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 determined, 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...