Free Will and the Significance of Basic Undeservedness

Manuel Vargas proposes a way around the longstanding stalemate between compatibilists and incompatibilists about free will, understood as the control required for moral responsibility. He argues that our practices of holding responsible can be justified by their role in upholding norms and cultivating moral agency, without appeal to basic desert, or what is deserved independently of such forward-looking considerations. Given this, libertarian commitments about ultimate control fall out as gratuitous. In this commentary, I raise a challenge to this strategy. Persons enjoy protections against certain kinds of harm, forfeited only through culpable action. If incompatibilism is correct, such forfeiture requires that the agent had ultimate control over their wrongdoing. If so, agents who lack such control retain protections that Vargas’s forward-looking reasons might not override, undermining his claim that concerns about basic desert can be set aside in justifying our practices. I then outline a different path to compatibilism. Suppose basic desert is grounded in the importance of treating persons with due regard and of agents and groups balancing their prioritization of persons and values over time. Since that importance does not depend on incompatibilist control, neither would reasons of basic desert. The upshot would be a compatibilist account of the desert presupposed by our responsibility practices.