The other day, while taking my kids to school, I held up traffic by trying to cut over a lane to make a left turn, and a car stuck behind me honked long and loud. My son, Lucas (10), said matter of factly, “You deserved that, Dad.” (I think he was right.) Of course, I then had to go Socratic on him and try to figure out what he means by ‘desert’, and I won’t bore you with the details. But it reminded me of an issue I’ve raised here before (e.g., here), and I’d like to get more explicit answers from people, especially skeptics about ‘genuine desert’ (by way of skepticism of ‘desert-entailing’ free will). Let me pose the questions this way:
- Either (a) I didn’t deserve to be honked at (children don’t deserve to be reprimanded for bad behavior, top musicians don’t deserve their awards, bad politicians don’t deserve to be voted out of office, etc.) or (b) I did deserve it (they do deserve it).
- If (a), is it because even low-level degrees of desert are unjustified for the same reasons that all desert is unjustified—i.e., we lack the powers of self-creation, sourcehood, agent causation, or unconditional choice that would be required for any and all desert? (If so, does this mean that Lucas was implicitly assuming that I have such metaphysical powers when he made his comment? And I was misusing the concept when I thought I deserved to be honked at—and that others deserve things—since I don’t think people have such powers?)
- If (b), is it because ‘desert’ is properly used in different ways, and it applies to my case and other low-level desert cases because those cases don’t require the metaphysical powers, but it does not apply to other cases that seem to involve more significant degrees of desert, like deserving to be punished retributively? (If so, does this mean that Sandusky or this guy do not deserve blame and punishment, but I do, because the concept is being applied differently across the cases? Or does it mean that they deserve blame in the same watered down sense as I do, but not in the genuine sense that would justify more significant responses, such as retributive punishment?)
- Or is there some other explanation I’m missing?
Of course, I think I deserved my low-level reprimand for the same reasons most people deserve blame and punishment, praise and reward (when they do and to the degree that they do): I had the capacities to recognize that what I was doing was (low-level) wrong (i.e., d-baggish), and I had the opportunity to act differently (in the ordinary sense that nothing prevented me from exercising my capacities to recognize what I was doing, to choose and act otherwise, etc.). And I think that’s roughly what Lucas was implicitly assuming (I also think he’d be quite good at picking up on mitigating circumstances based on these compatibilist conditions—from fanciful manipulators to ordinary excuses such as my being unable to see whether there were cars behind me or our being really late for school or my being so tired I couldn’t think straight, etc.).
Skeptics (and libertarians?) about desert tend to focus on heinous crimes and criminals, perhaps thinking that if those guys (Robert Harris, Hitler, etc.) don’t deserve blame, then obviously no one does. But this strategy may make the case more plausible, both because those guys may seem so crazy that it’s hard to distinguish whether what they lack is libertarian powers or compatibilist capacities and because those crimes are the sort that invoke the G-Strawsonian idea of heaven-and-hell responsibility/desert. I’m thinking the case is harder to make working from the bottom up rather than the top down. Convince us that no one deserves anything, including clearly rational, knowledgeable, self-controlled people, to any degree (and in both directions—blame and praise), or explain why low-level desert is different in kind from the sort of desert that you claim is not justified.
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