Compatibilism and Prepunishment
Saul Smilansky (2007) has a very interesting argument against compatibilism, which I'll paraphrase here:
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.
Prepunishment is the punishing of people who, it is believed, are going to commit a crime, before they have committed it. If they do go on to commit the crime, and the only way of punishing her 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.
Given a deterministic universe and extraordinary predictive power (say, based on an advanced neuropsychology), how can a compatibilist resist prepunishment? Smilansky thinks they cannot, for compatibilism allows that (a) a person’s committing of a crime is completely determined, and yet (b) she commits it out of her own free will, hence she is morally responsible for it, and liable to blame and punishment. If we perfectly know now that it is completely determined that a person will commit a crime in (say) a week, out of her own (compatibilist) free will, the compatibilist cannot have an objection to prepunishing this person now, before she has actually committed the crime.
The point is that the compatibilist's claim that determinism has no effect on our ordinary moral practise is clearly false: prepunishment is widely held to be an abhorrent violation of a person's autonomy and integrity, yet compatibilism cannot support this idea.
For my part, I think he's basically right. While he is wrong to say that the prepunishment can prevent the crime (for there is then no future crime to punish) it is still easily possible to punish a person without altering their future actions.
In no way does this establish anything like a libertarian free will, but the usual compatibilist exhortations about the unimportance of determinism have always sounded hollow. Much of our moral thought is structured around the idea of agents being able to resist determination, even determination arising from within their own psychology. The version of autonomy that emerges from this metaphysical picture is a significantly diminished one, and we can expect similarly significant changes to the rest of our moral discourse if the metaphysical picture is widely accepted.
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.
Prepunishment is the punishing of people who, it is believed, are going to commit a crime, before they have committed it. If they do go on to commit the crime, and the only way of punishing her 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.
Given a deterministic universe and extraordinary predictive power (say, based on an advanced neuropsychology), how can a compatibilist resist prepunishment? Smilansky thinks they cannot, for compatibilism allows that (a) a person’s committing of a crime is completely determined, and yet (b) she commits it out of her own free will, hence she is morally responsible for it, and liable to blame and punishment. If we perfectly know now that it is completely determined that a person will commit a crime in (say) a week, out of her own (compatibilist) free will, the compatibilist cannot have an objection to prepunishing this person now, before she has actually committed the crime.
The point is that the compatibilist's claim that determinism has no effect on our ordinary moral practise is clearly false: prepunishment is widely held to be an abhorrent violation of a person's autonomy and integrity, yet compatibilism cannot support this idea.
For my part, I think he's basically right. While he is wrong to say that the prepunishment can prevent the crime (for there is then no future crime to punish) it is still easily possible to punish a person without altering their future actions.
In no way does this establish anything like a libertarian free will, but the usual compatibilist exhortations about the unimportance of determinism have always sounded hollow. Much of our moral thought is structured around the idea of agents being able to resist determination, even determination arising from within their own psychology. The version of autonomy that emerges from this metaphysical picture is a significantly diminished one, and we can expect similarly significant changes to the rest of our moral discourse if the metaphysical picture is widely accepted.