery: First, being treated with respect counters the tendency to believe that one does not deserve respect. Second, understanding your experiences can be easier when you see them reflected in another. (shrink)

Can luck even partially determine how much praise and blame a person deserves? In a monograph and subsequent articles, I have argued that the answer is ‘yes’ for certain kinds of luck, and so I have argued that several types of moral luck exist. In this paper, I defend my view against the novel challenge that expected desert levels give everyone exactly equal moral opportunities, and so luck in circumstance and constitution cannot provide some people with better or worse moral (...) opportunities than others. I argue, however, that the Equal Moral Opportunity View is subject to counterintuitive implications (for example, it rules out supererogatory actions in circumstances with no blameworthy options) and cannot realize its ambition to immunize morality from unfairness. These costs form part of my argument that the Moral Luck View is more plausible. (shrink)

Derk Pereboom’s book, Wrongdoing & the Human Emotions, addresses how we ought to respond to wrongdoing given the lack of basic-desert moral responsibility, falsity of retributivism, and the metaphysical and moral problems with moral anger. The book is outstanding. Pereboom’s arguments are important, interesting, powerful, and very well-written. Despite this, his specific arguments fail because basic-desert responsibility-skepticism makes non-consequentialism is false.

This paper begins by bringing love and hate into tension via the ideal that you ought to love your enemy. The trouble with loving your enemy is that they may seem to merit hate instead, especially in cases of serious injustice. I develop this simple thought into a challenge for loving your enemy: that you cannot be required to do what makes no sense to you. This challenge is not adequately met by extant explanations for why you ought to love (...) your enemy within the Christian tradition and its heirs, which tend to give reasons that are either insufficient or else instrumentalize love. The second half of the paper presents a solution with a very different shape to the challenge. I argue that love may still be fitting even when your enemy fails to merit love, notwithstanding the contemporary orthodoxy about fittingness. What makes it fitting to love your enemy depends on the fact (if it is one) that you yourself have received unmerited love. You may thereby have reason to exclude the issue of merit from consideration; what is more, you have reason to love out of gratitude for the unmerited love that you yourself received. (shrink)

A common idea, both in ordinary discourse and in the desert literature, is that wages can be deserved. The thought is not only highly intuitive, but it is also often appealed to in order to explain various injustices in employment income – pay gaps, for instance. In this paper, I challenge the idea that income from employment is the kind of thing that can be deserved. I argue that once one gets clear on the metaphysics of jobs and wages within (...) the context of economic exchange more generally, there are natural principles concerning such exchanges which generate puzzles for that view. The puzzles, I argue, are especially acute for meritocrats who conceive of justice in wages in terms of desert. Additionally, I argue that appealing to dignity (rather than desert) offers better hope of explaining the kinds of injustices in wages that motivate the appeal to desert. In that case, no explanatory gap is left by abandoning the idea that wages can be deserved either, and so, I argue, we have good reason to doubt it. (shrink)

Retributive theories of punishment hold that moral desert is a necessary and sufficient condition for punishment. This principle has been justified in light of rectifying a 'balance of justice' upset by wrongdoing. Many opposed to retributivism, such as Nussbaum, have argued such a ‘balance’ is nothing more than ‘magical’ thinking and retributivism is, in fact, positively harmful. On the contrary, I will argue that there is a compelling way to make sense of that intuition. The Chinese Neo-Confucian tradition and medieval (...) Latin theologian Thomas Aquinas hold that moral wrongs upset a normative order of relationships and, in this respect, disrupt the order that ought to exist in the human community. Despite criticisms that retributivism about punishment requires outlandish metaphysical assumptions, I therefore propose the theory remains plausible without any such appeal. (shrink)

This paper examines Susan Wolf's account of "the Reason View" of moral responsibility as articulated and defended in 'Freedom Within Reason' (OUP 1990). The discussion turns on two questions about the Reason View: -/- (1) Does the Reason View aim to satisfy what Bernard Williams describes as “morality” and its (“peculiar”) conception of responsibility and blame? -/- (2) If it does, how successful is the Reason View judged in these terms? -/- It is argued that if the Reason View aims (...) to satisfy “morality” in respect of its understanding of deserved blame -- as it seems to -- then it fails for reasons similar to those that apply to R. J. Wallace’s 'rational self-control' model. On the other hand, if Wolf’s Reason View does not aim to satisfy “morality” in this respect then it might well rest satisfied with the more limited conditions of Wallace’s Reflective Self-Control model, which in contrast with the Reason View, does not appeal to the (problematic) apparatus of asymmetry and PAP. The paper concludes by drawing a contrast between the Reason View and a more "realistic" conception of responsibility, as suggested by the critique of “the morality system” and the more radical "recasting" of our ethical concepts that it proposes. -/- . (shrink)

[In Press - forthcoming 2026. ] The primary aim of this book is to provide the general reader with an overview of the main issues that arise relating to our understanding of matters of moral responsibility. Much of this study is constructed around a fundamental tension that we all must deal with in relation to this subject. From one point of view, moral responsibility permeates every aspect of human life - both in its public and its private dimensions. Beginning in (...) childhood, and continuing throughout our lives, we are immersed in a web of evaluations, attitudes, and practices that are evidence of our systematic and deep commitment to moral responsibility. From another point of view, when we critically reflect on our ordinary experience of moral responsibility, we encounter puzzles and perplexities concerning what moral responsibility actually involves, and what sort of justification it requires or that it can be provided with. This process is liable to push us into scepticism about its very possibility or intelligibility. We may be driven to worry about the death of moral responsibility as others have worried about the death of God. It is this philosophical dimension of moral responsibility that this study is especially concerned with. Although this slim volume cannot claim to offer any formulas or solutions for dealing with the various particular practical problems that readers may have, the discussion provided aims to discredit – or at least cast doubt on - some powerful illusions that continue to influence and distort much of our current thinking about this subject. This includes a misplaced scepticism about moral responsibility, which enjoys some currency in contemporary philosophy and some other related fields. When we discard these illusions, and remove the confusions that they generate, we will, hopefully, be better placed to deal with the practical problems and difficulties that we face in a more truthful, effective, and humane way. The picture of moral responsibility presented here is described as “responsibility realism”. It suggests that our human ethical predicament is one that falls in the territory that lies between a consoling optimism and a bleak pessimism. (shrink)

The main thesis of this paper is that there are two distinct and divergent compatibilist projects. The difference between them turns on a difference between two conceptions of moral responsibility and the way that they are related to the (traditional) free will problem. The idealist compatibilist aims to vindicate the ideal conception of moral responsibility and its assumptions and aspirations. A crucial element of this is that responsible agents are untainted by any significant forms of fate and luck, whereby the (...) agent is held responsible for qualities or conduct that she lacks full (absolute) control over. The realist compatibilist agrees with the sceptic that the ideal conception cannot be satisfied. The true sceptic insists that the ideal conception is the only credible or acceptable (i.e. “true”) conception, and so concludes that moral responsibility is impossible without qualification. The realist compatibilist rejects the true sceptical conclusion. According to realist compatibilism what is required is an accurate and complete description of the abilities and distinctions required for the effective operation of human ethical life. This standard of responsibility can be met even though the ideal conception is not satisfied. It follows from this that the particular form of optimism that idealists aspire to cannot be achieved or realized – morally responsible agents are plainly subject to significant forms of fate and moral luck. To this extent human ethical life, as constructed around the realist conception of moral responsibility, is not “absolutely” just or fair. That may well be a genuine source of “disenchantment” about our human ethical predicament. However, for the realist compatibilist this is not a problem to be solved but a predicament to be acknowledged. If we want to make sense of moral responsibility we need to look beyond the free will problem and discard the idealist conception of moral responsibility that has generated it. (shrink)

According to a prominent view, all blameworthy wrongdoers deserve to feel guilt at some point in time and to some degree. In this paper, I pose a challenge against this view by examining cases involving extremely small wrongdoings. I contend that, granted that defenders of the above view have provided strong intuitive support and reasons for their thesis when it comes to the morally severe wrongdoings, similar considerations do not extend to the extremely small wrongdoings. I then consider three alternative (...) forms of the thesis about deserved guilt. I suggest that the challenge from extremely small wrongdoings can be extended to criticize two of them as well. Though the third form remains promising, it would require us to significantly revise our understanding of the roles of guilt in moral responsibility practices. (shrink)

We are sometimes permitted to discount the interests of culpable wrongdoers relative to other people’s interests. What explains this? One answer is that culpable wrongdoers deserve less consideration than others because of their culpable wrongdoing (the Desert View). Another is that we may be negatively partial towards wrongdoers because of our negative relationship with them (the Negative Partiality View). We reject both answers. The Desert View fails because it cannot explain how permissions to discount can be sensitive to relational facts. (...) The Negative Partiality View fails because it cannot explain how permissions to discount can be agent-neutral, or independent of an existing relationship with the wrongdoer. We close by outlining a theory of permissible discounting that accounts for both its relationality and its agent-neutrality. (shrink)

If an agent’s moral blameworthiness is mitigated by her addiction, fitting blaming responses by affected parties should register this. What might be the proper way of doing so? I refer to this as the problem of fitting blame in addiction. The view I put forward rests on a distinction between desert-presupposing and non-desert-presupposing forms of blame. Retributive blame is the paradigm of the former, presupposing that target agents deserve to suffer harm on account of their behavior. This presupposition, I argue, (...) is typically incorrect when an agent's actions result from a significant impairment of behavioral control, as is often the case in severe addiction. In contrast, non-desert-presupposing forms of blame toward people with addiction can be fitting, regardless of considerations about their instrumental value. The argument for this claim is based on the notion of scaffolding blame (McGeer, 2013, 2019). Scaffolding forms of blame presuppose that target agents have the capacity to recognize their wrongdoing, care about harm done, engage in a productive moral conversation, and have some potential to act differently in the future. These presuppositions, I argue, are typically correct in cases of severe addiction. (shrink)

Common sense has it that some of the greatest achievements that are to our credit are creative, whether artistic or otherwise. But standard theories of achievement and merit struggle to explain them, since the praiseworthiness of creative achievements isn’t grounded in effort, quality of will, disclosing the agent’s values, or even reasons-responsiveness. I argue that it’s distinctive of artistic or quasi-artistic creative activity that it is guided by what I call aspirational aims, which are formulated in terms of evaluative predicates (...) (like painting something “moving” or engineering something “nifty”) whose descriptive realizers are not known in advance. Aesthetic creativity itself fundamentally consists in perceiving or conceiving of some modification of raw material or a medium as promoting or constituting a novel way of realizing the aspirational aim. Creative achievements like poems and paintings are then to our credit in virtue of being exercises of spontaneity that disclose a deep layer of our selves that is manifest in active perception of affordances, showing that there is something beautiful about the way we experience the world, as a Sally Rooney character puts it. As with other creditworthy achievements, what makes them difficult is that simply trying won’t suffice to make success likely – but unlike in many other cases, neither will trying hard, since we have no direct volitional or rational control over perceptual spontaneity. (shrink)

Bernard Williams identifies Hume as “in some ways an archetypal reconciler” who, nevertheless, displays “a striking resistance to some of the central tenets of what [Williams calls] ‘morality’”. This assessment, it is argued, is generally correct. There are, however, some significant points of difference in their views concerning moral responsibility. This includes Williams’s view that a naturalistic project of the kind that Hume pursues is of limited value when it comes to making sense of “morality’s” illusions about responsibility and blame. (...) It is, Williams maintains, only when we consider moral responsibility in genealogical terms, which gives attention to the importance of culture and history, that we can find a way of exposing the various prejudices and illusions of “the morality system”. Nevertheless, despite these differences, what Hume and Williams share is a fundamental commitment to provide a more “truthful” and “realistic” understanding of moral responsibility and our human ethical predicament. (shrink)

There is a large and growing body of empirical work on people’s intuitions about distributive justice. In this paper, we investigate how well luck egalitarianism and desertism—the two normative approaches that appear to cohere well with people’s intuitions—are supported by more fine-grained findings in the empirical literature. The time is ripe for a study of this sort, as the positive literature on justice has blossomed over the last three decades. The results of our investigation are surprising. In three different contexts (...) (good option luck, good brute luck, and bad brute luck) in which the demands of luck egalitarianism and those of a mainstream desert-based view come apart, the latter carries the day. One ramification of these findings is that people’s intuitions about justice are moralized; that is, they appeal to particular conceptions of the good. Luck egalitarians must decide whether to embrace these moralized intuitions by adopting desertism—or to resist them. (shrink)

This article constructively retrieves St. Anselm of Canterbury’s theory of retributive justice and provides a defense of what can be called the retributive model of hell. In the first part of this article, we develop the place of retributive punishment in Anselm’s thinking and discuss how and when retributive punishment is a good thing. In the second part, we apply Anselm’s thinking on retributive justice to the problem of hell and provide a defense of how hell, defined as a state (...) of receiving retributive, damnatory, and irreversible punishment, is good. We then address a series of objections. Despite some criticism that both Anselm and the retributive model of hell receive in the contemporary literature, Anselm’s account of retributive justice can make unique and constructive contributions to the contemporary discussion of hell; by retrieving and applying Anselm’s thought to the problem of hell, we intend to kill two birds with one stone. (shrink)

In this piece, I ultimately argue against the validity of punishment and reward. This is accomplished through accepting three general statements about punishment and deserving, endurance and responsibility, and identity and time. These premises are: (1) Punishment is justified if and only if the thing being punished is deserving of punishment (2) If a thing is deserving of punishment, then the thing being punished must have the exact same properties as the thing that committed the punishment worthy action. (3) It (...) is impossible for any thing being punished to have the exact same properties as the thing that committed the punishment worthy action. -/- I then assert that if this argument is valid and sound, punishment is not justified through a modus tollens relationship. Further, I argue that any metaethical relationship that holds for punishment must also hold for reward just in the inverse. Thus, reward is not justified either. I conclude by discussing what I call the aftermath of accepting this conclusion. If we are to disregard the conceptualizations of punishment and reward, many aspects of our world would be deeply affected as many of our systems of justice and economy would be invalidated. The consequences are too far reaching to full address here, but I focus on how I think this understanding ought to shape our conceptions of debts and responsibilities, criminal justice, and resource distribution. (shrink)

Philosophers who work on desert-adjustment within axiology often articulate the concept of desert as follows: x deserves y on the basis of z. This formulation allows for a focused examination that encompasses deservers, deservings, and desert bases. I call this first-order desert. This paper posits that axiology grounded solely in first-order desert fails to adequately capture our nuanced intuitions concerning desert. I contend that to construct an axiology that more effectively aligns with our desert-sensitive intuitions, we must incorporate considerations of (...) second-order desert. Second-order desert is defined as follows: x deserves to live a life in which x deserves y on the basis of z. Initially, I provide a definition of first-order desert, followed by an elucidation of second-order desert. Subsequently, I explore various counter-arguments against my proposition. I defend my proposal against potential counter-arguments, demonstrating that a desert-adjusted axiological theory will be significantly better-off by incorporating second-order desert considerations. (shrink)

I argue that the blameworthy deserve to suffer in that they deserve to feel guilt, which is the unpleasant experience of appreciating one’s apparent culpability for having done wrong. I argue that the blameworthy deserve to feel guilt because they owe it to those whom they’ve culpably wronged to (a) hold themselves accountable, (b) manifest the proper regard for those whom they’ve wronged, and (c) appreciate their culpability for, and the moral significance of, their wrongdoing. And I argue that the (...) blameworthy must feel guilt to satisfy a–c. What’s more, I argue that, in thinking about whether the blameworthy deserve to feel guilt, we need to compare the world in which the blameworthy feel guilt to the world in which the non-blameworthy feel guilt, for, as I argue, it’s insufficient to compare only the world in which the blameworthy feel guilt to the world in which the blameworthy don’t feel guilt. (shrink)

This paper articulates and responds to a challenge to contemporary compatibilist views of free will. Despite the popularity and appeal of compatibilist theories, many are left with lingering doubts about compatibilism. This paper explains this doubt in terms of the absurdity challenge: because a compatibilist accepts that they do not have causal access to all the actual sufficient causal sources of their own agency, the compatibilist can find their own agency absurd. By taking a cue from political philosophy, this paper (...) argues that a non-ideal construction of the problem of free will allows compatibilists to overcome this existential-metaphysical challenge, and by doing so, perhaps adopt a metaphysically progressive picture of human agency. (shrink)

Thomas Hurka’s recursive account of value appeals to certain intuitions to expand the class of intrinsic values, placing concepts of virtue and desert within the realm of second and third order intrinsic goods, respectively. This is a formalization of a tradition of thought extending back to Aristotle and Kant via the British moralists, G. E. Moore, and W. D. Ross. However, the evidential status of such intuitions vis a vis the real, intrinsic value of virtue and desert is hostage to (...) alternative explanations. If there is a plausible competing explanation for these intuitions, then the (putative) fact that desert and virtue are intrinsic (rather than instrumental or derivative) goods seems a much less obvious choice for the best explanation. As it turns out, there are plausible evolutionary explanations for these intuitions about desert and virtue. These evolutionary explanations suggest that it is adaptive to value desert and virtue separately from their instrumentality for other goods. Consequently, these explanations debunk intuitions about the intrinsic value of desert and virtue. (shrink)

Punishment involves the intentional infliction of harm and suffering. Both of the most prominent families of justifications of punishment – retributivism and consequentialism – face several moral concerns that are hard to overcome. Moreover, the effectiveness of current criminal punishment methods in ensuring society’s safety is seriously undermined by empirical research. Thus, it appears to be a moral imperative for a modern and humane society to seek alternative means of administering justice. The special issue of Diametros “The Abolition of Punishment: (...) Is a Non-Punitive Criminal Justice System Ethically Justified?” was brought into life precisely to give the authors a platform for such progressive inquiries. And it is now safe to say that this platform has been put to excellent use, since Valerij Zisman, Alexander Stachurski, Giorgia Brucato, Perica Jovchevski, Sofia M. I. Jeppsson, Stephen G. Morris, Benjamin Vilhauer, John Lemos, Saul Smilansky, Elizabeth Shaw, Mirko Farina, Andrea Lavazza and Sergei Levin have presented such thought-provoking texts that they are bound to set the stage for debate in the years to come. This article is an introduction to this special issue and to the authors’ papers. (shrink)

Philosophers have rightly condemned lookism—that is, discrimination in favor of attractive people or against unattractive people—in education, the justice system, the workplace and elsewhere. Surprisingly, however, the almost universal preference for attractive romantic and sexual partners has rarely received serious ethical scrutiny. On its face, it’s unclear whether this is a form of discrimination we should reject or tolerate. I consider arguments for both views. On the one hand, a strong case can be made that preferring attractive partners is bad. (...) The idea is that choosing partners based on looks seems essentially similar to other objectionable forms of discrimination. (In particular, the preference for attractive partners is arguably both unfair and harmful to a significant degree.) One can try to resist this conclusion in several ways. I consider three possible replies. The first has to do with the possibility of controlling our partner preferences. The second pertains to attractiveness and “good genes”. The last attempts to link certain aspects of attractiveness to a prospective partner’s personality and values. I argue that the first two replies fail conclusively, while the third only amounts to a limited defense of a particular kind of attractiveness preference. So the idea that we should often avoid preferring attractive partners is compelling. (shrink)

This is a review of Daniel Dennett and Gregg D. Caruso's Just Deserts: Debating Free Will.

Let F be a fact in virtue of which an agent, S, is blameworthy for performing an act of A-ing. We advance a slightly qualified version of the following thesis: (Reason) F is (at some time) a reason for S to feel guilty (to some extent) for A-ing. Leaving implicit the qualification concerning extent, we claim as well: (Desert) S's having this reason suffices for S’s deserving to feel guilty for A-ing. We also advance a third thesis connecting desert of (...) feeling guilty with the fittingness of this response. In light of our three theses, we address several claims that have been made regarding responsibility and desert. We take issue with the divorce of desert from responsibility. We find acceptable a claim regarding blameworthiness and reason to induce guilt, and we defend the idea that it is noninstrumentally good that one who is blameworthy be subject to a fitting feeling of guilt. We argue against a view on which desert of blame has a teleological dimension. (shrink)

Addicts are often portrayed as compelled by their addiction and thus as a paradigm of unfree action and mitigated blame. This chapter argues that our best scientific theories of addiction reveal that, psychologically, addicts are not categorically different from non-addicts. There is no pairing of contemporary accounts of addiction and of prominent theories of moral responsibility that can justify our intuitions about the mitigation of addicts but not non-addicts. Two conclusions are advanced. First, we should either treat addicts as we (...) normally treat non-addicts (as fully culpable) or embrace the skeptical conclusion that everyone is less responsible than we thought—perhaps not responsible at all. Second, we should be doubtful that theorizing about responsibility will be advanced by focusing on particular kinds of psychopathologies. (shrink)

According to Victoria McGeer’s “scaffolding view” (SV) (McGeer 2019), responsibility is a matter of moral reasons-sensitivity (MRS) which, in turn, requires only a “susceptibility to the scaffolding power of the reactive attitudes, experienced as a form of moral address” (2019: 315). This claim prompts a prima facie challenge: doesn’t this susceptibility lead to doing the right things for the wrong reasons? Although the SV offers a nuanced and sophisticated answer to this challenge, one that moreover respects the social nature of (...) moral knowledge and the fragility of moral motivation, it does not succeed. It redefines MRS to fit our responsibility practices in a way that overlooks our (fragile) capacity for “genuine MRS.” The first and primary objective of this paper is to contrast SV-MRS with genuine MRS. The second objective is to suggest that rather than redefining MRS (which is both unwarranted and costly), we should accept that there is a gap between our practices (and thus responsible agency) and genuine MRS. (shrink)

In punishment, proportionality is the systematic mathematical relationship between the significance of the wrongdoing and the amount of punishment that may be imposed on the wrongdoer. In this chapter, Kershnar argues that there is no adequate equation for proportionality. The lack of an adequate equation rests on intuitions and the absence of a shared metric. If there is no equation for proportionality, then there is no proportionality. This is because if there is no equation for proportionality, then there is no (...) general justification for proportionality. Purported justifications of punishment that lack proportionality—specifically, consequentialism and consent theory—are implausible. The lack of proportionality, then, is a threat to the notion that some punishment is justified and, more generally, non-consequentialism. (shrink)

Here, we argue for a mathematical equation that captures desert. Our procedure consists of setting out principles that a correct equation must satisfy and then arguing that our set of equations satisfies them. We then consider two objections to the equation. First, an objector might argue that desert and well-being separately contribute to intrinsic goodness, and they do not separately contribute. The concern here is that our equations treat them as separate contributors. Second, our set of desert-equations are unlike equations (...) in science because our equations involve multiple desert-equations with the applicable equation depending on how the variables are filled out. Neither objection succeeds. (shrink)

When it comes to the question of how much the state ought to punish a given offender, the standard understanding of the desert theory for centuries has been that it should give him a penalty proportionate to his offense, that is, an amount of punishment that fits the severity of his crime. In this article, we maintain that a desert theorist is not conceptually or otherwise required to hold a proportionality requirement. We show that there is logical space for at (...) least two other, non-proportionate ways of meting out deserved penalties, and we also argue that they have important advantages relative to the dominant, proportionality approach. (shrink)

"Meritocracy" has historically been understood in two ways. The first is as an approach to governance. On this understanding, we seek to put meritorious (somehow defined) people into public office to the benefit of society. This understanding has its roots in Confucius, its scope is political offices, and its justification is consequentialist. The second understanding of "meritocracy" is as a theory of justice. We distribute in accordance with merit in order to give people the things that they deserve, as justice (...) demands. This understanding has its roots in Aristotle, its scope is social goods broadly, and its justification is deontological. In this article, I discuss the differences--especially the conceptual differences--between these two, prima facie distinct, meritocratic traditions. I also argue that despite their differences Eastern Meritocracy and Western Meritocracy are harmonious. In Section I of the article I introduce the two meritocratic traditions through, in part, a highly abbreviated history of talk about "merit" and "meritocracy" in Chinese and Western philosophy. In Section II, I discuss a number of conceptual issues and partition meritocratic theories in accordance with their scopes and normative justifications. I also discuss two scenarios. In one scenario, Eastern Meritocracy appears to deliver the right result and Western Meritocracy, the wrong result. In the other scenario, vice versa. Finally, in Section III, I argue that Eastern Meritocracy and Western Meritocracy are each special cases of a single, compelling notion of "meritocracy.". (shrink)

This is a semifinal draft of a forthcoming paper. Kant’s account of the pain of remorse involves a hybrid justification based on self-retribution, but constrained by forward-looking principles which say that we must channel remorse into improvement, and moderate its pain to avoid damaging our rational agency. Kant’s corpus also offers material for a revisionist but textually-grounded alternative account based on wrongdoers’ sympathy for the pain they cause. This account is based on the value of care, and has forward-looking constraints (...) much like Kant’s own account. Drawing on both Kant’s texts and recent work in empirical psychology, I argue that experiences of remorse which conform to the sympathetic account may fulfill Kant’s forward-looking goals better than those conforming to his own account. (shrink)

The paper defends the idea that when we evaluate whether agents deserve praise or blame for their actions, we evaluate both whether their action was intentional, and whether it was voluntary. This idea can explain an asymmetry in blameworthiness and praiseworthiness: Agents can be blamed if they have acted either intentionally or voluntarily. However, to merit praise we expect agents to have acted both intentionally and voluntarily. This asymmetry between demands of praise and blame offers an interpretation of the Knobeeffect: (...) in the well-known experiment people blame a company chairman because, although he harmed the environment unintentionally, he did so voluntarily. In turn, praise is withheld, because the chairman did not benefit the environment intentionally. This is a way of rendering the Knobe-effect a rational outcome. It is an advantage of this position, that the distinction between the intentionality and voluntariness of actions can be upheld, whether or not it is the best explanation of the Knobe-effect. (shrink)

This article focuses on justified responses to “immoral” behavior and crimes committed by patients undergoing neuromodulation therapies. Such patients could be held morally responsible in the basic desert sense—the one that serves as a justification of severe practices such as backward‐looking moral outrage, condemnation, and legal punishment—as long as they possess certain compatibilist capabilities that have traditionally served as the quintessence of free will, that is, reasons‐responsiveness; attributability; answerability; the abilities to act in accordance with moral reasons, second‐order volitions, or (...) Deep Self. Recently leading compatibilist neuroethicists added the condition of not feeling alienated from desires motivating a person's action. This article argues against such attempts to determine conditions under which patients undergoing neuromodulation should be subject to negative reactive attitudes and legal punishment. Compatibilism should not be used to justify basic desert moral responsibility and legal punishment. Instead, a new way of thinking about the function of moral responsibility attribution is proposed for patients with neuromodulation. Their compatibilist capabilities should serve as important indicators for determining appropriate, forward‐looking courses of action, such as quarantining and restorative treatment, to ensure the public safety and well‐being of the patients. (shrink)

The proposal on offer is a radical form of egalitarianism. Under it, each citizen receives the same income, regardless of profession or indeed whether he or she works or not. This proposal is bad for two reasons. First, it is inefficient. It would eliminate nearly all incentive to work, thereby shrinking national income and leaving all citizens poorly off (albeit equally poorly off). I illustrate this inefficiency via an indifference curve analysis. Second, the proposal would be regarded as unjust by (...) almost everyone. The empirical work on justice makes this plain. Equal pay for equal work is desirable; equal pay no matter what is something else entirely. It is an idea not likely to find adherents. (shrink)

It is typically thought that a student deserves—or at least can deserve—a grade in a class. The students who perform well on assessments, who display a high degree of competence, and who complete all of the required work, deserve a good grade. Students who perform poorly on assessments, who fail to understand the course material, and who fail to complete the required work, deserve a bad grade. In this paper, I raise a challenge to this conventional view about grades. In (...) particular, I challenge the idea that grades—understood appropriately—can be objects of desert for class performance. In other words, grades are simply not the kind of thing that can be deserved. The argument is roughly as follows. In general, when some property or quality of ours is measured, where that property or quality is something that makes us deserving of something, the measurement, itself, is not the thing that is or could be deserved. Grades, however, are a measure of student performance, where performance is meant to be the basis on which students deserve their grades. Since they are mere measures of performance, grades are not and could not be deserved on the basis of performance, and so are not possible objects of desert. Rather, they serve as evidence of the desert basis (academic performance, e.g.) that grounds a student’s being deserving of other objects (praise or recognition, e.g.). In short, grades, at best, measure how deserving one is, but grades themselves are not deserved. (shrink)

Gwen Bradford has plausibly argued that one attains achievement only if one does something one finds difficult. It is also plausible that one must attain achievement to be worthy of “agential” praise, praise that is appropriately directed to someone on the basis of things that redound to their credit. These claims pose a challenge to classical theists who direct agential praise to God, since classical theism arguably entails that none of God’s actions are difficult for God. I consider responses to (...) this challenge and commend a view accord- ing to which God’s loving character is not necessitated by God’s nature but is a contingent and difficult achievement. I argue that this view can still satisfy the explanatory ambitions of natural theology. (shrink)

One way to frame the problem of moral luck is as a contradiction in our ordinary ideas about moral responsibility. In the case of two identical reckless drivers where one kills a pedestrian and the other does not, we tend to intuit that they are and are not equally blameworthy. The Character Response sorts these intuitions in part by providing an account of moral responsibility: the drivers must be equally blameworthy, because they have identical character traits and people are originally (...) praiseworthy and blameworthy in virtue of, and only in virtue of, their character traits. After explicating two versions of the Character Response, I argue that they both involve implausible accounts of moral responsibility and fail to provide a good solution to the problem of moral luck. I close by noting how proponents of moral luck can preserve a kernel of truth from the Character Response to explain away the intuition that the drivers are equally blameworthy. (shrink)

In his penetrating book on the criminal culpability of children, Gideon Yaffe advances a novel theory of desert. According to the theory, the punishment you deserve for committing a given crime is the punishment the prospect of which would have led you to deliberate correctly about how to act, had that punishment been presented to you beforehand as an inevitable consequence of your committing the crime. Although fascinating and ambitious, Yaffe’s theory of desert struggles as an account of who deserves (...) what, and it falls short of explaining why and how desert is normatively significant—why and how desert matters. (shrink)

This article seeks to cause trouble for a brand of consequentialism known as ‘desertarianism’. In somewhat different ways, views of this kind evaluate outcomes more favourably, other things equal, the better the fit between the welfare different people enjoy and the welfare they each deserve. These views imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing welfare to fit desert, which seems plausible enough. Unfortunately, they also imply that we can improve outcomes by redistributing desert to fit welfare: in other words, (...) by making happy people more deserving, at the cost of making unhappy people less deserving. Extant versions of desertarianism predict that such ‘deservingness transfers’ are improvements and that we ought to carry them out. Even worse, they will sometimes rank deservingness transfers higher than simply benefitting deserving people who are poorly off. (shrink)

This paper explores one facet of Paul Russell’s unique “critical compatibilist” position on moral responsibility, which concerns his rejection of R. Jay Wallace’s “narrow construal” of moral responsibility as a concept tied exclusively to the Strawsonian reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and guilt. After explaining Russell’s critique of Wallace’s view, the paper considers a Wallace-inspired challenge based on the idea that questions of moral responsibility raise distinct issues of “fairness” that apply only to a narrow subset of the Strawsonian reactive (...) attitudes. The paper offers a defense of Russell’s view against this challenge. (shrink)

Many philosophers believe that luck egalitarianism captures “desert-like” intuitions about justice. Some even think that luck egalitariansm distributes goods in accordance with desert. In this paper, we argue that this is wrong. Desertism conflicts with luck egalitarianism in three important contexts, and, in these contexts, desertism renders the proper moral judgment. First, compared to desertism, luck egalitarianism is sometimes too stingy: it fails to justly compensate people for their socially valuable contributions—when those contributions arose from “option luck”. Second, luck egalitarianism (...) is sometimes too restrictive: it fails to justly compensate people who make a social contribution when that contribution arose from “brute luck”. Third, luck egalitarianism is too limited in scope: it cannot diagnose economic injustice arising independently of comparative levels of justice. The lesson of this paper is that luck egalitarians should consider supplementing their theory with desert considerations. Or, even better, consider desertism as a superior alternative to their theory. (shrink)

Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the (...) attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. The different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that, when someone deserves something, it’s intrinsically good that she get it or there’s a non-instrumental reason to give it to her. Retributivists who try to justify punishment by appealing to claims about what people deserve typically assume this view or views that entail it. In this paper, I present evidence that many people have intuitions that are inconsistent with this view. And I argue that this poses a serious challenge to retributivist arguments that appeal to desert.