In this article, I argue against the idea of basic desert that has been prominent in recent literature on incompatibilism and retributivism. I claim that the supposed normative force of desert considerations is better understood in terms of dissociation. I begin my argument with the observation that an important strategy in spelling out the apparent normative force of desert considerations is through the idea of complicity. The intuition I will be interested in is that it is necessary to dissociate oneself from wrongdoing in order not to become complicit in it. However, I argue that we cannot give a good explanation of this connection if we begin from the idea of basic desert. I thus propose to explore the idea that it is dissociation, rather than desert, that is explanatorily basic.
I then argue that the best way to understand dissociation is to view it as an expressive action. Expressive actions are actions that have expressive properties relating to the salient features of some extraordinary situation. It is through such expressive actions that we attempt to ‘honor’ or do justice to the significance of these situations. Expressive actions are familiar and appropriate in contexts such as welcoming, mourning, thanking, and so on, as well as in contexts of wrongdoing. Dissociation from wrongdoing—expressed as distancing from the wrongdoer—is an expressive attempt to do justice to the significance of wrongdoing in a way analogous to the expressive attempt to thank someone adequately for a doing a favor.
Seeing dissociation as an expressive action has explanatory benefits. Specifically, I draw on the idea of dissociation as an expressive action to explain why it should be that a failure to dissociate is a source of complicity. If an act of dissociation is the appropriate way of acknowledging or ‘honoring’ the significance of the wrongdoing, then a failure to dissociate leaves one associated with the offence, and hence complicit. Having made the case for the nature and importance of dissociation, I then argue that it is proportionate distancing—rather than giving someone their just deserts—that is necessary for removing complicity. It is dissociation and distancing rather than desert that turns out to have normative force as a distinctively backward-looking response to wrongdoing.
1. The Debate over Desert
‘Desert’ can be used in a variety of ways, positive and negative. For instance, the winner of the race might be said to deserve the prize; a student may deserve a better grade than they got; workers may deserve higher wages (for more examples and discussion see Feldman Reference Feldman2020). In this article I focus on negative uses: the idea that those who do wrong deserve to (and hence should be made to) suffer as a result and in proportion to that wrongness. When I talk about ‘desert’ in what follows, negative desert is what I mean. Desert might also be framed in terms of the badness of character, but for simplicity I ignore this aretaic possibility and stick with the deontic.
Desert is controversial. Some argue that desert judgments are appropriate only for agents in possession of an impossibly strong type of control, or free will, over their actions—impossible because of determinism or because of the ineradicability of luck (Strawson Reference Strawson1994; Levy Reference Levy2011; Waller Reference Waller2011; Pereboom Reference Pereboom2014; Caruso Reference Caruso2021). Others argue that even if we do have the relevant free will, desert judgments are inherently morally problematic because they endorse suffering or are inimical to compassion or understanding or fixate on the past rather than on changing things for the better (Stern Reference Stern1974; Scanlon Reference Scanlon1998: 274–77).
Despite these criticisms, desert, or something like it, has seemed to many to be an important facet of our interpersonal interactions. Influential here has been P. F. Strawson's thought that a conception of human relations that did not involve some kind of desert-like accountability would be reduced to a mere ‘objective attitude’, where people treat one another solely as risk factors to be avoided or accommodated, rather than as persons whose responses matter noninstrumentally (Strawson Reference Strawson1962; for an alternative view see, e.g., Sommers Reference Sommers2007). Thus, a number of theorists have sought to defend something like desert by means of a two-pronged line of reply to the critics. The deflationary move argues that desert—or what is important in desert—is misdescribed by desert critics. On this move, the critics’ concerns apply only to an inflated conception of desert to which our practices (or a reformed alternative) do not commit us. Meanwhile the vindicatory move provides an explanation of the essential role that—on a better or more accurate interpretation than that provided by critics of desert—our accountability practices play in an attractive conception of human interpersonal relations.
These deflationary vindications have not convinced everyone. The line of critical response that I am interested in here is that the deflationary vindications fail to capture the significance of desert. This line comes from at least two directions: incompatibilism and desert-focused retributivism. These are not mutually exclusive groupings, but neither are they identical. Incompatibilists who are also free will skeptics disagree with desert-focused retributivists about whether the commitment to desert is defensible in the light of what we know about human agency. (Strictly speaking incompatibilism argues for the impossibility of basic desert given the truth of determinism. However, Galen Strawson's influential Basic Argument claims that basic desert is impossible independently of determinism [Strawson Reference Strawson1994].) Meanwhile, desert-focused retributivists could be either compatibilists or libertarians. But both incompatibilists and desert-focused retributivists might be attracted to the conclusion that an important part of our understanding of desert judgments—an important notion of basic desert—is lost in the deflationary vindications.
I will reject basic desert. But what is it? According to Pereboom:
For an agent to be morally responsible for an action in the basic desert sense is for the action to be attributable to her in such a way that if she was sensitive to its being morally wrong, she would deserve to be blamed or punished in a way that she would experience as painful or harmful, and if she was sensitive to its being morally exemplary, she would deserve to be praised or rewarded in a way that she would experience as pleasurable or beneficial. The desert at issue is basic in the sense that the agent, to be morally responsible, would deserve such blame or punishment, praise or reward, just by virtue of having performed the action with sensitivity to its moral status, and not, for example, by virtue of consequentialist or contractualist considerations. (Pereboom Reference Pereboom2021: 11–12)
As I will show in more detail below, basic desert so understood can be distinguished from instrumentalist views, on which the appropriateness of blame is nothing more than the likelihood that blaming will lead to a relevantly desirable outcome (Smart Reference Smart1961; Calhoun Reference Calhoun1989; Vargas Reference Vargas2013; McGeer Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013; Shoemaker and Vargas Reference Shoemaker and Vargas2021), and from the contractualist view that it would be fair to subject wrongdoers to reactive attitudes that are natural to us (Wallace Reference Wallace1994; Lenman Reference Lenman2006). But basic desert can also be distinguished from two other noninstrumental forms of responsibility—responsibility as attributability and responsibility as answerability—that might be proposed as a deflationary vindication (Watson Reference Watson1996; Shoemaker Reference Shoemaker2015). Attributability involves appropriately understanding an action as reflecting the agent's character or self. An agent who is not fully free and responsible may appropriately be judged cold-hearted or selfish or callous even if they are not to be blamed for what they do. On the answerability conception of responsibility, meanwhile, reasons-responsive agents can properly be subject to moral criticism should they fail to have a good justification for doing prima facie morally problematic things. Either attributability or answerability could be argued for as the ‘quality of will’ view underpinning P. F. Strawson's claim that reactive attitudes are constitutive of our accountability practices. (Alternatively, Strawson's view could be seen as a further alternative. For a helpful discussion of the debate on ‘attributionism’, see Talbert [Reference Talbert2019].) Neither attributability nor answerability is committed to basic desert because neither is committed to the intrinsic appropriateness of suffering as a response to moral wrongdoing. It is the claim that wrongdoing intrinsically speaks in favor of the suffering of the wrongdoer that distinguishes basic desert from these deflationary vindications.
To vindicate their claims, however, and to show decisively that deflationary vindications are inadequate, defenders of basic desert require a strategy that hews closely to that of their opponents. First, they need to show that basic desert is a commitment of our practices that neither instrumentalism, attributability, answerability, nor any better account properly captures. And second, they need to show that the practices underpinned by basic desert are attractive, such that something important would be lost if we adopted an alternative instead. At a minimum, this will involve explaining what the normative force of basic desert is.
In this article, I offer qualified support to the defenders of basic desert. I defend the view that our practices involve a conception of accountability that goes beyond instrumentalism, contractualism, attributability, or answerability. I am also sympathetic to the claim that this further conception of accountability is important and that abandoning it would be a significant loss. However, my ultimate aim is not to crown desert but to bury it. I argue that when we restore the missing part of our understanding of our accountability practices, we find that the key concept is not so much desert as dissociation. I argue that it is dissociation that is essential to an attractive conception of human relations. I conclude that my account of dissociation is stronger than either ‘basic’ desert or the deflationary vindications at capturing what we need from our accountability practices. Nevertheless, it seems false to suppose that dissociation would be relevant to accountability only if we had an impossibly strong form of agential control. I defend an improved deflationary vindication rather than a return to basic desert.
2. The Conceptual Role of Desert
Let us start by identifying our target. The logical structure of desert judgments in the sense I am interested in is as follows:
DESERT: A deserves T in virtue of XYZ and C
In this formulation, (negative) desert judgments are taken to be a kind of appraisal of an agent for some moral failing where the appraisal has as its conclusion that the agent should suffer in some way as a result. This formulation will be important as I proceed, and I will now explain it in more detail.
A is an agent. XYZ are background conditions that qualify A as the sort of being about whom desert judgments can appropriately be made. In particular, XYZ stand for the conditions that make A not just an agent, but a responsible agent. Thus, for instance, XYZ might include responsiveness to reasons, as on Fischer and Ravizza's influential account (Reference Fischer and Ravizza1998; see also Wolf Reference Wolf1990). C stands for particular triggering conditions that incur desert. C is often called the desert base. Depending on the conception of desert, C can include actions or intentions or mental states such as beliefs, desires, or emotions or states of character. Whatever C includes, it has to involve some departure from a moral norm—that is, some kind of wrongdoing or transgression or vice. Meanwhile T is some form of negative treatment deserved by A in virtue of (XYZ and) C.
That explains the letter variables. But the major variable has not yet been covered. The key justificatory question concerning DESERT is to elaborate ‘in virtue of’. Precisely what is the relation between (A, XYZ, C) and T, such that A receiving T is pro tanto justified or right or good or fitting or appropriate, and so on? The elaboration of ‘in virtue of’ should, in a complete conception of DESERT, cohere with and perhaps ground the other variables. (For instance, it might be hoped that getting clearer about the ‘in virtue of' and thus why DESERT matters would help us to resolve the question of whether intentional actions or states of character incur desert.) It is in spelling out ‘in virtue of’ that the proponent of basic desert needs to answer the two questions noted above: to explain what the deflationary vindications miss about our practices of accountability and then to elaborate a normative conception of DESERT that explains why missing that means losing something of great importance.
Regarding the first step, the defender of DESERT can argue that any conception will have to respect not just the logical structure of DESERT, but also the various features of its conceptual role:
1. Desert judgments are often characterized as distinctively backward-looking, by which is meant that they are valid independently of future good consequences. (This is Pereboom's [Reference Pereboom2021] point about instrumentalism in the passage quoted above). This characterization may be queried, say, on the basis that giving a person their deserts could be said to bring about the future good of justice (or a more just world). However, although this seems correct as far as it goes, there is still a point to the backward/forward distinction. When proponents of DESERT agree that giving out deserts serves the future good of justice, the term ‘serves’ specifies a constitutive rather than a contingent causal relation. When proponents of DESERT agree that the rightness or goodness of giving out deserts is valid independent of good consequences, they mean that it is valid independent of any good consequences that might be brought about as a contingent matter of fact and that, as an empirical matter, might have been otherwise. What the backward-/forward-looking distinction does is to highlight the noninstrumental rightness or goodness of wrongdoers receiving T.
2. Desert differs from other evaluations of responses to wrongdoing, in particular, judgments regarding the fairness of a given response. (This is Pereboom's [Reference Pereboom2021] point about contractualism.) To see this, consider that the natural reading of DESERT is that, if A deserves T, then A positively ought to get T or that it would be good if A were to get T. By contrast, if we say that it would be fair if A gets T, then the natural reading of this is conditional or hypothetical: for instance, as the thought that if someone has to bear certain costs arising from A's wrongful action, then it is fair that it should be A who does so. Thus, A deserving T and the fairness of A getting T differ in their force: one is a categorical (though presumably defeasible) end while the other is hypothetical.
3. Desert judgments, if valid, directly license judgments of the noninstrumental rightness or goodness of wrongdoers suffering or being made to suffer.
4. Desert judgments align noncontingently with judgments about the appropriateness of certain characteristic emotional reactions, reactions that share the feature of being unpleasant to experience or to have directed at oneself. The emotions that are relevant here include those, such as resentment and indignation, discussed by P. F. Strawson (Reference Strawson1962), but they might also include guilt, remorse, and some forms of shame, as well as some forms of contempt and blame, if blame is an emotion. Furthermore, it might be said that the unpleasantness of these emotions is not a contingent matter. It is not simply that being the object of indignation or blame is unpleasant because most of us do not like being subjected to the disapproval of others. There may be a minority who do not find this unpleasant. By contrast, it is a noncontingent matter that one who experiences guilt experiences something unpleasant.
I have now filled out DESERT in more detail, explaining not simply the logical structure of desert judgments, but also something about desert's conceptual role. It is now clear that DESERT involves a conception of responsibility different from those offered by deflationary vindications such as instrumentalism, contractualism, attributality or answerability. Unlike those deflationary vindications, DESERT is committed to the noninstrumental rightness or goodness of treatment T, where T is taken to involve something painful or harmful to the wrongdoer. The next question for the proponent of DESERT is: why do we need a concept that plays this role?
3. The Normative Force of Desert?
Why does desert matter? It might be said that there is no noncircular answer to this question because desert is ‘basic’. For instance, Michael McKenna has argued that part of the idea of the ‘basicness’ of basic desert is that ‘the normative warrant it provides is not supported by any more fundamental normative principles and values’ (McKenna Reference McKenna2019: 245). There are at least two ways in which desert could be argued to be basic. One of these is deontic and claims that there is a fundamental duty to give wrongdoers what they deserve; while another way is axiological and claims that a state of affairs in which wrongdoers get what they deserve (or in which happiness is apportioned to virtue and unhappiness to vice) is a fundamental good (McKenna Reference McKenna2011). Both of these views, the deontic and the axiological, can be understood as basic in the sense McKenna spells out.
However, I now want to argue that DESERT is not basic in the sense just mentioned. The opening step in this argument is the claim that a natural way to articulate the normative force of DESERT is through the idea that failing to give wrongdoers what they deserve is a source of complicity in the initial wrongdoing.
Complicity is a broad phenomenon. The basic idea concerns ways in which an agent who was not the perpetrator of an offence can be connected to wrongdoing in such a way as to share in the perpetrator's blameworthiness (and perhaps liability). Anglo-American criminal law tends to define complicity (or ‘secondary liability’) narrowly, only reluctantly extending the reach of this concept beyond the relatively clear cases of accomplice liability. Nevertheless, morality and law recognize the concept of complicity as correctly applied to situations other than that of the accomplice (for some discussion, see Bennett Reference Bennett2021a).
For instance, in a recent review of two books on the Benin Bronzes (bronze statues and artifacts from Nigeria looted by British soldiers in an operation aimed at enforcing the monopoly of trade of the Royal Niger Company in 1897), Adewale Maja-Pearce quotes the view of Dan Hicks, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford that ‘mere ownership of the artefacts’ makes museums such as the Pitt Rivers ‘complicit in the “indiscriminate attack on human life, in which tens of thousands died; the purposeful and proactive destruction of an ancient cultural, religious and royal site; and the looting of sacred art works”’ (Maja-Pearce Reference Maja-Pearce2021: 22; the books under review are Hicks Reference Hicks2020 and Phillips Reference Phillips2021). On this view, one can become complicit in wrongdoing not simply by actions that precede the commission of the wrongdoing, but also by one's responses to the wrongdoing after it has been committed—perhaps even long after it has been committed.
Although the notion of complicity invoked by Hicks and Maja-Pearce demands philosophical scrutiny, it does not seem an overreaction to think that attitudes and behaviors toward an offence on the part of otherwise unconnected individuals, even if taking place after the offence, can have the effect of implicating those individuals in that offence. For instance, one source of complicity might be explicitly approving of the offence after it has been committed. Another might be that of failing to disgorge certain benefits that have come to one as a result of the offence (Butt Reference Butt2007).
Is it plausible that a further source of complicity might be a failure to blame wrongdoers adequately for what they have done? For instance, let us assume B has the chance to further his career by taking a position working in close personal support of a socially powerful individual whom he knows to be a sexual predator who exploits the less powerful. B judges that this individual should be blamed for the way they have acted. However, with few other options open to him, B decides to take the position even though this means that, for prudential reasons, he does not express that blame. Indeed, B finds himself in a position in which he has to laugh and joke with his employer, treating them as if they were a good sort of person and behaving as they were on good terms. B engages in this behavior because the job demands it, and he wishes to keep the job. Nevertheless, he cannot help but feel in some way tainted or compromised by the fact that he does stay in the job and that he has to grin and bear his employer's jokes, overlook their behavior, and continue to work hard to support their day-to-day activities. This feeling of being compromised is not irrational, I suggest, but rather reflects B's sense of complicity in his employer's wrongs.
For a real-life version of this case, consider the racism directed at Pakistani cricketers at Yorkshire County Cricket Club in the UK, which put Pakistani players in the position of either speaking out and jeopardizing their position or accepting a morally compromised position. Former player Rana Naved-ul-Hasan was quoted as saying: ‘I never spoke about it because, as foreigners, we were temporary and somehow I managed to accept the way it is. So I just focused on playing cricket. I never wanted to jeopardise my contracts. There was systematic taunting and it's tough to do much about it. . . . I used to feel bad, but I decided to ignore it because I knew I was not going to live there permanently’ (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/sep/16/second-cricketer-backs-azeem-rafiqs-racism-claims-against-yorkshire).
The view that seems to underpin the sense of moral compromise highlighted in these examples can be expressed as follows:
SOURCE OF COMPLICITY: when XYZ and C are true of A, failing to give A treatment T can be to fail (properly) to treat the act as wrong and thus to acquiesce in it and become partly complicit in it.
SOURCE OF COMPLICITY has at least some normative force. Complicity is something we plausibly have reason to avoid. And it is plausible that some treatment T is constitutive of removing complicity. B can sensibly think that he would be a better, more admirable person if he had not taken the job or if he were to leave the job after openly expressing his blame. And he can sensibly think that he does wrong in continuing to treat the predator as if they were on good terms. He can think that the predator's victims (and others) could justifiably reproach him for what he is doing and that his compromise puts him in an indefensible relation to those victims. And he can think that in acting as he does, he acquiesces in his employer's treatment of those victims because he does not take the victims’ side as he is morally required to do.
Something like SOURCE OF COMPLICITY has been defended by a number of philosophers. For instance, Pamela Hieronymi, Aurel Kolnai, and Jeffrie Murphy have defended the view that forgiving too readily can involve—to use Hieronymi's term— ‘compromising’ with the wrongdoing and its perpetrator (Kolnai Reference Kolnai1973–74; Murphy Reference Murphy1988; Hieronymi Reference Hieronymi2001). Meanwhile, Jean Harvey, Thomas Hill Jr., and Joseph Raz have defended the idea that protest against injustice can have a moral point even when it is clear that it cannot change the situation for the better, again because it removes the protesters from a situation of moral compromise in which they are merely acquiescing in the wrongdoing (Raz Reference Raz2009: 264–65; Hill Jr. Reference Hill1979; Harvey Reference Harvey1996).
Can the DESERT theorists avail themselves of SOURCE OF COMPLICITY to explain DESERT's normative force? They could do so if it is plausible that giving someone what they deserve is necessary to remove complicity. Consider the following:
DESERT-COMPLICITY: when YYZ and C are true of A, failing to give A what they deserve can be to fail (properly) to treat the act as wrong and thus to acquiesce in it or be partly complicit in it.
The idea here would be that blame or punishment—understood as implying basic desert—is the treatment T that SOURCE OF COMPLICITY marks as necessary in order to remove complicity. As a sociological hunch, I suspect that many people who pretheoretically feel the normative force of DESERT take such a view. A famous expression of DESERT-COMPLICITY is Kant's claim that, before disbanding, the members of a civil society would need to execute every last murderer in its prisons so that blood-guilt should not cling to them for the murderer's deeds (Kant Reference Kant1991: 142). Kant's thought here is that members of that civil society will be complicit in the murders unless retributive punishment is carried out and the murderers get what they deserve. If DESERT-COMPLICITY is true, then we have a way of explaining the problematic normative consequences of a failure to take DESERT seriously.
It is important to note that SOURCE OF COMPLICITY and DESERT-COMPLICITY do not commit us to the view that all persons who fail to give any wrongdoer what that wrongdoer deserves thereby risk complicity. These propositions are compatible with the more plausible view that it is only when further conditions are met that a failure to blame (etc.) entails complicity. This is important because the risk of complicity cannot be unlimited. It may be unlikely that I would become complicit in the wrongdoing of someone who lives remotely from me and with whom I have no relationship if I were to fail to seek them out and give them what they deserve—even though if DESERT-COMPLICITY is true, someone might be complicit for such a failure.
The question of what the limits of complicity are in this area (and why) is complex, however, and I do not attempt to address it fully here. To give some sense of how an answer might be developed, let me say that these issues are, I believe, related to the discussion of standing to blame: in particular, the sense of standing that has to do with it being one's business to concern oneself with the wrongdoer's conduct (for an overview, see Todd Reference Todd2019). Having the standing to blame in this sense can be considered not only as giving one a permission to blame, but also, at least sometimes, as involving a requirement to blame. A person who fails to blame when they have standing to do so thereby themselves becomes blameworthy because their behavior involves acquiescing in the wrongdoing, treating it as acceptable rather than as transgressive. We might call this phenomenon the standing-relative nature of the risk of complicity in relation to failure to blame.
One who wishes to defend DESERT-COMPLICITY will need to explain why liability to complicity varies as it does. I suspect—though I do not argue for it here—that desert theorists of the axiological or deontic varieties considered in this article will struggle to account for standing-relativity and that the dissociation account defended below is better placed to capture the relational nature of the risk of complicity. The present argument relies on what I take to be a pretheoretically plausible connection between response T to wrongdoing (where T might be deserved) and complicity; if the connection is sufficiently plausible, then we can leave to another day the question of specifying more precisely the scope and limits of such complicity.
4. Assessing DESERT-COMPLICITY
If DESERT-COMPLICITY were true, we would have a way of explaining what would be lost in the deflationary vindications considered in section 1. Deflationary vindications do not recommend treating offenders in the way they deserve. Thus, if DESERT-COMPLICITY were correct, those deflationary responses would be morally inadequate because they incur complicity. DESERT-COMPLICITY would help to explain the importance of DESERT because it would help to explain why we need a concept that plays the conceptual role that I attributed to desert judgments above.
However, is DESERT-COMPLICITY true? I doubt it. The first thing to notice is that SOURCE OF COMPLICITY also differs from the deflationary vindications reviewed above in its view of the significance of responses to wrongdoing. Indeed, SOURCE OF COMPLICITY plays a conceptual role that is very close to that of DESERT. For instance, SOURCE OF COMPLICITY would explain the ‘backward-looking’ moral importance of giving wrongdoers some treatment T. SOURCE OF COMPLICITY identifies considerations that have normative force because of the need to remove complicity independently of the production of future good consequences. Furthermore, such considerations are different from considerations of the fairness of a response to wrongdoing: whether a response is fair and whether it is adequate to remove complicity are two separate issues. SOURCE OF COMPLICITY would also explain why desert judgments license judgments about the noninstrumental rightness or goodness of wrongdoers getting treatment T: that is, on the assumption that avoiding or removing complicity is itself intrinsically appropriate. And SOURCE OF COMPLICITY could be argued to align noncontingently with emotional reactions such as guilt and blame, such that, as in our example of person B, we intelligibly feel guilt when we are complicit and remove complicity by engaging in blame.
The closeness of conceptual role played by DESERT and SOURCE OF COMPLICITY might appear to give the proponent of DESERT good grounds to appeal to SOURCE OF COMPLICITY and to defend DESERT-COMPLICITY. DESERT-COMPLICITY may not be the only way to articulate the normative force of DESERT. But without it, defenders of DESERT will have to find some other way to articulate the normative force of desert considerations. However, I will now argue that if they do appeal to DESERT-COMPLICITY, they will be vulnerable to the argument that it is SOURCE OF COMPLICITY rather than DESERT that has explanatory priority in the combination of the two. The truth of the matter, I will claim, is that defenders of DESERT mistakenly attribute the normative force of SOURCE OF COMPLICITY to DESERT. Without support from SOURCE OF COMPLICITY, it is unclear why we need a concept that plays the role of DESERT. But once SOURCE OF COMPLICITY is in place, I will claim, DESERT is undone. Once we have a better understanding of SOURCE OF COMPLICITY, it becomes clear that DESERT no longer plays an important role. It can simply fall out of the picture. This will pave the way for the argument that the fundamental notion is dissociation from wrongdoing rather than desert.
What I mean by explanatory priority is that when we seek to explain why or whether DESERT-COMPLICITY is true, one of these notions is more fundamental than the other. Thus, compare two ways of understanding the relationship between the elements in DESERT-COMPLICITY. On one reading, we appeal to our best understanding of DESERT to explain why DESERT-COMPLICITY is true (that is, to explain why SOURCE OF COMPLICITY is true for a failure to give wrongdoers what they deserve). On the other reading, we appeal to our best understanding of SOURCE OF COMPLICITY to explain why DESERT-COMPLICITY is true. The question is which of these approaches gives the better explanation. I argue that the second strategy gives the more powerful explanation. Why is that? Recall the two theories of basic desert that I noted earlier: one theory was deontic and held that DESERT represents a fundamental duty; the other theory was axiological and held that states of affairs in which wrongdoers get what they deserve are fundamental goods. Neither of these views, I claim, gives a powerful explanation of why DESERT-COMPLICITY should be true. I therefore conclude that we are better off assessing the truth of DESERT-COMPLICITY by elaborating our understanding of SOURCE OF COMPLICITY. (Though as I mentioned, when we elaborate our understanding of SOURCES OF COMPLICITY, we will come to see that giving someone their supposed just deserts is not necessary to remove complicity.)
Take the axiological view first. Presumably the axiologist about basic desert believes that there are fundamentally valuable states of affairs other than desert. For instance, perhaps states of affairs in which people are happy or virtuous or knowledgeable are all intrinsically valuable. The explanatory problem for the axiological desert theorist is that a failure to bring about these other inherently valuable states of affairs does not incur complicity, whereas, according to DESERT-COMPLICITY, it is a source of complicity to have failed to bring about desert. Thus, the proponent of axiological desert has to explain why desert has this distinctive feature in order for their explanation to be a powerful one. My concern is simply that it is hard to see how the theorist can do this other than by the ad hoc means of stipulating that desert has this distinctive feature. This strategy will therefore be vulnerable if there is an alternative explanatory route with better prospects.
The deontic view has similar problems. There are various fundamental duties, on this view, but why does complicity arise only in connection with desert? Now the deontic view might be able to make more progress in providing the requisite explanation than the axiological theory. The deontic basic desert theorist could argue that fundamental duties can be of two sorts, primary and secondary. In addition to the primary duty, for example, not to treat a rational agent as a mere means, there are secondary duties that concern how to respond when someone violates that primary duty. Included among these secondary duties is, according to the desert theorist, a duty to give out deserts. Although secondary duties are secondary, it could be argued that they are nevertheless fundamental in the sense that no further normative grounding is needed to explain their validity. Because it is a further wrong to violate these secondary duties, we can explain why a failure to give out desert is wrongful. Might this view, if developed well enough, account for DESERT-COMPLICITY?
Not quite. While this deontic view may initially seem more plausible than the axiological one, it still has a crucial failure of explanatory power. It fails to account for the intuition that in complicity one shares in the responsibility for the initial wrong. According to Sanford Kadish (Reference Kadish1985), the distinctive role of the idea of complicity is ‘to define the circumstances in which one person (to whom I will refer as the secondary party or actor, accomplice, or accessory) becomes liable for the crime of another (the primary party or actor, or principal)’ (Kadish Reference Kadish1985: 336). Kadish's understanding is not eccentric. His is the usual way in which complicity is understood: as the secondary party's sharing in responsibility for the principal's misdeeds. On the deontic desert theorist's explanation, by contrast, a violation of a secondary duty constitutes a further wrong: namely, the wrong of failing to respond to a violation of a primary duty in the way a secondary duty requires. However, the violation of secondary duty in relation to some violation of primary duty is not the same thing as a sharing in blameworthiness for that initial violation. Complicity attaches to someone who has some responsibility-incurring relation to another agent's violation of a primary duty, in virtue of which the complicit agent shares in the principal's blameworthiness for that violation. According to DESERT-COMPLICITY, that responsibility-incurring relation might be a failure to give the wrongdoer what they deserve. However, the explanation just offered on behalf of the deontic view of basic desert does not explain this sharing in the blame for the violation of the primary duty. The best that it can do is to explain how a failure to respond to wrongdoing by giving out deserts is a violation of a secondary duty and hence a further wrong. Thus DESERT-COMPLICITY cannot be explained by appeal to basic desert.
These claims about the nature and sources of complicity are put forward here as independent data for which a theory in this area should account. These data might also be helpful in explaining the normative force of claims that we should respond to wrongdoing in particular ways, such as by blaming or protesting. But it looks as though DESERT struggles to account for these data. It may be that the proponent of DESERT, on either its deontic or axiological version, can yet find an argument to show that DESERT has explanatory priority in DESERT-COMPLICITY. However, given the problems noted above, I suggest that we explore the possibility that it is SOURCE OF COMPLICITY that has explanatory priority.
If SOURCE OF COMPLICITY has explanatory priority, then the issue immediately takes on a different cast. Rather than being limited by whatever grasp we have on the notion of DESERT, we start with the potentially richer resources of the notion of complicity. For this to work, what we need is, first, an explanation of why a failure to respond adequately to wrongdoing is a source of complicity at all and then, second, an explanation of what an ‘adequate response’ is that removes complicity. Thus, SOURCE OF COMPICITY could be further spelled out as involving two distinct steps:
DISSOCIATION: It is necessary to treat the act properly as wrong if one is not to acquiesce in it and risk complicity with it.
ADEQUACY: Treatment T is necessary in order to treat the act properly as wrong.
What kind of claim is the combination of DISSOCIATION and ADEQUACY? I will now argue that it is a claim about expressive action. Without the expressive action of dissociation, one has not ‘honored’ the wrongdoing as one ought and therefore remains associated with it.
5. Dissociation as An Expressive Action
First, let us introduce the idea of expressive action (Bennett Reference Bennett2012, Reference Bennett, Coates and Tognazzini2013, Reference Bennett, Abell and Smith2016, Reference Bennett2021b, Reference Bennett2021c, Reference Bennett2022). As I explained in the introduction, expressive actions are actions that have expressive properties related to the salient features of the situation they are directed to. We can elucidate this claim by distinguishing two ideas of ‘expression’ as it pertains to behavior. One is the idea that some behavior is expressive of some underlying state if the presence of that underlying state is what causes the behavior. The second idea of ‘expression’ is the one relevant here, and it is concerned rather with expressive power. It is this second sense of ‘expression’ or ‘expressive’ that we appeal to when we say that, for instance, the slow movement of Beethoven's String Quartet no. 15 expresses the determined but fragile and temporary (re-)awakening of life in the context of an inevitable deterioration toward death. (Beethoven's inscription to this movement calls it ‘Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit’: ‘A convalescent's hymn of thanksgiving to the divinity’.) What we mean here is that the music is weary and tentative, yet hopeful and grateful and at the same time resigned. In just this combination it captures the situation of someone recovering, perhaps briefly, from illness, but knowing death to be close; more broadly, the music captures the ongoing struggle for life in the face of the inevitability of change and decay. The music, in other words, has expressive properties that relate to the situation of struggling life or to the condition that we are in as we are struck by a full appreciation of the significance of that struggle. What it is for these properties to be (successfully) expressive is for the music to be such as to capture or embody the nobility of that continued struggle in full awareness of its ultimate hopelessness.
Perhaps music can be expressive in this second sense. Can actions also have expressive properties? Take the example of Christians kneeling in church. A plausible explanation of why they kneel in church is that they think kneeling is appropriate. Why might it be appropriate? To explain this, we need to appeal to the expressive properties of the action. Thus, one reason why kneeling might be taken to be appropriate in church is that in church one takes oneself to be in the presence of the divine. What makes kneeling appropriate as a response to the presence of the divine is the perception that the divine has a worth or status that is incomparably higher than one's own. The act of kneeling is thus an expression of humility, and it is appropriate as an expression of humility because making oneself low captures or embodies an awed sense of being impure and powerless in the presence of one so pure and so powerful.
Why do we perform expressive actions? To do justice to what appear to us the salient features of the situation. Or simply to acknowledge that situation and lift it out of the ongoing rush of one event after another. In other words, expressive action is a category of action that does not primarily aim to bring about an alteration in our situation, but rather to recognize or acknowledge the gravity of the situation: to dwell on it, lifting it out of the ordinary run of things and marking it as significant. As well as having a primarily backward-looking role, such dwelling also helps to fix the situation, and what was important about it, in our memory.
Situations of welcoming, leave-taking, thanking, celebrating, commiserating, and mourning all involve distinctive actions that can be thought of as being expressive in this sense. When a parent embraces a child returning home from university or as she is leaving, they mark the significance of the situation by doing something that captures or embodies the sense that the child is dear to them (that they want her close) and that they are either delighted to see her return or are wishing her well as she departs. One particularly important role that expressive actions can play is in marking the passage from one normatively significant state to another.
With this account of expressive action in place, the next step in my argument is that dissociation is the relevant expressive response to wrongdoing. Suppose that we wanted to do justice to the significance of wrongdoing, lifting it out of the mundane and marking its extraordinary nature, what kind of action would be expressively powerful in relation to such transgression? Some possibilities would include:
1. Doing nothing
2. Doing something beneficial for the offender, aimed at the offender's happiness or welfare
3. Doing something beneficial for the offender, aimed at their moral reform
4. Imposing physical suffering on the offender
5. Permanently excluding the offender from relationships/community
However, none of these alternatives embodies the right attitude toward wrongdoing—or not in the right way. The first one is problematic because it fails to do anything to mark the offence as wrong. The second is problematic because of a lack of fit between the situation and the symbol. It is unclear how we could explain or justify the choice of an act that is welcoming and rewarding to mark something that is to be deplored and for which the wrongdoer is responsible.
The third option improves on the second in that it marks the wrongdoing as a failing. But the symbolism of imposed reform is inadequate because it treats the offender as though their identity, status, and dignity as an independently competent agent who has committed serious wrongdoing is not a salient feature of the situation. In (Bennett Reference Bennett2008: 91–100), I make this point through a distinction between qualified participants and apprentices. Purely reformative responses do not take account of the salient fact that a qualified moral agent is one who has a competence and a responsibility to comply with their obligations without external assistance. Such responses can be denigrating in that they fail to treat being a qualified moral agent as an important part of the wrongdoer's identity. Note, however, that the argument here is not that imposed reform is never an appropriate response to the offender. The argument is rather that imposed reform is inappropriate in the absence of, or as a replacement for, a response such as the one recommended below, which symbolizes the offender's failure as that of an independently competent agent. It would be compatible with this that imposed reform could accompany the latter response.
The corporal responses involved in the fourth option (lashing, stoning, exposure to the elements, crucifixion, breaking on the wheel, or lashing out at the offender with blows) are expressively inadequate because it is difficult to see how we could explain the relation of reference between the symbolism of the action and the salient features of the situation. The treatment seems to have no intelligible symbolic connection with the situation of wrongdoing. The fifth option involves marking the offender as lost to the moral community, but this symbolism is disproportionate to most cases of even serious wrongdoing. People who commit moral wrongs show responsiveness to moral considerations in most areas of their lives even though they may have grossly failed in one area. It is, after all, this general responsiveness that is partly constitutive of their being a responsible agent in the first place. At best, the fifth option would be appropriate to a very small number of extremely serious moral wrongs.
Our review of these problematic alternatives suggests a better symbolism. What is salient in the situation of wrongdoing is that (1) the wrongdoing is something to be deplored; (2) it was committed by an independent responsible agent who could and should have done better; (3) the agent is thus a member of the moral community who has violated the basic requirements of membership in that community. Our identity as a member of the moral community is a central part of our status. If the pursuit of moral ends and the upholding of moral standards is important, this can come about only through the cooperation of human agents who are sensitive to these requirements. There are signs of expressive recognition through which we mark the dignity of an agent as one who is part of this shared enterprise: certain characteristic marks of respect and goodwill. On the other hand, however, the offender is one whose membership in the moral community is troubled because they have done something that a competent member of the moral community should have seen was not to be done. This suggests that an appropriate symbolism would be that the characteristic forms of respect and goodwill that come with membership are partially and temporarily withdrawn. The agent remains a member of the moral community, so this withdrawal should be neither permanent nor comprehensive. It is thus partial and temporary distancing or withdrawal that is the appropriate way to symbolize our understanding of the significance of wrongdoing when we wish to mark that wrongdoing expressively.
This conclusion resonates with the vignette of B provided above. B is in an uncomfortable position of moral compromise because he is not able to blame his employer. In particular, he is in a position in which he has strong prudential reason to continue to act as though he is on good terms with his employer. This is uncomfortable because he feels a normative pressure to distance himself from his employer, and not to treat them as if they were on good terms. The account given in this section explains this pressure. I have sketched an argument that the expressively appropriate action in the face of wrongdoing is distancing or, as we might otherwise call it, dissociation. One reacts with distancing in order to do justice to the fact that wrong has been done by one who, in the absence of the wrongdoing, would be due certain marks of expressive recognition and respect. In doing so, one dissociates oneself from the wrongdoing and from the agent who perpetrated it (for further thoughts about dissociation, see Bennett Reference Bennett2022).
6. Understanding SOURCE OF COMPLICITY
We are now in a better position to understand the basis of SOURCE OF COMPLICITY. The idea that a failure to blame or withdraw from a wrongdoer can be a source of complicity makes sense if the following claims about expressive action are true. First, actions are sometimes called for, not simply to alter, but to mark the significance of situations and events. Second, in order properly to mark those events and honor their significance, actions have to be expressively adequate in the sense of having appropriate expressive properties. Third, actions are expressively adequate when they have properties that manifest the appropriate attitude to the situation by referring to its salient features. Fourth, situations of serious wrongdoing call for expressive actions to mark their significance. Fifth, the significance of situations of serious wrongdoing is that a member of the moral community has failed in the basic terms of their role. Sixth, the properties (or symbols) that are expressively adequate to the situation of wrongdoing, in virtue of referring in the appropriate way to the salient features of the situation, are withdrawal or distancing, that is, dissociation. If all six claims are correct, then one who fails to engage in dissociative behavior has failed to honor the wrongdoing as they should. They remain ‘associated’ with it.
This recapitulation of the six points above allows us to see why the account of dissociation as an expressive action can give us a more powerful explanation of SOURCE OF COMPLICTY than one beginning with either the axiological or deontic interpretation of basic desert. We now have an argument to show that SOURCE OF COMPLICITY has explanatory priority over DESERT in grounding DESERT-COMPLICITY. In seeking to understand SOURCE OF COMPLICITY we now have a more powerful explanation of why complicity might arise from a failure to engage in some response to wrongdoing than we could get from attempting to explain this connection beginning from DESERT.
However, what we have ended up with is not DESERT-COMPLICITY. For one thing, my explanation of why complicity arises does not appeal to DESERT. Rather, the theory of dissociation as an expressive action seems to be doing the explanatory work. For another thing, according to my argument, it is not the imposition of suffering as such that is the treatment T that is appropriate to such occasions. Rather, it is withdrawal and distancing from the wrongdoer that is expressively adequate to situations of wrongdoing.
An appeal to dissociation as the most basic backward-looking response to wrongdoing has various explanatory benefits over the notion of desert. One, noted above, is that appeal to dissociation allows us to explain the link between failures to respond adequately to wrongdoing and the incurring of complicity. Another benefit is that rather than appealing to a sui generis and perhaps mysterious notion of desert, dissociation is seen as an expressive action and is thus related to many other such acts, such as welcoming, thanking, mourning, which are appropriate to situations of normatively significant passage from one state to another. A further benefit is that we have at least the beginnings of a vocabulary with which to articulate the normative significance of noncontingently appropriate responses to wrongdoing. Given the limits of space here, I have sketched out a rationale for thinking that expressive actions are appropriate to certain situations, and I have explained how candidate actions might be compared regarding their adequacy as responses to wrongdoing. The reader might remain unconvinced by my sketch. But I hope that it is at least clear on what basis the argument between those who reject the account and those who accept it might proceed.
As suggested at the outset of this article, this conclusion has significance for debates about retributivism and incompatibilism. A position that, like the one defended here, insists on the independent normative force of dissociation is, in important respects, a retributive position. Indeed, it is a backward-looking position that shares much of the conceptual role that is attributed to retributive desert. If dissociation is important, it is clearly backward-looking in the relevant sense, distinct from fairness, and it licenses judgments of intrinsic rightness and/or goodness. If blame and guilt can be seen as emotions of dissociation from wrongdoing, then the account also promises to explain why it is that judgments about dissociation track judgments about emotions such as blame and guilt. Nevertheless, the account presented here involves a reinterpretation of the basis of retributivism and deepens and extends the debates about its nature and significance. Rather than simply appealing to the ‘basicness’ of deserved suffering, inquiry should proceed by asking whether we have genuine justificatory reasons for expressive action; whether expressive actions in regard to wrongdoing are (ever) called for; what degree of force is possessed by reasons for expressive action; and what kinds of action—whether of distancing or some alternative symbolism—are adequate to situations in which a member of the moral community does wrong. An appeal to desert tends to make it harder to articulate these questions, but these are at least some of the questions that we need to address if we are to evaluate properly the normative force of backward-looking responses to wrongdoing.
Regarding incompatibilism, the question is whether the appropriateness of dissociation requires that the agent to-be-dissociated-from had the (perhaps in fact impossible) kind of control or freedom that incompatibilists claim would be required for basic desert. As I interpret it, this is a question about the capacities that are needed to be a member of a moral community in which one's wrongs will have the significance of calling for dissociation. A moral community is structured as a form of cooperation for moral ends. Each member has a place because they are needed to further those moral ends and uphold the vision of human relations structured by those ends. It does not seem implausible to think that the capacities needed for such membership in the moral community are simply those involved in the kind of normative competence that is treated as the defining mark of responsibility by authors such as P. F. Strawson (Reference Strawson1962) and R. Jay Wallace (Reference Wallace1994; for a related view, see Bennett Reference Bennett2008: ch. 3).
We do not need to stop talking in terms of DESERT. Such talk may be innocent if we do not take it to commit us to deserved suffering as good in itself. We can talk about one person deserving or not deserving a certain kind of treatment in virtue of some wrongdoing for which they were or were not responsible. However, while the surface grammar of this talk appeals to desert, the arguments presented in this paper suggest that the normative structure underpinning it has more to do with dissociation. We get a deeper understanding of the desert-focused surface grammar if we transpose these claims to the idiom of dissociation.
