Withdrawal Pains: Giving Up Desert

Abstract

Underlying our present conception of punishment is the moral notion of desert. As Hodgson sets the problem, either we treat people as sometimes deserving punishment, or we treat them as “vehicles for treatment to be manipulated for the general good.” But treating them as mere vehicles to be dealt with for the common good, he says, (1) is an inappropriate way to treat rational people, and (2) does not encourage them to take responsibility for their conduct. I’m not sure about the second claim, since if human beings are not in fact responsible for what they do, I’m not entirely sure what it would mean for them take responsibility for their actions. I think it’s worth saying a word or two about that. I entirely agree with him about the first of these claims, though: treating human beings as mere instruments to be used for the common good is an inappropriate way to deal with rational people. Where, however, do we find the root of that claim? Is it in the belief that human beings deserve something else? That, of course, would simply be to insist on the position Hodgson has taken, and it may be that that is as far as the argument can go. All argument ends somewhere. I want to explore the other option, that perhaps even if there is no responsibility and no desert it is still wrong to treat human beings as mere instruments of the common good. I have begun to argue this possibility in an earlier paper, and I would like to follow out that line of thinking in this essay. If I am wrong about this third possibility (people do not morally deserve punishment for wrongdoing, and yet it is wrong to treat them as mere instruments), then (pace Greene and Cohen) I believe the outlook is pretty bleak.