Against Desert Part 2: Moral Luck

You feel morally lucky, punk?

Here I continue my series arguing against desert; if you missed part 1, here it is, also you did bad and should feel bad for missing it!

Here, I will present a few related arguments against desert. All of them have in common being based on moral luck. The idea behind moral luck is that what a person deserves cannot be a matter of chance circumstances—it should not be the case that whether a person deserves something depends on whether they got bad luck. For example, it could not be the case that all South Dakotans deserve to suffer—for being in South Dakota is a matter of luck (rather poor luck, as it happens, one Dakota is more than enough), and what one deserves cannot depend on whether they got lucky or not.

Many people, myself included, have robust intuitions about moral luck. It shouldn’t be the case that one person deserves to suffer and the other doesn’t just because of bad luck. The basic desert-makers, like god, do not play with dice. But it seems that any plausible account of desert requires denying moral luck. Thus, she who affirms moral luck while denying desert is in for a rather bumpy ride.

Before I explain the deep tension between desert and moral luck, let me provide a brief explanation of what moral luck is not. It does not require saying that circumstances can’t affect whether a person deserves to suffer. People with lead in their water may be more likely to be violent. But it is plausible that people who are more violent, regardless of the causal explanation of why they are more violent, deserve worse things than peaceful, non-violent people. If chance circumstances affect whether a person is vicious, then it is very plausible that, though the circumstances are chancy, they affect desert. A scenario like that does not run afoul of my intuitions, nor of those of most people I’ve spoken to. Of course, I have dirty utilitarian intuitions, and am not initially inclined to think anyone deserves to suffer, but if I try really hard to tap into my retributivist side, this doesn’t seem objectionable at all.

The other kind of moral luck, however, does. Suppose that whether a person deserves to suffer just depends on whether, through chance, they end up doing a bad thing. We might suppose that two people both drive while drunk, both drivers of equal competence. One gets into an accident and the other doesn’t. It seems intuitively like what one deserves if they kill someone through their drunk driving is more severe than if they don’t—but whether they kill someone is a matter of luck. Thus, to hold on to the intuition that drunk drivers who kill people deserve worse than those who don’t, the retributivist must give up on their moral luck intuitions.

But after adequate massaging of their intuition, after the adrenaline has left their system, a calmer and more relaxed retributivist might recognize that, in this case, the two people deserve the same thing. When the difference is only luck, as it is here, it cannot affect desert. We might be angrier at the one who killed people, but really they deserve the same thing.

But other cases remain trickier for the believer in desert to explain, and show that they must give up on their retributivist intuitions. For example, consider the following two scenarios. In the first, John wakes up on a Saturday, meets a new stranger who infuriates him an extreme amount, and strangles the stranger. Suppose here that there is no risk that John will strangle anyone else; this stranger is the only person with a face that could make John strangle him.

In the second scenario, John sleeps through Saturday. In this dream, unlike in the case of ordinary dreams, John’s reasoning is not impaired at all, and he believes himself to be in the real world. In the dream, he meets a stranger who infuriates him an extreme amount—John strangles the stranger in the dream. Once again, there’s no risk that John will do it again.

Whether John would just dream about this or actually do it is a matter of luck. But nonetheless, it seems that what John deserves if he actually kills a stranger is very different from what he would deserve if he committed a homicide in a dream. Thus, to maintain our intuitions about John’s actions in dreams vs in real life, we must accept moral luck. But many are not prepared to accept moral luck—how can what we deserve depend on whether we get lucky?

A few more cases show that common ideas about desert require that we reject moral luck. One of them relates to brains in vats—few think that if Hitler was a brain in a vat, who never caused any suffering, he’d deserve exactly the same thing as real-life Hitler, who I’ve heard is a real shmuck. But whether Hitler is born a real boy or a brain in a vat is a matter of luck; thus, this again requires we reject moral luck.

Finally, we can deduce that desert requires moral luck from the following principles, both of which seems to follow from common-sense ideas of desert.

1. Don’t punish the innocent: if a person has taken no immoral actions, they don’t deserve to suffer.

2. Do punish some guilty: some guilty people deserve to suffer.

These are inconsistent for the following reason: whether a person takes an immoral act is a matter of luck. Take any sadistic serial killer and then imagine having them be paralyzed so that they cannot commit crimes. Whether a person is paralyzed is a matter of luck—but don’t punish the innocent entails that the meek, wheel-chair-bound Bundy who has hurt no one would not deserve to suffer, while do punish some guilty entails that the sadistic, serial-killing Bundy would deserve to suffer. But whether Bundy gets paralyzed is a mater of luck.

One suggestion that my good friend

Amos Wollen

, author of the excellent blog Going Awol, has is that a person who has done nothing immoral can’t deserve to suffer, but one who has thought evil thoughts does deserve to suffer. Thus, if wheel-chair bound Jeffrey Dahmer was thinking evil thoughts, he would deserve to suffer. But this runs into at least two worries.

First, it seems like, even if wheel-chair bound Dahmer deserves to suffer a bit, surely he’d deserve to suffer more if he killed lots of people. But that’s a matter of luck, and so if there’s no moral luck, then this wouldn’t affect his desert at all.

Second, whether a person thinks evil thought is a matter of luck. Suppose there’s a person who, whenever they see a Laotian person, has the urge to kill them and tries to do it. If this person sees no Laotian people, then they would not deserve to suffer on this account—after all, they have not had any bad thoughts. But whether a person sees a Laotian person is, of course, a matter of luck. This actually raises a distinct and perhaps bigger problem that I’ll explain in an interlude, but at the very least, it poses a challenge for moral luck.

Thus, belief in desert seems to require moral luck. But moral luck is a tough pill to swallow. It just intuitively seems that what we deserve can’t depend on how lucky we are. Additionally, as Kershnar notes, what one deserves depends on the things that one is responsible for. But for one to be responsible for something, they must have control over that thing—but one can’t have control over the chance events that, according to those who affirm moral luck, determine one’s desert level, like whether one is a brain in a vat or whether other drivers are near them on the road. Thus, no one deserves anything.

Even if one gives up belief in moral luck, they are still not out of the woods. If, for example, one is a personal identity reductionist—which they should be—then there is no robust sense in which one is the same person as their past self. Thus, one cannot deserve to suffer for the actions of their past selves. Positing the R relation as the basis for desert cannot account for this, as we’ve seen in the last article in the series.

Interlude in which I talk about the scenario where the person starts plotting homicide every time they see a Laotian person

Actually, I think this case poses a problem for desert, independent of the whole moral luck thing. Suppose that we discovered that there is a particular way that one could look—purple with yellow splotches and such—that would cause all humans to want to kill them. Would we all deserve to suffer then? There are three options: first, yes; second, only if we do see the people with purple and yellow splotches; and third, no.

The third option is out if we believe in desert—if there’s a person who tries to kill Laotian people whenever they see them, then they’d deserve bad things to befall them if they do try to kill Laotian people. But on this account, we’d be like those people. The first option is also out—if we discovered this about all humans, it would be strange to think that this would make all bad things that had ever happened in human history actually good and all people deserve to suffer. The second option is also dicey—if a person would try to kill all Laotian people they see them, it seems odd, conditional on believing in desert, to think they deserve puppies and rainbows just because they’ve never seen a Laotian person.

Okay, interlude is done now, I’ll now wrap up

So now, over the course of this series, we’ve seen at least four intuitions that are inconsistent with our belief in desert: first, our intuitions about temporally inverted lives; second, our intuitions about whether most people deserve to suffer; third, our intuitions about moral luck; and fourth, our intuitions about people who get homicidal whenever they see people of a particular type. That’s an awful lot of intuitions weighing against just one fundamental one—that bad people deserve to suffer. It is thus time to revise our retributivist intuitions; they, while being plausible on their face, just can’t stand up to rigorous philosophical scrutiny. We’ll see more reasons in future articles to do this—retributivist intuitions are plausibly debunked, and they clash with many, very fundamental intuitions. They are just about the best candidates for revisable intuitions in philosophy.