Читать книгу Just Deserts - Daniel C. Dennett, Daniel C. Dennett - Страница 7

Derk Pereboom

This exchange between Daniel Dennett and Gregg Caruso on free will, moral responsibility, and punishment is intense and engaging, and will captivate any reader who is interested in the cutting edge of the contemporary free will debate. It has much to offer newcomers and seasoned veterans alike. This exchange serves as an excellent introduction and at the same time provides details about the contested positions not available elsewhere.

Caruso is an incompatibilist about free will and determinism. If determinism is true, then there are factors beyond our control, events in the distant past and natural laws, that causally determine all of our actions, and incompatibilists maintain that this would rule out free will. Incompatibilists divide into those who hold that determinism is false and that we have free will – the libertarians – and those who hold that determinism is true and we lack free will – free will skeptics. Dennett affirms compatibilism about free will and determinism, and he contends that we do have free will. Caruso argues that we would lack free will if our world is deterministic, but also if it were indeterministic, say in the way some interpretations of quantum physics propose. Caruso and Dennett are thus situated on opposite sides of a traditional divide – Dennett is a compatibilist and affirms free will, Caruso is an incompatibilist and a free will skeptic.

There is also a conceptual issue about how “free will” should be defined, which divides Dennett and Caruso. Dennett is well known for recommending that we should use “free will” so that it refers to a kind of free will worth wanting. The kind of free will worth wanting is a capacity for rational response to stimuli in our natural and social environment, which has developed in our species in its evolutionary history and matures in individuals as they become adults. This is clearly a valuable capacity, and I think that Dennett’s proposal is defensible.

But a question that arises about Dennett’s characterization is whether it works for dividing the sides in the debate. Because few believe that Dennett’s notion of free will is incompatible with determinism, his definition results in a challenge for defining compatibilism so that it’s controversial. Caruso, by contrast, defines free will as the control in action required for attributions of desert in its basic form, as do a number of other participants in the current debate. In the basic form of desert, someone who has acted wrongly deserves to be blamed and perhaps punished just because she has acted for morally bad reasons, and someone who has acted rightly deserves credit or praise and perhaps reward just because she has acted for morally good reasons. Such desert is basic because these desert claims are fundamental in their justification; they are not justified by virtue of further considerations, such as anticipated good consequences of implementing them. According to Caruso, in order to facilitate the free will debate, so that there are substantial numbers of participants on each side, free will should be defined as the control in action required for basically deserved praise and blame, reward and punishment.

Dennett and Caruso disagree about the prevalence of the notion of basic desert. By contrast with Dennett, Caruso believes it is widespread. He supports his view by using a thought experiment that derives from Immanuel Kant, in which there are no good consequences to be achieved by punishing a wrongdoer (1785: Part II). Here is a version of such an example. Imagine that someone on an isolated island brutally murders everyone else on that island, and that he is not capable of moral reform, due to his inner hatred and rage. Add that it is not possible for him to escape the island, and no one else will ever visit because it’s too remote. There is no longer a society on the island whose rules might be determined by a social contract aimed at good consequences, since the society has been disbanded. Do we have the intuition that this murderer still deserves to be punished? If so, then punishment would be basically deserved if the example in fact does eliminate the options for non-basic desert, as it seems to.

But on Dennett’s side, do we want to define “free will” so that anyone who rejects basic desert counts as denying free will, or so that anyone who denies that we have the control in action required for attributions of basic desert counts as denying free will? Perhaps enough of the role that the concept “free will” has in our thought and practice would survive the rejection of basic desert and the control in action required for it. We have many concepts that we’ve retained even though we’ve revised how they are characterized, say due to scientific advance.

Dennett contends that enough of the role of the concept “free will” would indeed survive the rejection of basic desert because we have a notion of non-basic desert that can do the work we want. Practice-level justifications for blame and punishment invoke considerations of desert, while that desert is not basic because at a higher level the practice is justified by good anticipated consequences, such as deterrence of wrongdoing and moral formation of wrongdoers. On Dennett’s account, our practice of holding agents morally responsible in this non-basic desert sense should be retained because doing so would have the best overall consequences relative to alternative practices.

One might object that penalties and rewards justified by anticipated consequences on Dennett’s model do not really qualify as genuinely deserved, since on such a view they ultimately function as incentives. In reply, citing the type of analogy Dennett provides in the exchange, it seems legitimate to say that someone who commits a foul in a sport deserves the penalty for that foul. But such sports-desert isn’t basic – it’s instead founded in considerations about how the particular sport works best. Similarly, suppose penalties for criminal behavior are justified on deterrence grounds, by the anticipated good consequence of safety. Imagine that lawyers and judges consider only backward-looking reasons to convict and punish, while their practice is justified on forward-looking grounds that lawyers and judges never consider or invoke. Arguably, it then would make sense for the lawyers and judges to think of the penalties as deserved.

Accordingly, the exchange between Dennett and Caruso involves substantive issues, and some conceptual and verbal issues as well. The conceptual issues are important, and their resolution depends on whether the role of the relevant concepts can be retained. Neither Dennett nor Caruso contends that the role of the concept of “basic desert” in justifying actual practice is worth preserving. But Dennett argues that “desert” and its role should be retained, while Caruso disagrees. Throughout the exchange, separating the verbal and conceptual from the substantive issues is a challenge, as it is generally in philosophy. Caruso and Dennett take it on in the classic way, by regularly prodding each other to clarify terms.

My sense is that Caruso’s and Dennett’s positions are substantively quite close on the basics of the free will debate, but that they do differ on other matters, such as the value of manipulation arguments for incompatibilism, the discussion of which is especially intense. They also diverge on recommendations for treatment of criminals, despite both agreeing that current American practice requires serious reform. But it is not clear whether they differ on this issue because Dennett endorses justifications in terms of desert, while Caruso rejects them, or for some other reason. The reader will enjoy sorting out these issues in this valuable and timely dialogue.