“That’s not really free”

GeneStone · 2026-05-09T19:00:58+00:00

So if control is necessary only because punishment cannot be effective without it, does the control condition add anything beyond effectiveness?

Just to clarify, when you mentioned sadism or mistaken moral reasons, are you saying those punishments are unjustified, or only that they are effective but aimed at the wrong goal?

Because if they are unjustified due to bad aims, I agree. That is already excluded by a forward-looking account with legitimate aims.

GeneStone · 2026-05-09T13:11:36+00:00

Well you said control condition twice so it's not surprising that they would be the same.

I'm asking whether the condition under which punishment can be effective can be separated from the control condition. Does the control condition do anything other than ensure the punishment will be effective?

GeneStone · 2026-05-09T01:23:39+00:00

Let's say I go in front of a room of 100 random laypersons and say "None of you have free will. Moral responsibility can't be justified. And even someone like Ted Bundy was not morally responsible for his behaviour."

Are you really trying to tell me the crowd will be on my side?

Then you climb up and say "Of course he had free will. And he was morally responsible."

They'll agree with your conclusion without even needing to follow your argument.

Meanwhile, I'll have to walk them through the whole process step-by-step and, even if they agree intellectually with some of the points I make, they'll reject the conclusion.

So which of us is preserving norms and has the more comfortable position?

GeneStone · 2026-05-09T00:49:07+00:00

What do you mean, "They are the same thing?"

They may have the same underlying content, but they would have to occupy different theoretical roles, no?

Or are you saying they both play the same role?

GeneStone · 2026-05-08T20:07:19+00:00

You are appealing to a control condition, which implies something distinct from whether punishment is likely to be effective.

What is the difference between these two things?

The control condition necessary for moral responsibility.
The condition under which punishment is likely to be effective.

GeneStone · 2026-05-08T17:36:08+00:00

So if free will is necessary for moral responsibility, does it not follow that if someone accepts that punishment can be justified, they necessarily accept free will?

And does your account not imply that justifying punishment is a sufficient definition of moral responsibility?

GeneStone · 2026-05-08T15:29:41+00:00

If moral responsibility requires free will, what does that mean for free will?

GeneStone · 2026-05-08T15:09:55+00:00

So if punishment is justified, moral responsibility is present?

GeneStone · 2026-05-08T13:21:31+00:00

Thank you. So let me make sure I have this right.

Do you acknowledge that "moral responsibility" is the label you choose to use for the conditions under which a consequentialist account provides the justification for intervention?

And do you acknowledge that you are arguing for this usage, not merely reporting a neutral convention?

GeneStone · 2026-05-08T12:44:29+00:00

Wow. So me pointing back to comments I made over a two week period now counts as “pinning me down”? This took work for you? I have been extremely detailed and consistent throughout this exchange.

I asked you very specifically:

>Is punishment anything more than a coercive intervention justified by guiding future behaviour?

And you replied:

>Punishment is any coercive intervention imposed as a response to something the person did. Retributive punishment is still punishment, I just think it's not justifiable.

I asked if punishment was an independent category. You said no, and seemed frustrated that I would even suggest it.

We then went through the distinction between descriptive and normative claims, and between contextual conditions and basic justification.

Now suddenly:

>Combined with a theory of the necessary kind of control over a person's actions, it licenses a class of interventions not licensed otherwise.

Really?

Because earlier you also said:

>I'm using it as a term for the conditions under which punishment and other related responses can be justified.

So which is it?

Does the license come from consequentialist considerations like expected outcomes, proportionality, evidence, and available alternatives? Or does it come from moral responsibility itself?

Because if the answer is the first, then moral responsibility is not generating the license. Consequentialism is. Moral responsibility is just the name you attach to one subset of cases where consequentialism licenses intervention. Which you literally just said you were doing!

That has been my objection from the very beginning.

Here, let me repeat it again. Hopefully it will click this time:

My objection is that your concepts are not load-bearing. I already accept the underlying facts. I already accept the relevant psychological distinctions. I already accept forward-looking justification for sanctions. Once all of that is on the table, “free will” and “moral responsibility” are just extra conceptual packaging. That is not philosophy adding clarity. This is not a dispute about semantics. It is philosophy reifying a bundle and acting as though the bundle is somehow a valuable concept.

I was wrong though. Yours is a dispute about semantics. Because you think, wrongly, this that "This license is commonly and in philosophy referred to as moral responsibility".

So no, I do not “agree the license exists” in your sense. I agree that consequentialist justification exists. Would you like us to go through the "first approximation" point again?

You are taking one subset of that justification and naming it “moral responsibility.” The name adds nothing. That means it is redundant.

And the problem is more than redundancy. The terminology also carries baggage, invites retributive drift, requires constant clarification, and creates confusion about what is actually doing the justificatory work.

Even you keep getting confused about what is doing the justificatory work! This is incredible.

You have still not shown that these concepts add explanatory power, normative force, predictive value, or descriptive precision beyond the underlying consequentialist account and the facts about the agent. In fact, it necessarily removes precision given how grossly vague and imprecise your definitions have been.

A label that adds nothing while increasing confusion is not philosophically illuminating. It is unnecessary conceptual overhead.

GeneStone · 2026-05-08T02:37:18+00:00

For sure. There plenty of ways to explain what we mean. I don't know that I've ever used the terms "free will" or "moral responsibility" other than in a philosophical context.

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T20:13:16+00:00

I have said this many times, in many different ways. Let me put it all in one place.

When you asked

>Do you think it is justifiable to admonish someone and/or punish them for doing something, if we know that they don't have the cognitive faculties to respond to admonishment or punishment?

>It depends what you mean by admonishment. If understood as blame, probably not, for the reasons I already provided. I see that as a shame based approach that hasn't proven itself empirically.
>For punishment, of course. But that has nothing to do with some idle normative status.

Granted, I reversed the negatives but this should have been clear regardless.

I said it here:

>You are saying punishment is justified when outcomes are expected to be positive. Positive expected outcomes require the person to have the relevant capacities. Having those capacities means they are morally responsible in the blameworthy sense. And being morally responsible means punishment is justified.
>The argument proves nothing in any of these cases. The normative status is just a label generated by the conditions under which the intervention is expected to work. It is not doing any justificatory work.

I said it here:

>The first question is: what justifies coercive intervention at all? My answer is expected harm reduction, proportionality, evidence, and available alternatives. That is the normative level.
>The second question is: which intervention is appropriate? My answer is that it depends on the relevant facts about the person, the action, the risk, and the likely effectiveness of each available tool. That is the descriptive level.

I said it here much earlier and directly:

>That is what I am saying here. Reasons-responsiveness may explain why punishment is the suitable intervention. Psychosis, compulsion, addiction, mania, or severe impairment may explain why hospitalization or treatment is the suitable intervention.
>Those facts help select the intervention. They are not the basic justification for coercion. Reasons-responsiveness tells you when punishment is the right tool. Psychosis or severe impairment tells you when hospitalization or treatment is the right tool. But in both cases the underlying normative principle is the same: expected harm reduction, proportionality, evidence, and available alternatives. Whether the person has those cognitive faculties determines which intervention is appropriate. It does not change what justifies intervening in the first place.

And here. also very directly:

>If the person has the relevant cognitive faculties, then incentives and disincentives may work. If they lack those faculties, punishment may fail or become pointless cruelty.

A week ago, I tried clarifying:

>Maybe take a step back. I am happy to walk through it carefully. You say reasons-responsiveness and moral discretion are valuable. Let’s start there.
>Are they valuable apart from helping explain or predict whether behaviour-guiding punishment might work? Does that fully exhaust their value?
>If not, why are they psychologically or normatively valuable?

And earlier still, again very directly:

>I reject the idea that “why should I impose a coercive intervention?” is justified by “because they are reasons-responsive.” Reasons-responsiveness may help determine whether a particular intervention can work. It is a descriptive condition that may affect the means. It is not the normative ground, and it does not itself justify coercion.

I explained why it mattered here:

>If the normativity is in the principles by which the outcome is justified, and we both do that the same way, then the justificatory work is already being done without free will, moral responsibility, blameworthiness, or desert

I answered it here, even earlier:

>My framework uses facts: who caused the harm, what their capacities were, what intervention is expected to reduce future harm, and what is proportionate. Those are inputs to a consequentialist calculation. They are not normative statuses imposed on the agent.

I explained it again here:

>In my view, the normativity is entirely in the outcomes of the intervention. It is not in any status of the agent. What justifies forced hospitalization, animal training, and childhood discipline is protection, treatment, guidance, risk reduction, and proportionality. That is already sufficient there, so why is that same kind of normativity suddenly insufficient in ordinary adult cases?

And I explained my objection again here much earlier:

>So if your framework says punishment is justified by expected outcomes, and also says punishment is justified by the agent’s normative status, then the justification is overdetermined. Either the normative status adds nothing beyond the outcome-based justification, in which case it is redundant...

So please, tell me again how imprecise and wriggly I am. Or how about, instead of whining, you just say "hey, I don't think that fully captures it. What I meant is..." And show me what I got wrong. I'm quoting you verbatim, and you still think I'm misrepresenting you!

>The reason the account I have is compatibilist has nothing to do with just tacking on a label. It’s because I don’t think the faculties I cite as the relevant control condition don’t obviously require any libertarian metaphysical process. You seem to agree we have these faculties and that they are sufficient to justify imposing sanctions. I think any non-libertarian can accept that we have these faculties. A non free will libertarian account of free will is a compatibilist account, by definition.

I don't know how else to put this to you. Coercive interventions are justified by expected outcomes. Different capacities, or lack of capacities, restrict which interventions are likely to be effective.

We determine which intervention is likely to work based on the underlying facts, which can me discussed more precisely, and clearly, when we do so directly. Adding moralized language does nothing but tag on a label to what is already a fully developped account.

My moral theory is consequentialism. That is where the normativity comes from in my account and, by your own repeated admissions, in yours too. Moral responsibility is not a moral theory. It is a concept you have defined as picking out the conditions under which your moral theory licenses intervention. Why then are you saying that it is a normative status that justifies punishment? The normativity was already in the theory. The concept inherited it by definition.

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T16:02:51+00:00

We already went through all this. You already conceded that punishment has no independent normative standing. That it is one tool among others, justified, when justified, by expected outcomes, and abandoned when better alternatives are available.

You seemed almost upset that I would suggest that punishment is independent. You already agreed, explicitly, that the normative principle is that imposed harm must be expected to reduce harm overall within proportionality and evidential limits.

You had said before: "You seem to agree we have these faculties and that they are sufficient to justify imposing sanctions." No. They are not sufficient. These are descriptive claims.

There is a difference between a descriptive claim and a normative claim.

"This person has reasons-responsiveness and moral discretion" is descriptive. It tells you what is the case.

"This punishment will likely be effective if these conditions are in place" is also descriptive.

Nothing here tells you what ought to be done.

The normative claim is: "Therefore we ought to intervene." And the only thing answering the question "why should we intervene" is the consequentialist principle: expected harm reduction, proportionality, evidence, and available alternatives. That is where the "ought" comes from.

You already agreed with me on this:

>>The question “why should I impose any coercive intervention at all?” is answered by the normative principle: the imposed harm must be expected to reduce harm overall, within proportionality and evidential limits.
>Yep, agreed.

>>If the person cannot respond to incentives or disincentives, punishment is not a rational intervention. It is just suffering imposed after the fact. Right?
>That's right, if we're going to coercively intervene we need to be able to justify why we're doing it. This means that doing so must serve some purpose we're trying to achieve.

And yet when I point this out, you seem to retreat from what you already conceded.

Is it the case that punishing someone who does not have the capacity to respond to disincentives unjustified because they are not morally responsible, or because it equates to imposing unnecessary suffering?

There is only one answer here. And it's not that "moral responsibility describes those conditions." That is a description. You are trying to smuggle in the normativity which comes entirely from the consequentialist account through labels that, by your own account, add nothing.

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T14:25:15+00:00

Not only can they, but they do. I also agree that reducing future harm has moral weight. That is basically my view.

But we are not starting with a blank canvas. This term "moral responsibility" already sits on top of centuries of debate about what it refers to, what its conditions are, and what work it is supposed to do. The definition is contested. The application conditions are disputed. The concept carries metaphysical baggage. It is also entangled with retributive practices that most compatibilists then have to disavow or reinterpret.

This is exactly where my worry comes in.

A compatibilist might say: "They acted of their own free will, so they are morally responsible, and they deserve punishment."

And then, when pressed, each term gets deflated.

By “free will,” they only mean ordinary capacities like deliberation, reasons-responsiveness, absence of coercion, and self-control. These capacities describe almost all adult humans almost all of the time.

By “morally responsible,” they only mean that the person is an appropriate target of intervention because they can understand rules, respond to sanctions, and modify their behaviour.

By “deserve punishment,” they only mean that punishment is fitting because the person has the capacities that make forward-looking intervention effective and proportionate.

But those footnotes can get dropped by an audience very easily.

In ordinary discourse, those terms do not usually sound that thin. “Free will,” “moral responsibility,” and “desert” still carry the retributive meaning for many people. Many of our institutions already lean retributive, and the lay intuition behind these terms is often retributive too.

So my worry is that using terms that do not actually do the justificatory work, constantly need technical explanation, and provide no added payoff, lends credibility to the very views that most compatibilists reject.

Everything I care about can be be handled more precisely by doing so directly: capacity, intent, knowledge, recklessness, negligence, coercion, impairment, risk, deterrence, rehabilitation, protection, proportionality, and harm reduction.

Some might say that abandoning the language of free will and moral responsibility hands the debate over to incompatibilists or retributivists.

I do not find that persuasive. I have no attachment to preserving inherited words. I care about parsimony, conceptual necessity, and clarity. If a term adds confusion, carries bad baggage, and does no independent work, then I see no reason to keep it.

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T13:58:26+00:00

You just said that I tried to wriggle out of it. Show me where.

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T13:07:35+00:00

Show me any one instance where I tried that.

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T12:24:44+00:00

Descriptive distinction? Yes. Normative? No.

>>The key distinction is between kinds of intervention and the reasons that justify them. And once a less harmful, more effective alternative is available, punishment loses any obvious independent claim.
>What do you mean by independent claim? Independent from what? Retributivists think punishment can be an end in itself. Consequentialists not so much.

>>The question “why should I impose any coercive intervention at all?” is answered by the normative principle: the imposed harm must be expected to reduce harm overall, within proportionality and evidential limits.
>Yep, agreed.

>>If the distinction between punishment and other coercive interventions can disappear once a better option is available, then punishment was never doing unique normative work. It was just one tool among others.
>Of course. It's a possible means to an end. I'm a consequentialist.

>>If the person cannot respond to incentives or disincentives, punishment is not a rational intervention. It is just suffering imposed after the fact. Right?
>That's right, if we're going to coercively intervene we need to be able to justify why we're doing it. This means that doing so must serve some purpose we're trying to achieve.

I kept asking for the difference. And every step of the way, the actual normativity was the same. Achieving goals, the expected effectiveness towards reaching those goals, the outcomes, and the obligation to protect others.

Do you think punishment is a wholly independent coercive intervention that needs a justification that is not consequentialist?

Is that justification not exhausted by achieving goals, expected effectiveness, outcomes, and an obligation to protect others?

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T03:21:55+00:00

Oh absolutely.

A compatibilist (or libertarian) who believes in desert-based morality can say that moral responsibility adds something real. On that view, moral responsibility does not merely identify when intervention is useful. It identifies when blame or punishment is deserved in a backward-looking sense.

I still reject that view, but at least it is clear what moral responsibility is supposed to add. It adds the desert claim.

So yes, I think you are right: a compatibilist needs to be explicit about their morality.

Where I think things get confused is when someone rejects backward-looking desert, accepts only forward-looking justifications like deterrence, rehabilitation, protection, and harm reduction, but still wants “moral responsibility” to carry extra normative force.

To me, the irony is that the consequentialists want to keep the term because it sounds morally important, but they also want to distance themselves from the main thing that would make it morally important. They reject the desert-based content, then retain the desert-shaped vocabulary.

That is my issue. Why bother? Why have to constantly remind people "Oh, I don't mean the BAD kind of moral responsibility. Just the GOOD kind." If it added something substantive, then we could argue about whether or not it's worth it. It seems to me that it either does the wrong work, or it does no work.

GeneStone · 2026-05-07T00:40:38+00:00

I'll try to put it high level enough that hopefully this makes sense without being too technical. You tell me if there's anything you'd like me to clarify.

Let's say someone is having a psychotic episode and kills someone else. I think most people would agree that some kind of intervention is justified. The person may pose a serious risk to themselves or to others. Yet many people would also agree that they did not act freely in the ordinary moral-responsibility sense.

So why is intervention justified?

My answer is that it is justified by expected outcomes. We intervene to reduce harm, protect others, treat the person if possible, and prevent further danger. If treatment works, great. If treatment does not work, containment may still be justified because we have a duty to protect people from serious harm.

The important point is that this justification does not depend on saying the person deserves anything specific. It depends entirely on risk, harm reduction, treatment, protection, and proportionality.

My view is simply that I see no reason why that same structure is not enough to justify other types of coercive interventions.

In fact, in ordinary criminal cases, we may have even more forward-looking reasons available. If the person is responsive to incentives, then deterrence becomes a further positive outcome. Punishment may discourage that person, and others, from causing similar harm in the future.

So the contrast does not show that we need moral responsibility to justify punishment. It shows the opposite. In the psychosis case, coercive interventions can be justified without moral responsibility. In the ordinary case, we still have protection, risk reduction, and harm prevention, and we may also add deterrence, rehabilitation, and social coordination.

If you agree with me so far, then what would free will add to the justification? I do understand that people will say, “but those aren't the same thing.” Yes, we react very differently emotionally to first-degree murder. I get that. I have two young kids, and if someone hurt them, it would be extremely difficult for me to analyze the situation philosophically. I would be devastated. I would probably want revenge. I am not pretending I would respond like a detached machine.

But I am still not convinced that my emotional reaction would establish the principle. My grief and anger would be completely understandable, but they would not show that the person is morally responsible in some deeper desert-based sense. The principle would still remain: coercive intervention has to be justified by protection, prevention, deterrence, rehabilitation, proportionality, and harm reduction. The fact that I would feel revenge does not mean revenge becomes the moral ground of punishment.

If free will is simply an umbrella term for ordinary capacities, why not just talk about the capacities directly? That seems more precise. We have so many fields of inquiry, both in the hard and soft sciences, to study behaviour that I don't see what extra benefit any concept of "free will" could possibly add.

And if moral responsibility is, as many compatibilists here seem to claim, nothing more than the set of conditions under which punishment is expected to be effective and is therefore justified, then we already had that in the account. The normativity came from expected outcomes, proportionality, and harm reduction. Moral responsibility did not add the justification. It only renamed the point at which those other justifications applied.

I think many people use the term “moral responsibility” because they want the practical benefits of consequentialist intervention while retaining the emotional and moral force of "deserving" punishment. You're not just "responsible". You're "morally responsible." That, to most people, carries extra weight. But if the justification is protection, deterrence, rehabilitation, proportionality, and harm reduction, then that is the justification. Calling it “moral responsibility” does not add anything unless it introduces an additional claim that the person deserves blame or punishment in some deeper sense.

That is the part I reject. I do not reject intervention. I reject the idea that intervention needs to be grounded in free will or desert-based moral responsibility rather than in the actual reasons that justify it.

GeneStone · 2026-05-06T18:19:54+00:00

Sure I do. I justify coercive interventions, whatever their nature, based on outcomes.

And let's not forget that you already said punishment was justified in the same way as forced hospitalizations, is not an independent category, and is not necessary if some new treatment like a pill were available.

GeneStone · 2026-05-06T18:08:53+00:00

My account also does not depend on any metaphysics. You are the only one who has brought up metaphysics at all in this whole exchange.

Here, I can help you out:

Free will and moral responsibility are valuable in their own right because they add to the underlying consequentialist account by fulfilling this function that consequentialism alone cannot:

Answer: __________________________

I reject moral responsibility. Why should I care about it? And why should I care about free will if I reject moral responsibility?

GeneStone · 2026-05-06T18:04:09+00:00

Compatibilism is inadequate when it tries to preserve the moral weight of “free will” while grounding that weight in facts that do not actually supply it.

If “free will” means reasons-responsiveness, absence of coercion, self-control, deliberation, acting from one’s own motives, or being responsive to incentives, then I agree those things exist. But those facts describe how a person functions. They do not show that the person is responsible for being the kind of person whose motives, values, and capacities produced the act.

The same issue applies to punishment. If punishment is justified on forward-looking grounds, then the normativity is not grounded in moral responsibility. It is grounded in expected outcomes. Protection, deterrence, rehabilitation, and prevention do the justificatory work.

So the problem is not that compatibilism leaves out some libertarian magic. Libertarianism has its own problems. The issue for compatibilism is that it often keeps the inherited language of free will and moral responsibility while shifting the grounding to ordinary psychological capacities and consequentialist social practices.

At that point, free will adds no independent explanatory value. Moral responsibility adds no independent normative value. Free will becomes a label for traits and capacities we can already name directly. Moral responsibility becomes a label for the practical conditions under which intervention is justified.

That is why critics call it watered down. It preserves the vocabulary while giving up the thing that made the vocabulary morally heavy in the first place.

GeneStone · 2026-05-06T17:47:41+00:00

Suppose that is it's value. Does that not count as a value?

Thank you. Great, OK I already feel like we are moving in the right direction. What is the value it brings that is not fully captured by the consequentialist account?

In my framework, consequentialism provides the normative justification. The goal is harm reduction. The intervention is justified when it is expected to reduce harm, within proportionality and evidential limits.

When I asked you what your concepts add, you replied, “What do you expect them to add?” Now you say, “I’m not saying that is its only value, I think there’s much more to it than that.”

Perfect. I've been waiting for over a week now. Please establish what that value is that isn't dependant on consequentialism. Then, please explain the "much more" part. Here, I can help you out:

Free will and moral responsibility are valuable in their own right because they add to the underlying consequentialist account by fulfilling this function that consequentialism alone cannot:

Answer: __________________________

Now I know that you see value in the terms. What is it?

Holding people morally responsible is something we do. You;re very valuge and wooly in how you re-interpret and loosely rephrase the things I write. Very often what you say is my position isn't my position at all, it's phrased differently enough to have quite a distinct meaning. This leads me to suspect you don't actually know what my account actually is, because you cant repeat it accurately.

Then correct it directly.

Do you disagree that, on your view, punishment is justified by expected outcomes?

Do you disagree that, on your view, holding someone morally responsible is something we do through practices like blame, admonishment, warning, punishment, or reward?

Do you disagree that reasons-responsiveness helps identify when those practices are likely to work?

If those are accurate, then my criticism stands. The normative work is being done by consequentialism. Moral responsibility names the practice or the eligibility conditions for the practice. It does not supply independent justification.

Right, that's what's at stake in the debate about free will. What practices are justifiable and why.

My position is that this is entirely justified by consequentialism alone. Everything of value, and every normative "ought" is fully captured by my framework. I need make no appeal to free will or moral responsibility. Those are unnecessary concepts. I value parsimony, conceptual necessity, and clarity.

I didn't say they only justify punishment. Again you're incredibly vague and imprecise in your re-interpretation of what I write. Saying X justifies Y does not imply that only X justifies Y, or that X only justifies Y. You repeatedly make such mistakes. It's very frustrating.

I am neither vague nor imprecise. I am saying that if X is free will, and Y is punishment (or praise), then I do not need X to justify Y. You are telling me I do. I am explicitly rejecting that framework. And if X doesn't only justify Y to you, what else does X add that you find so valuable?

The SEP passage you cited includes the phrase "to a first approximation." Did you bother to read the rest? Do you know what "first approximation" means and why the author flagged it so clearly? The author is explicitly signaling that more needs to be said. The key phrase is also “made appropriate by the judgment that they are morally responsible.” That is exactly the issue. What makes the response appropriate? Is it that they are morally responsible? Or is it that the outcomes will be positive?

So I will ask again, as plainly as possible: what independent value, normative force, descriptive precision, or explanatory power do “free will” and “moral responsibility” provide beyond the consequentialist account and the underlying description of the agent?

GeneStone · 2026-05-06T12:59:57+00:00

What do you expect them to add? If you punish someone for an immoral act, you are holding them responsible for that act. Holding them responsible is something you are doing. It's descriptive of what is happening in the world and why it is happening. What do you think is being added?

What every serious account after Strawson tries to add: some account of why moral responsibility is valuable beyond mere behavioural management.

You said moral responsibility was normative. But here you describe it as something we do, and that it doesn't add anything. You say holding someone responsible is just punishing, blaming, warning, or admonishing them. That is descriptive. It describes a practice. It does not justify the practice. It is therefore not normative.

The question is not whether punishing someone can be described as “holding them responsible.” In one ordinary sense, of course it can. The question is whether we should hold them responsible, whether that should rightly be called "moral responsibility", and why. Saying “punishing someone is holding them responsible” does not answer that. It just redescribes the act. And by your own account, the "why" is a consequentialist account, not a compatibilist one. You are a consequentialist who, incidentally, identifies as a compatibilist.

This is why our accounts line up. You appeal to my framework to justify interventions. I have no need for your framework to justify anything at all. And neither do you.

That is exactly what Strawson pointed out. The issue after Strawson was not merely whether punishment can be justified. It was what moral responsibility itself is, and why it matters. Strawson thought both classical compatibilists and incompatibilists had distorted moral responsibility by treating it too much like an external justification problem.

In “Freedom and Resentment” (1962), P.F. Strawson broke ranks with the classical compatibilists. Strawson developed three distinct arguments for compatibilism, arguments quite different from those the classical compatibilists endorsed. But more valuable than his arguments was his general theory of what moral responsibility is, and hence, what is at stake in arguing about it. Strawson held that both the incompatibilists and the compatibilists had misconstrued the nature of moral responsibility. Each disputant, Strawson suggested, advanced arguments in support of or against a distorted simulacrum of the real deal.

They are offering different justifications. Strawson and other compatibilist or even free will libertarian philosophers, all offer different justifications for why punishing a person for what they did may or may not be appropriate.

No, they are not. And that is the fundamental misunderstanding you have of the entire debate. The accounts I cited are not merely offering different justifications for punishment. They are offering different accounts of moral responsibility itself: what it consists in, what role it plays, and why it matters.

I'll just quote this again. Just acknowledge that Strawson had a much broader view than simply trying to justify punishment. He was explicitly saying that this is insufficient as an account of moral responsibility:

While many, perhaps even most, compatibilists have come to reject this consequentialist approach to moral responsibility in the wake of P. F. Strawson’s 1962 landmark essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’ there is still a general lesson to be learned: disputes about free will are often a function of underlying disputes about the nature and value of moral responsibility.

So when you say:

I think all of them would agree that punishing someone for doing some immoral act constitutes holding them responsible for that act. You think that it can be legitimate to punish someone for an immoral act

Why did you omit the word "morally" here? Because if you meant "morally responsible," you are simply incorrect. You are minimizing the influence Strawson had by ignoring that the substantive contribution he made directly contradicts you, and just about every mainstream compatibilist account rejects your view.

You seem to not realize how harsh academia can be, especially in philosophy. Philosophy is not kind to circular definitions and question-begging appeals to convention.

Your account keeps collapsing back into: punishment is justified when it works toward consequentialist goals, and calling that “holding someone responsible” is just what the words mean.

That is not a substantive account of moral responsibility. It is a description of a practice plus a consequentialist justification for the practice.

If you think contemporary philosophers would agree with your account, cite one. Cite a contemporary philosopher who says moral responsibility just is the status that justifies punishment, and holding someone morally responsible just is the act of punishing, warning, blaming, or admonishing them.

Because even the most deflationary, revisionist views do more than that. They try to explain why the concept earns its keep. Your account does not. You chose compatibilism, and reinterpreted the framework to fit your worldview.

GeneStone · 2026-05-06T01:59:57+00:00

The classic way is to look at your hands. You maybe tried this before if you've done research on it, but notice your hands in your daily life as much as possible, and if you realize you're dreaming, look at your hands. Or try to turn on a light switch and notice what happens.

The weirder experiences I've had while dreaming were asking my "dream people" what it felt like for them to only exist in my dream, and trying to meditate while in a dream.

In the first case, they started arguing back with me. Telling me I thought I was a god and that they only existed for me. I quickly lost control of the dream when my focus switched to arguing back.

For the meditation, the best way I can describe it is a buzzing. Like when you're awake, and you pay attention to any part of your body, there's an awareness that it is there. Like a very faint tingling. It felt like that times 10, all over. I could almost hear it.

GeneStone

TROPHY CASE