Determinism and prepunishment: the radical nature of compatibilism

Abstract

I shall argue that compatibilism cannot resist in a principled way the temptation to prepunish people. Compatibilism thus emerges as a much more radical view than it is typically presented and perceived, and is seen to be at odds with fundamental moral intuitions. Let us begin by making a few explications and assumptions: Compatibilism is, broadly, the view that even if everything is deter mined, this does not make much of a difference, morally. According to compatibilism, it is a mistake to think that we lose anything morally significant if we do not have libertarian free will. We can continue to function with our common-sense moral paradigm, which requires free will for moral responsibility, and moral responsibility for desert, blame, and punishment even in a fully deterministic world. Prepunishment is the punishing of people who, it is believed, are going to commit a crime, before they have committed it. If the person does go on to commit the crime, and the only way of punishing him is through prepunishment, then prepunishment is the only way of establishing desert and justice. If prepunishment prevents the crime, it is morally tempting in a different way, because unlike regular punishment, i.e. postpunishment it is not inflicted after there are victims of crime, but rather prevents the crime, and so prevents also the potential harm.1 Finally, let us assume for the sake of our argument both determinism and complete predictability: if people's actions are determined, and we have perfect epistemic capacities, we can know ahead who will commit a crime.