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This paper explores the relationship between punishment and desert and offers two distinct sets of reasons for rejecting the retributive justification of legal punishment — one theoretical and one practical. The first attacks the philosophical foundations of retributivism and argues that it’s unclear that agents have the kind of free will and moral responsibility needed to justify it. I present stronger and weaker versions of this objection and conclude that retributive legal punishment is unjustified and the harms it causes are prima facie seriously wrong. The second objection maintains that even if one were to assume that wrongdoers are deserving of retributive punishment, contra concerns over free will, we should still abandon retributivism since there remain insurmountable practical difficulties that make it impossible to accurately and proportionally distribute legal punishment in accordance with desert. In particular, I present the Misalignment Argument and Poor Epistemic Position Argumentand argue that, taken together, they create a powerful new challenge to retributivism called the Retributivist Tracking Dilemma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to defend deliberation-compatibilism against several objections, including a recent counterexample by Yishai Cohen that involves a deliberator who believes that whichever action she performs will be the result of deterministic manipulation. It begins by offering a Moorean-style proof of deliberation-compatibilism. It then turns to the leading argument for deliberation-incompatibilism, which is based on the presumed incompatibility of causal determinism and the 'openness' required for rational deliberation. The paper explains why this argument fails and develops a coherent account of how one can rationally deliberate and believe in causal determinism without inconsistency. The second half of the paper then takes up Cohen's proposed counterexample and his Four-Case Deliberation Argument (FCDA) against deliberation-compatibilism, which is meant to mirror Derk Pereboom's famous Four-Case Manipulation Argument. In response, the author defends a hard-line reply to FCDA but also argues that the notion of 'sourcehood' relevant to rational deliberation differs from that involved in free will. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author talks about moral luck that is, when factors beyond an agent's control nevertheless influence one's moral assessment of the agent. Topics include the impact of descriptively speaking on moral judgments; Robert Hartman's objections to the luck pincer; and relevance of luck to moral responsibility.

This paper presents existing results and experimental evidence in social psychology to argue against the compatibilist thesis that our folk-psychological notions of freedom and moral responsibility are completely consistent with the acceptance of determinism. In section 1, I spell out the compatibilist position and briefly discuss the standard incompatibilist argument--the so-called consequence argument. In section 2, I take a closer look at the folk psychology of free will and argue that, contra the compatibilist, recent empirical research by Shaun Nichols, Joshua Knobe and others, reveals that our folk-psychological intuitions are essentially incompatibilist and libertarian in nature. I conclude in section 3 by examining the phenomenology of agentive experience and argue that it further undermines the compatibilist thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]