Vargas-Style Revisionismand the Problem of Retributivism[1]

The free will debate is locked in a virtual stalemate that has persisted ever since the basic tenets of the three primary competing positions—compatibilism, libertarianism, and skepticism—were laid down. Compatibilists hold free will to be compatible with the truth of causal determinism.Incompatibilists believe that free will is not possible if causal determinism is true.Libertarians areincompatibilistswho maintain that human beings are capable of exercising free will (and, thus, that causal determinism is false).Skeptics are incompatibilists who deny the possibility that human beings can exercise free will.In order to overcome this stalemate, philosophers have increasingly employed novel approaches in tackling the related subjects of free will and moral responsibility. The revisionist approach to the free will debate sets out to alter the commonsense meanings of terms like “free will” and “moral responsibility” in a way that allows us to assert the existence of the general kinds of attributes that these terms attempt to capture without committing ourselves to the more philosophically problematic aspects of the commonsense notions. Revisionists in the free will debate basically hold that the way we ought to think about the terms “free will” and/or “moral responsibility” differs from the way the “folk” (i.e., laypersons) actually do think about them. This essay will focus on the revisionist account of free will and moral responsibility that has received the most attention from contemporary philosophers—namely, the view championed by Manuel Vargas. Despite Vargas’s claim that the revised notions of free will and moral responsibility that he recommends can perform virtually all of the important roles that these terms have traditionally played, I argue that Vargas’s revised concepts are unable to accomplish the key task of grounding the idea of retributive justice that figures prominently in both commonsense views about morality and philosophical discussions concerning free will and moral responsibility. In discussing what I take to be the key difficulties facing Vargas’s view, it will be helpful to address his attempt to defend his account against an objection presented by Derk Pereboom.

Vargas’s revisionist account is predicated on two main theses: 1) Our commonsense intuitions about free will and moral responsibility are primarily libertarian in nature (his descriptive thesis); and 2) we ought to revise our concepts of “free will” and “moral responsibility” in such a way as to strip them of their libertarian commitments (his prescriptive thesis). What we should end up with, according to Vargas, is essentially a compatibilist understanding of both free will and moral responsibility that will be able to play more or less all of the major functions that these concepts have been called upon to serve. By stripping the libertarian baggage from our notions of free will and moral responsibility, Vargas believes that we will be left with concepts that, while somewhat different from our current commonsense notions, will nonetheless justify the commonplace attitudes, norms, practices and institutions that allow for a well-functioning society.

From Vargas’s perspective, what matters most in the free will debate is not whether human agents possess the libertarian type of free will and moral responsibility that he believes the folk typically consider themselves to have. For his part, Vargas argues that it is extremely unlikely that we are capable of possessing this type of free will and moral responsibility.[2] Nonetheless, he maintains that this issue is more or less irrelevant when it comes to the question of whether or not we should affirm that we have free will and moral responsibility, since it is not directly pertinent to the main role that these concepts play. For Vargas, the real importance of the concepts of free will and moral responsibility is the role they play in allowing for the effectiveness of what he calls “the responsibility system”—that is, “the responsibility norms, and their attendant social practices, characteristic attitudes and paradigmatic judgments,” where such judgments include praise and blame (2007a, p. 154). He believes that the key purpose of the responsibility system is “to get creatures like us to better attend to what moral considerations there are and to appropriately govern our conduct in light of what moral reasons those generate” (Ibid., p. 155). What Vargas thinks we need are labels for attributes that denote that an agent is an appropriate target for the particular kinds of attitudes and treatments that are effective in influencing people to better attend to moral considerations. The labels that Vargas believes are best-suited to this function are “free will” and “moral responsibility”. Hence, we get Vargas’s assertion that “An agent can be said to have free will or to be acting from or with free will when the agent, in the context of deliberation or action, has the capacity to detect moral reasons and can govern him or herself [in the] appropriate way in light of those moral considerations” (Ibid., p. 160). In a similar manner, an agent can be said, roughly, to be morally responsible for an action or decision in virtue of being the kind of agent for whom the action or decision in question has rendered him or her an appropriate target for attitudes and/or treatment that could be expected to further the aim of getting this agent (and perhaps others) to better attend to moral considerations in the future.

It is important to understand that for Vargas, whether an agent satisfies the conditions for libertarian freedom is irrelevant insofar as whether one is free or morally responsible in the senses endorsed by his revisionist position. All that really matters is whether or not one can apprehend moral reasons and act in accordance with them. Whether or not one is determined simply does not matter. After all, even determined agents can be responsive to moral reasons. This is essentially the basis for his compatibilist view. Vargas believes that the revised notions of free will and moral responsibility that he endorses are sufficient for playing essentially all of the important roles (in terms of justifying our attitudes, practices, social institutions, etc.) that their folk counterparts have traditionally been considered to play. This being the case, Vargas believes that we can bypass many of the metaphysical quarrels that have come to characterize the free will debate (e.g., whether or not libertarian freedom is required for moral responsibility) since even if we are incapable of exercising the kinds of powers that the folk concepts of free will and moral responsibility require, we can still have all, or nearly all, of the important things that these folk concepts were valued for in the first place.

Free will skeptic Derk Pereboom is among those who doubt that Vargas’s revisionist account could succeed at overcoming the traditional difficulties that have led to the current standoff among the different camps in the free will debate. From Pereboom’s perspective, the fundamental issue in this debate is whether or not human agents are capable of possessing what he calls “the basic desert sense” of moral responsibility as well as the kind of free will that could give rise to it. This being the case, Pereboom believes that in order to succeed at providing alternative accounts of free will and moral responsibility that can “do enough of the work” that the folk conceptions do, Vargas’s revisionist program must provide a plausible explanation of how human beings are capable of being morally responsible in the basic desert sense (Pereboom 2009, p. 25). Pereboom explains the basic desert sense of moral responsibility this way:

...for an agent to be morally responsible for an action is for it to belong to her in such a way that she would deserve blame if she understood that it was morally wrong, and she would deserve credit or perhaps praise if she understood that it was morally exemplary. The desert sense at issue here is basic in the sense that the agent, to be morally responsible, would deserve blame or credit just because she has performed the action…and not by virtue of consequentialist considerations. (2007a, p. 86)

The importance that Pereboom attaches to the basic desert sense of moral responsibility stems in large part from his view that it is this particular notion of moral responsibility that provides the grounding for the so-called “backward-looking reactive attitudes” that play a central function in moral systems. These reactive attitudes—which include resentment, indignation, and what Pereboom calls “moral anger”—are emotional responses to the actions (and non-actions) of others that often give rise to punitive actions towards those who are viewed to have behaved immorally. At the heart of Pereboom’s criticism of Vargas’s revisionist account is the idea that unless people can be responsible in the basic desert sense, neither certain kinds of reactive attitudes (e.g., resentment, moral anger) nor the actions they engender—which include particular kinds of punishment that I discuss below—can be justified. Pereboom’s challenge to Vargas, therefore, is to explain how his revisionist account of free will and moral responsibility can preserve the basic desert sense of moral responsibility without addressing the metaphysical issues that have been central to the traditional debates about free will.

While Vargas agrees with Pereboom’s view that the kind of moral responsibility at issue has to do with deservingness of either praise or blame, he denies that he shoulders the burden of explaining how his view can accommodate the particular type of moral responsibility that Pereboom considers to be closely connected to commonsense attitudes about free will. Vargas states that he rejects “Pereboom’s conception of ‘basic desert’ if, by that, he means a substantive account of desert that requires that desert is warranted by nothing more than the agent and the action” (2009, p. 56, FN 14). Vargas believes that it is enough for him to defend a kind of desert that takes into account not only the agent and the action, but also other factors that may include “facts including social context and the broader normative significance of the act in a system of human practices” (Ibid.). He evidently believes that accommodating such a “non-basic” type of desert within his revised account would be enough to ground a responsibility system that would “look very familiar, accommodating both backwards-looking attitudes (such as gratitude) [my emphasis] and forward-looking attitudes and practices” (2007b, p. 202).

Lurking in the background of Pereboom’s objection to Vargas is the idea that unless we can provide a justification for the kind of basic desert sense of moral responsibility that he has in mind, it would be unfair to harbor certain kinds of backward-looking attitudes towards determined agents and to inflict punishments that stem from such attitudes. This line of reasoning is supported by the fact that the folk themselves seem to acknowledge that Pereboom’s basic desert sense of moral responsibility (or something very close to it) is what ultimately justifies such attitudes and punishments. Since Pereboom’s understanding of the basic desert sense of moral responsibility is more demanding than other senses of the basic desert type of moral responsibility that Vargas considers, I will henceforth refer to Pereboom’s conception of it as the narrow basic desert sense of moral responsibility. It is important to understand that Vargas is not denying Pereboom’s claim that the folk tend to view the narrow basic desert sense of moral responsibility as providing the philosophical grounding for their backward-looking reactive attitudes as well as the particular practices that arise from them. What he does deny is Pereboom’s claim that no justification for retaining these attitudes, etc., can be given once we relinquish the possibility of defending this kind of moral responsibility. Consistent with his basic revisionist approach, Vargas maintains that even if it is true that the narrow basic desert sense of moral responsibility is the fundamental sense of moral responsibility operating in our responsibility systems—a claim that he questions—there is no clear reason why we could not revise it in such a way as to strip it of its problematic metaphysical commitments while retaining the backward-looking attitudes and practices that play a central role in these systems. All that would matter for Vargas—and this is the key point—is that the elements that we retain in the responsibility system (which may include backward-looking attitudes and practices) serve to foster moral attentiveness. So long as they do, we can justify the claim that agents within the responsibility system are proper targets of backward-looking attitudes and practices.

Having discussed the relevant aspects of Vargas’s revisionist view in some detail, we can now assess whether we should follow his recommendation to accept the existence of free will and moral responsibility along the lines he suggests. There are reasons for thinking that Pereboom’s line of attack against Vargas would be more effective if he insisted that rather than accountingfor the narrow basic desert sense of moral responsibility, Vargas needs to account for the particular practices that arise out of them. More specifically, it seems incumbent upon Vargas to explain how we can justify retaining retributivist practices within responsibility systems. By retributivism, I am referring roughly to the justification for treatment whereby an individual is either rewarded or punished as payback for the moral rights/wrongs he has committed. Consequentialist considerations do not figure into justifications for treatment from this perspective. There are a few reasons for why the success of Vargas’s revisionist project depends on his providing an adequate defense for why such retributivist practices should be retained. To begin with, while one may question (as Vargas does) whether the basic desert sense of moral responsibility plays a fundamental role in the predominant responsibility systems, there is little doubt that retributivist attitudes and practices do. The key role that retributivist justice plays in commonsense moral systems has been noted by philosopher Richard Joyce, among others, who points out points out that “When we examine our ordinary concepts of desert and justice, what we seem to find is an idea of the world having a kind of ‘moral equilibrium.’ When a wrong is done this equilibrium is upset, and the administration of the appropriate punishment is seen as the procedure that will effect its restitution” (2006, p. 68). Given how centrally retributivism figures into our responsibility systems, unless Vargas is able to explain why retributivist attitudes and practices should be retained, it is doubtful that he could succeed at his stated goal of providing us with a revisionist account that can accomplish more or less everything that we are looking for in an account of free will and moral responsibility.

An additional reason for thinking that Vargas shoulders the burden of explaining why the retributivist elements of our responsibility systems ought to be retained is that the claim that we can justify retaining such elements in our attitudes and practices is clearly a point of emphasis for a large proportion of philosophers involved in the free will debate, including many libertarians as well as some compatibilists like John Fischer. The role that retributivism plays in the traditional disagreements between free will skeptics and their libertarian and compatibilist opponents has been observed by Galen Strawson, who believes that the rift can be boiled down to the question of whether or not it is possible for human agents to have what he calls “true moral responsibility”. Strawson defines “true moral responsibility” as “responsibility of such a kind that, if we have it, then it makes sense, at least, to suppose that it could be just to punish some of us with (eternal) torment in hell and reward others with (eternal) bliss in heaven” (1994, p. 9). Given that part of the aim of libertarians and many compatibilists is to defend the sort of free will and moral responsibility that could ground backward-looking reactive attitudes as well as the retributive practices that arise from them, it stands to reason that were Vargas to admit that his revisionist view cannot accommodate retributivism, we should expect philosophers in these camps to balk at the suggestion that they ought to adopt the revised notions of free will and moral responsibility that Vargas recommends.

At this point one might question my claim that providing a viable defense of his revisionist account of free will and moral responsibility requires that Vargas offer a plausible explanation of how retributivist attitudes and practices can be justified by it. In opposition to my view, one might suggest that it would be enough for Vargas to defend an account of free will and moral responsibility that is capable of grounding our forward-looking attitudes and practices. Should he pursue this path, Vargas’s account of free will and moral responsibility would go beyond simply calling for the elimination of the libertarian commitments that he believes ground the folk concepts. It would now be recommending that we revise away the retributivist elements that play a central role in our responsibility systems. While this is certainly an option Vargas could take, it is probably a route he is best avoiding since pursuing it would likely strip his revisionist account of whatever widespread appeal it otherwise might have had.