Tamler Sommers

Retributive emotions and behavior are thought to be adaptive for their role in improving social coordination. However, since retaliation is generally not in the short-term interests of the individual, rational self-interest erodes the motivational link between retributive emotions and the accompanying adaptive behavior. I argue that two different sets of norms have emerged to reinforce this link: (1) norms about honor and (2) norms about moral responsibility and desert. I observe that the primary difference between these types of retribution motivators lies in where the normative focus is placed after an offense. In the first form of retribution, the normative focus is on the offended party. In the second, it is on the offender. Next, I show how each class of norms is well tailored to the particular features of the environment in which these forms of retributive behavior emerge. Finally, I consider some philosophical implications of these observations. I suggest that my account, if correct, would pose tough challenges for contemporary philosophical theories of moral responsibility and punishment.

Theories of moral desert focus only on the personal culpability of the agent to determine the amount of blame and punishment the agent deserves. I defend an alternative account of desert, one that does not focus only facts about offenders and their offenses. In this revised framework, personal culpability can do no more than set upper and lower limits for deserved blame and punishment. For more precise judgments within that spectrum, additional factors must be considered, factors that are independent of the agent and the offense. I refer to this as the ‘partial conception’ of desert because takes facts about victims—their behavior, desires, and attitudes—into account for desert judgments. On my view, then, agents who are equally culpable may deserve different amounts of blame or punishment, depending on these victim-related factors.

In the first edition of A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain – Nine Conversations, philosopher Tamler Sommers talked with an interdisciplinary group of the world’s leading researchers—from the fields of social psychology, moral philosophy, cognitive science, and primatology—all working on the same issue: the origins and workings of morality. Together, these nine interviews pulled back some of the curtain, not only on our moral lives but—through Sommers’ probing, entertaining, and well informed questions—on the way morality traditionally has been studied. This Second Edition increases the subject matter, adding eight additional interviews and offering features that will make A Very Bad Wizard more useful in undergraduate classrooms. These features include structuring all chapters around sections and themes familiar in a course in ethics or moral psychology; providing follow-up podcasts for some of the interviews, which will delve into certain issues from the conversations in a more informal manner; including an expanded and annotated reading list with relevant primary sources at the end of each interview; presenting instructor and student resources online in a companion website. The resulting new publication promises to synthesize and make accessible the latest interdisciplinary research to offer a brand new way to teach philosophical ethics and moral psychology.

Michael Smith’s The Moral Problem gives an admirably straightforward condition for moral rightness: an act is morally right in circumstance C only if under conditions of full rationality we would all want to perform that act. I will assume that this condition, if met, would make acts objectively right and therefore vindicate a robust form of metaethical realism. There remains the question, however, of whether this condition can be met. Smith considers several arguments that it cannot, and this paper will argue that his response to one of them— Gilbert Harman’s “successful criminal” argument—is inadequate. Clear and straightforward as it is, Smith’s condition for moral rightness is deceptively strong for it requires a full convergence of desires. It appears that moral facts can exist only if there is unanimous agreement about how we would want to behave if we were fully rational. The unanimity requirement leaves Smith vulnerable to sensible knave style objections. If someone can be fully rational yet not desire to perform acts in accordance with morality, then according to Smith’s account, we should be skeptical about the existence of moral facts. Harman presents such an objection in the form of a successful criminal who does not observe the alleged requirement not to harm or injure people outside of his criminal organization. Most importantly, the criminal’s disregard of outsiders is not due to inattention, failure to consider or appreciate certain arguments, ignorance of relevant evidence, errors in reasoning, irrationality, unreasonableness, or weakness of will. If this criminal is truly rational and still desires to steal..

No one has expressed the destructive power of Darwinian theory more effectively than Daniel Dennett. Others have recognized that the theory of evolution offers us a universal acid, but Dennett, bless his heart, coined the term. Many have appreciated that the mechanism of random variation and natural selection is a substrate-neutral algorithm that operates at every level of organization from the macromolecular to the mental, at every time scale from the geological epoch to the nanosecond. But it took Dennett to express the idea in a polysyllable or two. These two features of Darwinism undermine more wishful thinking about the way the world is than any other brace of notions since mechanism was vindicated in physics.