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Shazbot5 in reply to Brandon Berg says:

If we don’t have free will, then we can’t make sense of desert. Normally, we say X deserves, say wealth, more than Y, because they each could have gotten the wealth, it was in each of X’s and Y’s control as to whether they would get the wealth, but X make good decicions and worked hard, so X deserved the wealth. But if we don’t have free will, we don’t have control over whether we are hard workers or whether we will make good decisions. Those things are as predetermined and out of our control as our height or whether we are born with a genetic disease. Notice that it makes no sense to say that guy deserves his child-onset diabetes, because he couldn’t have done anything to get it or avoid it. It just happened to him and it was out of his control, so he didn’t deserve it. Or imagine you are parked at a red light, driving carefully, and someone crashes into your car. Suppose there was nothing you could do to prevent the accident. Well, then you don’t desever punishment or blame for the accident. In general, people only deserve therewards or punishments that they get if the action that lead to the punishment or reward was in their free control
But if there is no free will, there is no real control, we are no more in control of whether we will work hard or make good choices than whether we are born with diabetes, and so no on deserves anything, good or bad.

Now, you might think it doesn’t matter for practical politics that it turns out to be true that, for example, no one deserves to go to jail, and no one deserves to be richer or poorer than someone else, because you think we can explain criminal justice and distributive justice, not with a desert-based theory, but an incentives-based theoryl But that is extremely controversial.

I’ll give you two examples. Suppose we find out empirically that putting murderers in prison for more than 5 years for horrible crimes like rape and murder provides no more incentive than 5 years. Should we conclude that there would (hypothetically) then be no reason to put such criminals in jail past 5 years. Or should we conclude that they deserve more than 5 years, especially if they acted in a way where they planned their crime, freely and intentionally.

Or similarly, suppose we find out that the current level of inequality doesn’t maximize incentives for the rich and poor to work harder and be productive. Does that mean this level is necessarily unjust? Can’t a person say, this is the level of inequality that is deseverved and even if a different level would provide more incentives, desert is more important than incentive, morally speaking?

Indeed, most of our arguments about what sorts of policies we should have end up being rooted in premises about what we deserve. And if theres is no free will, all of those premises are false. That matters, or at least its controversial.Report