A man, drunk past the point of standing, gets into a car. He has done it before; people have taken his keys before, and warned him before, and he has laughed it off before. This time he comes over a rise too fast, on the wrong side of the road, and kills a child who was walking home from school. The child was eight years old.
Suppose you are sitting in the public gallery at his trial. He is at the front of the room with his head down; a few feet away the child's mother is gripping the edge of the bench. The reaction that rises in most people, sitting there, is not complicated. It is not merely that the man should be stopped. It is that he should suffer for what he did — that the suffering is owed, that a world in which he pays for it is more correct than one in which he does not, quite apart from any further good the suffering might do. If you searched yourself for the most certain moral fact you hold, it might be this one: he deserves it.
Now, there is one position in the long argument about free will and blame that would sit in that gallery, feel a version of that reaction, and still, quietly, refuse it. Not: he is innocent. Not: it was not his fault, blame the drink, blame the childhood. Not: let him go. Someone holding this position would keep the man off the roads for the rest of his life if that were what it took to keep the next child safe; would require him to face what he did; would put everything into repair and prevention. But the one thing this position will not grant — the thing it says was never there to grant — is the part most of us want most: the deserving. The idea that, on top of everything we do to protect people and repair the harm, there is also a debt of pure suffering the man has earned, a bill in his name that the universe is somehow more correct for collecting. That, this position says, is the single piece of the whole structure that does not hold up. No one has it coming. Not him. Not anyone.
The first reaction to this — and it is the right place to begin — is that it is monstrous, or cold, or worse, a trick: a way of releasing the worst people who have ever lived from the one thing that ought to hold them. That reaction deserves to be taken seriously, and it will be.
But hold it for a moment, because the person who says this is not a crank, is not soft, and is not, it turns out, releasing anyone from anything. And the same claim runs the other way, into a room more familiar than any courtroom: the one at two in the morning, where the person going over their own charges, certain they deserve to feel this bad about something they did, is you. This position would enter that room too, and say the same word: no — you do not deserve to suffer for it either. And most of us would want to argue back. We would want to keep the right to make ourselves pay.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the sixth of eight episodes on choice and blame. Last time, the argument changed direction. The philosopher Peter Strawson, in his 1962 lecture "Freedom and Resentment," came to the question the first three answers could not settle — whether anyone could ever truly have done otherwise — and set it aside. Holding people responsible, he argued, was never waiting on the answer to that question. It rests on its own ground: the reactive attitudes — resentment, gratitude, the way we stand towards another person rather than merely handle them. That was a relief. But it came with a difficulty. Strawson showed that our blaming is natural. He did not show that it was justified — and a critic was present throughout, saying exactly that. Natural is not the same as justified.
Tonight we turn to that critic. His name is Derk Pereboom, and with him Gregg Caruso; and they take "natural is not justified" and follow it further down than the determinist went, further than anyone in this argument has gone — to that sentence in the courtroom: nobody deserves it. It is the answer most listeners will be most eager to wave away. So we will do the harder thing: build his case properly, at full strength, before we let ourselves judge whether it is as cold as it first sounds.
Begin with the word the argument turns on, because the skeptic is precise and we should be too. The word is desert — not the geographical kind, but the moral kind: what a person has coming. When we say the drunk driver deserves to suffer, we do not merely mean that making him suffer would be useful — useful as deterrence, useful as a warning to the next driver. We mean something stronger: that he has earned it, that the suffering would be fitting, that it is owed, that a world in which he receives it is more correct than one in which he escapes it — even if the suffering does no further good for anyone. Philosophers have a term for this, and it is worth having, because it is the exact point in dispute tonight: basic desert. Desert at the root. The bare, backward-looking claim that, because of what you did, a certain treatment is owed to you — with no further reason needed. That is the conviction in the courtroom. And it is the one thing Pereboom says was never there.
It matters why he says it, because if he were simply asserting it, there would be no reason to listen. He is not. His argument takes the form of a thought experiment in four steps — one worth running through slowly, because it turns on what we find ourselves feeling between the steps. It is usually called the four-case argument, and it appears in his books "Living Without Free Will," from 2001, and "Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life," from 2014.
Step one. Imagine a man — call him Plum — who commits a murder. Imagine that, unknown to him, a team of neuroscientists has been controlling him throughout, reaching into his brain in real time, shaping the very deliberation that ends in the killing, so that the decision he reaches is the one they intend. He feels as though he is deciding. He weighs reasons; he chooses. But every step is authored from outside. Does Plum deserve blame — basic desert, the courtroom kind — for the murder? Almost everyone answers no. He is, in effect, controlled from outside; the control is merely hidden from him. Whatever he may deserve, it is not that.
Step two. The same man, the same murder — except now the neuroscientists did not tune him in real time. They programmed him once, at the start of his life, set the process running, and withdrew. Everything that follows — every reason, every choice, the murder itself — flows from how they built him at the beginning. Does he deserve it now? Again the pull is to say no. The control is simply front-loaded rather than live. And why should the timing of the interference change whether he has it coming? A man set in motion before his birth is controlled still.
Step three. Now remove the neuroscientists entirely. Plum is simply the product of his upbringing, his culture, his genes, the training his particular family and society happened to give him — none of which he chose, all of which made him precisely the man who would commit precisely this murder. No manipulators. Only the ordinary process by which a person is formed. Does he deserve it now? Here many people want to stop and insist — yes, this case is different, this is just a man who grew up. But Pereboom keeps asking the question that will not let them: what has changed? What is the morally relevant difference between a man programmed by a team and a man formed by a childhood he equally did not choose? In each case he runs the program he was handed. In each case he never reached back behind himself to author what authored him.
Step four is simply our own world. Determinism: every choice the downstream result of prior causes reaching back before we were born, cause upon cause. If the morally relevant difference between Plum and the rest of us is nothing, then we are all in Plum's position — not controlled by scientists, but controlled by the same thing that controls everything, the long chain of causes we did not lay down. And if Plum does not deserve it, then in the end neither do we.
But here is what makes this the third distinct answer, and not merely a louder version of the first. One might object: the whole argument leans on determinism; remove determinism — make some of our choices genuinely undetermined, as the libertarian wanted — and the regress is broken. Pereboom's reply is quick, and worth stating carefully. It does not help, he says, and we already know it does not, because we watched it fail two episodes ago. Recall the luck objection. If a choice is genuinely undetermined — if, given everything about you up to the instant of choosing, it could still have gone either way — then what made it go this way rather than the other is not you. It is simply where the indeterminacy fell. So there are only two options for being the ultimate source of your action. Either the choice was determined by what came before — in which case you are in Plum's position, running the program — or it was not determined by anything, in which case it is a matter of chance, and chance is no one's achievement. Determined, and it traces back behind you; undetermined, and it is not quite yours. There is no third possibility. That is the whole skeptical case in a sentence: whichever way the universe turns out to work, you are never the kind of ultimate source that basic desert would require. Not because some scientific discovery came in, but because the concept asks for something — being the origin at which the responsibility stops, the author of yourself — that nothing in the world, determined or not, can supply.
And the claim is narrower than it first appears. It does not say that you did not act; you did. It does not say that nothing you do matters, or that you are not the one doing it; you are — they are your hands. It denies exactly one thing. The part of blame that reaches past stopping the man, past repairing the harm, past changing him — the part that reaches for the pure deserving, the debt that must be paid because he earned it — that part, it says, reaches for something the world does not contain. The drunk driver did it. The drunk driver should be stopped. But the deserving to suffer, the thing you were most certain of in the gallery — that, the skeptic says, you were never entitled to. And he says the same in the room at two in the morning. What you did, you did; but the suffering you are so sure you have earned as payment for it, you have not. The deserving was never there. To have done the harm is one thing; to be owed the pain for it is another; and that second thing, the skeptic says, was never real.
The reaction, again, is that this is a horror — that a world without deserving is one in which the drunk driver and the saint stand level, in which nothing anyone does can ever be answered, in which the worst people simply walk. Hold that objection in view, because it is precisely the one Pereboom has spent his career answering — and his answer is the part few people expect.
Here is the assumption that arrives the moment someone says that no one deserves to suffer: that the whole apparatus of accountability collapses — the prisons empty, the worst offenders shrug and walk free, and the rest of us are left with no way to answer anything anyone does. That assumption rests on running together two things that come apart.
Look again at what is being asked in the courtroom. There are really two questions there, not one. The first looks backward: what did this man do, and what, in consequence, does he deserve — what suffering has he earned, what does he owe? The second looks forward: given that he is the kind of person who did this, what should now be done — how do we keep the next child safe, how do we repair what can be repaired, how, if it is possible, do we change the man so that the danger in him is gone? The two have been fused for so long that they feel like a single question. The skeptic's whole project is to separate them: to drop the backward-looking question of desert, and to keep the forward-looking one, with all of its work still to do.
For the forward-looking task can be carried out in full without the word "deserve" appearing anywhere. A man is dangerous; he will do it again; we restrain him — not because he has earned a cage, but for the reason we would restrain anyone who endangers others: to prevent the harm. Pereboom and Caruso make the comparison directly, and it is the one analogy to keep in mind for the rest of the episode. Consider how we treat someone carrying a dangerous, contagious disease. It is not their fault; no one thinks they deserve to be ill. We may nonetheless quarantine them, and we have the right to, because others have the right to be protected. But the shape of that right matters. We restrain them as little as protection actually requires, and no more. We do not add suffering on top, because the suffering was never the point; the protection was. And throughout, we try to cure them, to return them to ordinary life as soon as it is safe. There is no desert anywhere in this — only protection, proportion, and repair. Caruso, in his 2021 book "Rejecting Retributivism," argues that this is the whole model for how a society should treat dangerous people: public health, not vengeance. Every part of the protecting is kept; the only part lost is the suffering added for its own sake, because desert was thought to demand it.
And once the distinction is in view, it reaches beyond the prison. The forward-looking task can do everything that was needed. We can still want people to become better — that is moral formation, and the skeptic keeps it entirely. We can still repair a relationship that someone has damaged — that is reconciliation, and it requires no one to have basically deserved anything; two people can simply sit down and try to mend what happened. We can protect, mend, change, and cultivate the kind of people who do not do such things. Every task blame was performing, the forward-looking view still performs. The only thing that falls away is the retributive extra: the suffering that makes no one safer, the pain whose entire justification was that he had it coming.
And the skeptic does not regard this as a colder world. He regards it as a kinder one, and he argues it is the more humane view, not the more heartless. Consider what desert permits, once it is admitted. It permits the part of punishment that is not about safety — the part that wants the man to hurt, over and above anything protection requires, because hurting him is thought to balance something. It permits an entire system of suffering whose only justification is desert. And that justification, the skeptic says, is a fiction. So all of that suffering — the deliberately harsh sentence, the punishment that helps no one and is intended to help no one — is suffering added to the world for nothing, for a debt that does not exist. Give up basic desert and you do not lose the ability to protect a child; you lose only the permission to make a man suffer beyond what protecting the child requires. That, the skeptic says, is not the cold view. It is the one that finally settles the matter.
And here the argument becomes personal, because the same word returns in the room at two in the morning. Go back to it — your own chair, your own head lowered, the thing you did to someone you love. What is happening there? For the most part you are not protecting anyone or repairing anything; those are tasks for daylight, and better done rested. What you are doing in the dark is carrying out a sentence: making yourself suffer, deliberately, past any point that helps the person you hurt, because some part of you is certain the suffering is owed — that paying it in private somehow settles the debt. That is the backward-looking question, at work inside your own head, over a debt the skeptic says was never real. And when he enters that room and says no — you do not deserve to suffer for it either — the first instinct is that he is trying to let you off, to wave the matter away, to say it did not matter. But look again at what he removes and what he leaves. He does not say it did not matter. He does not say do not change, do not apologise, do not repair — all of that stays, every part of it; that is the forward-looking work, and it has plenty to do at dawn. He removes exactly one thing: the licence to make yourself suffer for a debt that never existed. And the question he leaves is whether you could set that down — whether you could stop punishing yourself, if you genuinely came to believe the punishment was never owed — or whether you would take it up again, and insist on your right to pay.
So there is the skeptic's view at its full height. Not nihilism. Not releasing anyone. A demanding, forward-facing, and arguably kinder rebuilding of the whole practice, which keeps every protecting, repairing, and person-changing task blame ever did, and drops only the one piece it cannot justify: the deserving. It is, I think, the most humane-looking of the three answers — which is why we must now do to it what we did to the other two, and find where it fails.
Three objections come at this view, and it survives all three — but not cleanly. It comes through as the other two answers did: still standing, but with an objection it cannot fully answer.
The first we already have to hand, because we met its author last week: Strawson. Recall what he gave us. Holding someone responsible is not a theory one adopts; it is the reactive attitudes — resentment, gratitude, the hurt that shows you had been counting on someone, the stance of standing towards a person rather than handling an object. And recall the contrast: the objective attitude, the stance of the dementia ward, in which one stops resenting and starts managing, in which the person becomes a situation to be handled, as one handles the weather. Strawson held that we adopt the objective attitude only at the margins: towards the very young, the very ill, those who genuinely cannot be reasoned with. And he added something worth hearing again now, because it is the first objection. He held that we could not extend that attitude to everyone, permanently, without ceasing to live among other people at all.
Now consider what the skeptic asks. The forward-looking carer does not resent the patient; the quarantine officer does not lie awake furious at the carrier of the disease. That is the humane point of the model: drop the resentment, keep the protection. But Strawson's question returns at once: can one live there — towards everyone? For it is not only the drunk driver the skeptic asks us to stop resenting. It is the friend who betrays you, the partner who lies, your own father. If no one is ever an ultimate source, then no one ever basically deserves your resentment, and the consistent skeptic must adopt the managing attitude towards every person who ever wrongs him, including those he loves — to meet betrayal with diagnosis rather than hurt. And Strawson's claim is that this is not kindness but a kind of exile: that a person you can never resent is a person you can never quite be with, because the vulnerability to being wounded by someone cannot be separated from love of them. The skeptic has a genuine reply — he keeps the love, the gratitude, the joy, and drops only the punitive, desert-laden reactions. But the difficulty does not fully resolve, and one can see why: it is not obvious that gratitude can be kept while resentment is discarded, when the two arise from the same source — the stance of taking another as a person who could have met you and chose not to. Remove the one, and the other may not survive.
The second objection is sharper, and the one the skeptic likes least. It runs as follows. You suppose you are being kind to the drunk driver by refusing to think he deserves it. But are you? Consider what you have actually done. You have moved him from the dock to the clinic. He is no longer a man who did a terrible thing and must answer for it; he is a faulty mechanism that produced a bad outcome and must be repaired. And there is a sense in which this is the least respectful thing one can do to a person. To blame someone — really to blame them — is to pay them a kind of compliment: to treat them as one of us, a full member of the moral community, who knew what they were doing, who can be addressed, reasoned with, held to the standard the rest of us are held to. On this view resentment is not the opposite of respect but a form of it. It says: you are a peer, and I hold you to what a peer owes. And the worry is that the skeptic's gentle, forward-looking clinic, for all its mildness, reduces everyone in it from agent to patient — that in saving the drunk driver from deserving, it removes the very thing that treated him as fully a person. Perhaps blame was never only cruelty in search of a licence. Perhaps part of it was the respect we pay one another by holding one another answerable — and one cannot drop the deserving without dropping that as well. The skeptic replies that he can respect you in a forward-looking way, by addressing you, by expecting better of you, without the backward debt. Perhaps. But the objection stands open: it is not clear the respect survives once one can no longer say to a person — you can be addressed, you failed us, and that is yours to answer for.
The third objection is the strangest, and it is aimed at everything this series has been doing. It comes from the philosopher Saul Smilansky, in his 2000 book "Free Will and Illusion." Suppose, he says — merely suppose — that the skeptic is entirely right: that there is no basic desert, no ultimate source, and that the courtroom certainty is, at bottom, a mistake. It does not follow, Smilansky argues, that one should tell everyone. It does not even follow that one should live by it oneself. For the belief in desert and free will may be doing essential moral work — it may be one of the things that holds a decent human life together, that keeps people from despair, that keeps them taking responsibility, that keeps people answerable to one another. And a truth that, once widely believed, corrodes — a truth one cannot actually inhabit without something vital draining away — may be a truth it is wiser to hold at arm's length. His unsettling conclusion is that the right course might be to keep the illusion: to go on blaming, to go on feeling the deserving, as if it were real — with one's eyes open, knowing it may not be — because the alternative is worse. He calls this position illusionism, and it is worth noticing where it aims. It does not say the skeptic is wrong. It says: even if you are right, look what becomes of a person who actually believes you. And it strikes at this series in particular, because everything we have done has rested on the opposite conviction. We have said, again and again: examine the assumption, check the premise, do not blame on grounds you have never inspected. And Smilansky asks: are you sure that is wisdom? Are you sure the examined version is livable? What if some of these premises are essential precisely because they go unexamined — and the honest clarity you take yourself to be offering is the very thing that lets a decent human life fall apart?
So there is the skeptic's view, with three objections lodged in it. It cannot promise a life one could actually live while resenting no one. It cannot fully dispel the worry that its clinic, for all its mercy, stops treating people as people. And it cannot rule out that, even if it is right, the honest course might be to look away from how right it is. Three objections — none of them fatal; the skeptic has a reply to each, and the replies are not nothing. But none of them is fully answered, either. The view survives, as the determinist and the libertarian survived: still standing, and still cut. Which is, by now, the only way anyone comes through this argument at all.
So take stock of where we stand, because tonight something in the argument was completed, and its shape matters.
We now have all three answers — the full field. Three serious responses to the question your blame has been leaning on all your life — could he have done otherwise, and does he have it coming — and each was built as its ablest defender would build it. The first said: everything is caused, the choice is the downstream result of causes laid down before you were born, and "caused" may simply mean "not up to you." The second said: no — you are free if the choice is really yours, your own reasons doing the work, and that kind of freedom is available in a determined world, with no special ingredient required. And the third, tonight, said: set aside which way the universe runs — determined or open, you were never the ultimate source that deserving needs, so the one thing no one ever has is it coming. Three answers. And here is the finding, stated plainly: not one of them won, and not one emerged without an objection it could not answer. The determinist could not say why "caused" must mean "unfree." The compatibilist could not say why being answerable amounts to deserving to suffer. And the skeptic — who looked, tonight, the kindest and the cleanest of the three — could not promise a life you could actually live with no one left as a person you are permitted to resent, could not fully dispel the charge that his clinic stops treating people as people, and could not rule out that, even if he is right, the wiser course might be to look away. Three answers. No winner.
And we must be careful just here, at the close, because this is the easiest point in the whole argument to cheat — and tonight the temptation has a particular character. The skeptic's view is attractive. It arrives last; it looks the most humane; it takes the licence to punish yourself out of your hands. And there is a strong pull, after an hour spent inside it, to walk out quietly converted — very well, no one deserves it, that is the answer, that is where I will live. Do not. Not because the view is wrong — it may be right — but because it did not win, and to pretend it did would be the same error as with the other two, only in a gentler form. It took three objections, and it has not disposed of them. To leave converted would be to do, once more, the very thing this series has refused throughout: to seize the answer you prefer and stop looking, because looking is uncomfortable and a verdict would let you rest. There is no rest here. That is not a failure of the argument. That is the argument.
So hold all three at once — which is among the hardest things a mind can do. Each one serious, each one met by an objection it cannot answer, none of them refuted: that is the trilemma, entire, in your hands. And it changes the question you came in with. You came wanting to know whether he is free, because you supposed the answer would tell you what to do with your blame. You now know two things you did not. You know the metaphysics may genuinely never resolve — three of the finest minds who ever worked on it, and no winner. And you know — this was last week's finding, and it holds — that what your blame is for was never waiting on that answer in any case. Which leaves you in an unusual position: still blaming; still, in the gallery, certain the driver deserves it; still, at two in the morning, sure you have it coming — and no longer able to tell yourself those certainties rest on anything you have checked.
There is one thing we have not yet tried, and it is what we turn to next time. Throughout, you have been arguing about desert — whether it is real, whether it is justified, whether the skeptic can talk you out of it. And it has held its ground; the conviction in the courtroom is stubborn; it survived a full hour of the best case against it; "he deserves it" may be the most immovable thing in your moral life. So next time we stop arguing with it, and ask a different kind of question. Not whether it is true, but where it came from. A conviction that strong, that widely shared, that fundamental, presents itself as though it had always been there — as old as the species, like hunger. Next time the only question on the table is whether that is so: whether "he deserves to suffer" really has been the human default from the beginning, or whether it has a history we have forgotten we are standing on. We will not try to argue desert away. We will go looking for where it came from — and ask whether what we find changes how the conviction feels.
So — one thing to carry out of tonight. You will feel that certainty rise again this week — he has it coming, or I have it coming. When it does, do neither of the two easy things with it. You cannot prove it, so do not declare it settled. You cannot disprove it, so do not pretend it is gone. Hold it as you now know how to hold such things: as one answer among three, none of them proven, all of them met by an objection none could answer, and the kindest-looking one no safer than the rest. You used to think the hard part was deciding whether anyone deserves anything. The hard part, it turns out, is living with the fact that you must keep acting — keep blaming, keep punishing, keep forgiving, keep lying awake — on a question three first-rate thinkers could not close, and that you will close it, in practice, every day, by a vote you cannot fully justify. That is not something you settle and walk away from. You will be carrying it, unfinished, the next time the certainty rises — and you will not have an answer then either.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.