Why I disagree with those of my comrades who think our commitments to a more egalitarian economy and a less cruel criminal justice system go hand in hand with utilitarianism and free will denial.
Rather than reject moral responsibility/free will/luck/rights, perhaps the point is to see them as historical and “socially constructed”and therefore subject to change, maybe even conscious change. We may not want to do without these concepts altogether, but we may need to be skeptical of how the dominant ideology conceives of them. At a theoretical level, that requires a certain distance since humans tend to experience them as inscribed in the universe itself. The downside would be that we would have to acknowledge that condemnation of crossing picket lines or engaging in sexual harassment isn’t just given by the universe but was the product of movements that only were possible in certain historical circumstances. (Not that the victims wouldn’t experience suffering from strike breaking or what we now call sexual harassment but that there wasn’t a concept to name these things as specific blameworthy acts.)
It is pretty hard to imagine social interaction without retributive emotions. And it seems like progress to be able to talk about whether retribution is justified and, if so, how much. In the end, these issues are precisely how social conflict and change works. It is just questionable whether this should be analogized to the way a science gets better at understanding how motion or metabolism works
Rather than reject moral responsibility/free will/luck/rights, perhaps the point is to see them as historical and “socially constructed”and therefore subject to change, maybe even conscious change. We may not want to do without these concepts altogether, but we may need to be skeptical of how the dominant ideology conceives of them. At a theoretical level, that requires a certain distance since humans tend to experience them as inscribed in the universe itself. The downside would be that we would have to acknowledge that condemnation of crossing picket lines or engaging in sexual harassment isn’t just given by the universe but was the product of movements that only were possible in certain historical circumstances. (Not that the victims wouldn’t experience suffering from strike breaking or what we now call sexual harassment but that there wasn’t a concept to name these things as specific blameworthy acts.)
It is pretty hard to imagine social interaction without retributive emotions. And it seems like progress to be able to talk about whether retribution is justified and, if so, how much. In the end, these issues are precisely how social conflict and change works. It is just questionable whether this should be analogized to the way a science gets better at understanding how motion or metabolism works