[lbo-talk] Framed (Was Everything's coming up roses)

[andie nachgeborenen]

That does not seem to be the case with the Morris-Sher story about benefits and burdens. The reason, according to them, that we seek to punish the guilty is because their action makes them in particular the unjustified beneficiaries of an unfair distribution of freedom; punishing the innocent would not help rectify that injustice. By analogy, it would not help rectify an unjustly unequal distribution of wealth (however acquired) to take from the poor and give to the rich. the point in both cases is that neither should have the benefit of advantages unjustly acquired. The Morris-Sher story is consistent with determinism or its denial, but the metaphysics of the will plays no role in its account of the rightness of punishment. jks

But, like in the framed case (it seems as though it is wrong to punish someone who is innocent not because doing so will have bad consequences, though it may, but because the person is _innocent_), it seems as though our intuition that the guilty deserve punishment is most clearly rooted in our prior intuitions about responsibility (which gets us into the tricky metaphysical terrain you want to avoid) and not distributive justice.

 
-- Luke

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