u/adr826

Dramatis personae

Chad; a good looking compatibilist who recently became a partner at a prominent architectural firm. He is dropping off his motorcycle to be repaired.

Hedley; owner of the Hard Determinists motorcycle repair shop who has been checking Chads bike for the last 15 minutes.

Scene 1

Chad sits in the waiting room. Hedley returns from the garage.

Hedley: Good news, Chad

Chad: Go ahead

Hedley: I found the problem with your Harley.

Chad: Finally. What was it?

Hedley: the big bang

Chad: What? I want to know why the bike failed.

Hedley:Thats what I'm trying to tell you. It was the big bang.

Chad: I am almost certain it was the fuel injector.

Hedley: That's because you aren't treating this scientifically. The question I asked myself was what is the ultimate cause for your bike failure. A lot of mechanics would look at your bike and tell you the fuel injector failure was the cause of your bike not running. But something caused the fuel injector to stop running and that too was caused. A long chain of causes. Heat cycles, material fatigue, manufacturing variance It turns out that every time I thought I found a cause, it too was caused and therefore had no responsibility in the ultimate sense.

Chad: But I don't want an ultimate cause. I want to get my bike running again. I can't decide who is worse, I tried a libertarian motorcycle repair shop first. They said there was no cause at all. Just the injector acting how it wanted.

Hedley: The big bang is the ultimate source of your problem

Chad: So what? this is all the Big Bang’s fault?

Hedley: I wouldn’t say “fault.” I try to stay away from retributive mechanics. There are no parts to blame. I don't believe in praise or blame. The bike is a system so it has to follow the laws of physics.

Chad: So are you going to replace the injector or not?

Hedley: Replace is such a loaded term. The injector is merely participating in a deterministic unfolding.

Chad: Is the part broken?

Hedley: “Broken” presupposes a normative standard imposed upon matter.

Chad: That seems unhelpful.

Hedley: It’s only unhelpful if you think blaming a part is what you need to fix a motorcycle. No, what I'm going to do is to change the fuel injector.

Chad: That's exactly what I would have done.

Hedley: Yes but you'd have changed it as a kind of punishment. I'm going to change it compassionately.

Chad: Will that still fix it?

Hedley: Yes.

Chad: Then why bring up the Big Bang at all?

Hedley turns to leave and shakes his head. Then turns around and wipes the grease onto a rag.

Hedley: Well Chad once you understand deterministic mechanics you become more compassionate towards the parts you change.

Chad: What do you do with the parts you change?

Hedley: Oh put them in the crusher and send them to the dump. I don't think about them again. They're just parts after all.

Chad: That's more compassionate, I guess. Well go ahead and fix it.

Hedley: I don't think of it as fixing Chad, I like to think I'm rehabilitating the bike. Give me till Tuesday and come pick it up.

Chad: alright see you Tuesday.

Exeunt.

And do the museums know they are missing?

Both Sam Harris and Robert Sapolskey agree that if we lost our sense of moral desert, our system of justice would necessarily become more compassionate. I think this fundamentally misunderstands both our own system and what a more deterministic system would entail. I will go into the structure and mission of our own system first and then investigate a more rehabilitative system historically and show that the underlying drivers of cruelty in justice are not philosophical but economic and political.

In both federal sentencing law and judicial practice, retributive considerations are present but rarely operate as the sole or explicit governing rationale for punishment. Judges are required to justify sentences through a framework that includes deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and proportionality constraints. Even when sentences have a retributive structure in effect, retribution is embedded within broader conceptual language rather than stated as an independent aim. The contemporary U.S. system is not straightforwardly organized around retribution in its official reasoning, undermining the claim that abandoning belief in free will would transform our retributive system into a more compassionate system.

When the Federal Bureau of Prisons says incarceration is given

“as punishment, not for punishment”

It is trying to express two ideas. First, that it is the loss of liberty it seeks to enact, and second, that the sentence doesn't entail any metaphysical desert.

There is a conceptual error on the part of sapolskey and Harris because Retribution (in the philosophical sense) means harm is justified because the offender deserves to suffer. But the Bureau of Prisons does not say anything like that. It doesn't rely on the idea of moral desert as an organizing principle. It actually aligns more with an administrative theory of punishment than a retributive one. It says only that punishment is the consequence of conviction. It also affirms respect for the “inherent dignity of all human beings” and providing “opportunities for self-improvement."

In the courts Federal sentencing law includes retribution but explicitly subordinates it within a plural, constrained framework.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 3553:

Courts must impose a sentence “sufficient, but not greater than necessary” and among the purposes to “reflect the seriousness of the offense… and to provide just punishment”

alongside

“adequate deterrence”

“protect the public”

“provide… training, medical care, or treatment”

18 U.S.C. § 3553

My point in this isn't to defend our current prison system. It is broken as I think most people would agree. It's to show that changing beliefs from our current system to a hard deterministic model of justice alone wouldn't make it more compassionate necessarily.

It is tempting to think that penal systems reflect philosophies, retributive systems produce punitive outcomes, rehabilitative systems produce humane ones, and determinist frameworks would naturally reduce punishment severity. However, historical comparison show otherwise. Systems such as Soviet “corrective labor” institutions or Vietnamese reducation camps and contemporary prison systems like those in the United States differ radically in their stated moral justifications, yet both produced horrific outcomes that depended more on economic incentives, and political pressures than any philosophical commitments for or against free will and determinism. The lived reality of punishment is only loosely connected to its official philosophical framing. Debates about determinism and free will, may be less germaine to punishment and prison than is often assumed in philosophical arguments.