Desert, Free Will, and Our Moral Responsibility Practices

Abstract

In this paper, I assess a challenging argument made by McKenna (J Ethical Theory, 2019) that free will might be important in justifying our moral responsibility practices even if free will is not important insofar as it is required for desert of blame and praise. I offer an alternative picture, according to which while we can justify our practices of moral responsibility in terms that appeal to free will without using terms that explicitly appeal to desert, desert is necessarily implicated nevertheless by the very practices we seek to justify. In the process, I set out my understanding of the nature of blame and address the question of whether blame should always be understood as deserved in a sense distinct from fitting.