Against Retribution

Another NYTimes article relevant to freedom and responsibility, this one discussing the abolition of prisons as punishment. Here's the most relevant passage:

"Even if the deterrent effect of imprisonment is overrated, there are those who feel that lawbreakers should nevertheless get stiff sentences because they deserve it. The idea of making an offender suffer for his crime can be traced to the ''blood vengeance'' practices of primitive societies. Today, it goes under the more dignified name of retribution, which literally means ''paying back.'' How the suffering inflicted on an offender compensates for his crime has never been clear, unless it is through the vindictive satisfaction it might bring to his victims and society. But is this justice? There is increasing evidence that the most violent criminals are often driven by forces beyond their control. Because of damage to the frontal lobes of their brains caused by birth complications, accidents or brutal childhood beatings, they simply can't contain their aggressive impulses; compared with the rest of us, they live life on a neurological hair trigger. Clearly, society needs to protect itself from these people. But does it need to punish them?"

To add a philosophical question, I wonder what people think is the significant difference, if any, between some compatibilists (e.g. JJC Smart) and some skeptics (e.g. Pereboom), both of which may think some robust notion of responsibility (e.g. the G.Strawson sort) is clearly impossible and tend to focus on the forward-looking aspects of freedom and punishment, suggesting that (most) retributive practices are not justified (at least not because we have robust freedom)? How might we show that the debate between these two parties, both of whom tend to reject the viability of libertarian freedom, is not just semantic (if it's not)?

Comments

[Rob]

Perhaps skeptics are more inclined than compatibilists to seek some kind of non-utilitarian vindication for the reactive attitudes -- particularly, the punitive ones -- in their natural history.

"Whence has this age-old, deeply-rooted, perhaps now no longer eradicable idea taken its power -- the idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already given it away: in the contractual relationship between *creditor* and *debter*, which is as old as the existence of 'legal subjects' and in turn points back to the basic forms of purchase, sale, exchange, trade, and commerce." (GM 2.4)

[Tamler]

Eddy,

Do you really see Smart as a compatibilist? In "Free Will, Praise, and Blame" he argues that (1) we wrongly believe we have metaphysical freedom, and (2) that any non-consequentialist form of blame is irrational, and that we should GRADE people instead of JUDGING them. That seems like a pretty straightforward hard determinist (or skeptical) view, especially when compared to compatibilists like Fischer and Ravizza, Susan Wolf, or Frankfurt. (Wolf explicitly rejects purely consequentialist accounts of blame and praise.)

I think the confusion is due more to the mislabeling of certain philosophers (Spinoza has been called a compatibilist!) than to a lack of a real distinction between compatibilists and skeptics.

That's an interesting article from the Times. Thanks for posting it and the others.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Right, Smart looks like a skeptic in most ways. But similarly Pereboom looks like a compatibilist in some ways (i.e. to the extent he tries to salvage certain attitudes, emotions and practices despite the case against RMR--and you are facing the same issue in your discussion about forgiveness and love). So, as one moves away from these two positions in opposite directions, where should we say one becomes a compatibilist vs. a skeptic? There will be some compatibilists who end up much closer to libertarians, of course, and some libertarians (perhaps event-causal ones) that look more like compatibilists than agent-causal libertarians. I've tried to draw a picture to capture this logical space but you can't post pictures. I'd just like to hear more people describe how they think the terminological labels map onto substantive claims. We've surely shown in this blog that the standard labels are too simplistic and in some cases misleading.

Speaking of which, looking back at G. Strawson I notice that at the very end of chapter 2 he labels a position: "non-self-determinationists" are those who think (a) self-determination is necessary for freedom and (b) self-determination is impossible. Now the question is what sense of freedom requires self-determination? Here are two possibilities: (1) the kind that is required for true responsibility of the sort justifying deserved praise and blame or (2) the kind people have in mind pre-philosophically. Am I right that Strawson suggests both of these answers? What sort of argument does he give (could be given) for either?

Finally, I noticed an interesting consequence of Strawson's view. Suppose RMR is the sort required to answer the problem of evil. But RMR is impossible even for God. So there's no reason to posit RMR as a way to take responsibility for evil from God and put it onto us because there is not any responsibility for evil at all.

[Daniel Cohen]

Hey Tamler,

I hope things are well back in North Carolina.

I’ve been thinking about Smart’s article recently and, while I mostly agree with your reading, I’m interested by the fact that Smart doesn’t really seem to think of himself as a sceptic at all.

“Though some of our ordinary talk about moral responsibility is frequently vitiated by a confused metaphysics of free will, much of it can be salvaged” (p. 68, in Watson).

Smart does reject a ‘judging’ construal of responsibility in favour of a ‘grading’ construal, but seems to think (a) that this is morally preferable and, most interestingly, (b) that this allows us to hold onto most of our core intuitions about responsibility.

My impression is that this reveals a deep disagreement with Strawson about the centrality of the reactive attitudes to the notion of responsibility. Strawson thinks that without them you lose the concept, whereas Smart seems to put greater emphasis on getting the extension of the concept right. That is, he seems happy simply to vindicate the intuitive distinctions between those who are and those who aren’t appropriate objects of responsibility judgements.

Note too that Smart doesn’t give up on blaming – but he does think of it simply as an interesting subclass of dispraising (grading badly), where the grading itself changes the thing graded. Now while Smart does seem strongly in favour of adopting a very objective attitude in blaming, it’s not clear why this is necessary, especially if taking a participant stance would be more likely to improve the thing being graded/blamed. At this point, I’m not sure how to respond is to Smart. What’s he missing?

By the way, Smart currently spends most of his time hanging around Monash, and I’m just waiting for an opportunity to sit him down and have a chat about these matters.

[Rob]

"Finally, I noticed an interesting consequence of Strawson's view. Suppose RMR is the sort required to answer the problem of evil. But RMR is impossible even for God. So there's no reason to posit RMR as a way to take responsibility for evil from God and put it onto us because there is not any responsibility for evil at all." (Nahmias, two posts above)

This is akin to what Nietzsche admired in Spinoza.

"What can our doctrine be, though?—That no one gives man his qualities, neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor man himself (—the nonsense of the last idea rejected here was taught as 'intelligible freedom' by Kant, perhaps already by Plato, too). No one is responsible for simply being there, for being made in such and such a way, for existing under such conditions, in such surroundings. The fatality of one's being cannot be derived from the fatality of all that was and will be. No one is the result of his own intention, his own will, his own purpose; no one is part of an experiment to achieve an 'ideal person' or an 'ideal of happiness' or an 'ideal of morality'—it is absurd to want to discharge one's being onto some purpose or other. We invented the concept 'purpose': in reality, ''purpose' is absent . . . One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole—there is nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our Being, for that would mean judging, measuring, comparing, condemning the whole . . . But there is nothing apart from the whole! That no one is made responsible any more, that a kind of Being cannot be traced back to a causa prima, that the world is no unity, either as sensorium or as 'mind', this alone is the great liberation—this alone re-establishes the innocence of becoming . . . The concept 'God' has been the greatest objection to existence so far . . . We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: this alone is how we redeem the world.—" (Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great Errors, 8)

[Tamler]

Eddy wrote: "But similarly Pereboom looks like a compatibilist in some ways (i.e. to the extent he tries to salvage certain attitudes, emotions and practices despite the case against RMR--and you are facing the same issue in your discussion about forgiveness and love."

I don't see that as being compatibilistic, because the "salvaging" is being done IN SPITE of the fact that there is no RMR (where RMR means "strong accountability") Compatibilists, it seems to me, want to salvage RMR itself. That seems like a way to keep the distinction reasonably sharp.

(Of course, P.F. Strawson would argue that RMR is constituted by the proness to having those attitudes. But first, the skeptic denies that. And second, the skeptic is not trying to salvage all the attitudes, just the ones that are compatible with the denial of RMR.)

Daniel, it's hot here, but we missed the brunt of hurricane Charley. I don't see why a skeptic would want or have to disagree with anything that Smart says in that essay. I'd be very interested to hear his views on this, so make sure you post the highlights of your discussion with him.

[Robert Allen]

Rob,

You know what a real philosopher would do after asserting that once we stop believing in God we will stop believing in responsibility altogether (having already realized that we ourselves couldn't be responsible for anything) and can then get on with the business of enjoying "the innocence of becoming," including, I presume, the innocence of folks like Hitler, Pol Pot, and bin Laden- attempt to prove that God does not exist. I'd like to see such a proof because, frankly, I'm growing tired of thinking that someone, somewhere is responsible for all evil things I see in the world. I used to think that those who saw Nietzsche's views as a precursor to Nazism were way off out of line (given what he had to say about his sister and her husband) but now I see their point: his philosophy leaves one without any reason for thinking that mass murder is evil. Do you really think that defending such a view is a worthwhile philosophical project? Or shouldn't we be trying with all our might to show that it is false? BTW, the fourth sentence in your quote should read 'The fatality of one's being CAN be derived from the fatality of all that was and will be'. The Kaufmann translation of TI reads 'The fatality of (one's) essence is not to be disentangled from the fatality of all that has been and will be'.

[Rob]

Robert,

The point concerning translation is well-taken. I should have used a better one, since by the unhappily-chosen "derived" we are really meant to understand something like "detached," "separated," or, as Kaufmann has it, "disentangled."

As for responsiblity and the reactive attitudes, (particularly the punitive ones), I don't see that Nietzsche holds the view "that once we stop believing in God we will stop believing in responsibility altogether," if that is outlandishly supposed to include the condoning of mass murder and other such great evils.

As I read Nietzsche, he's an incompatibilist, but one who doesn't therefore promote a consequentialist reformation of the reactive attitudes (and the practices they inform) for reasons having to do with their natural history. I think it's his emphasis on the importance of getting a realistic fix on the nature and natural history of the reactive attitudes which significantly sets him apart from other varieties of incompatibilism when it comes to the question of whether and how the reactive attitudes, or our attitudes towards them, should be reformed.