Michael McKenna's "Responsibility and Desert"

Michael McKenna is Professor of Philosophy at University of Arizona, having arrived in 2012. He taught at Ithaca College from 1994-2006, and Florida State University from 2006-2012. He has held visiting appointments at University of Colorado, Boulder, and Bryn Mawr College. McKenna works primarily on the related topics of free will and moral responsibility, but also in ethics, moral psychology, action theory, and metaphysics. His book Conversation & Responsibility appeared in 2012, and Free Will: A Contemporary Introduction, coauthored with Derk Pereboom, appeared in 2016.

McKenna applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Responsibility and Desert, and reported the following:

Page 99 of my 2024 book Responsibility and Desert takes up a potential challenge to my proposed theory of punishment. I argue that a justified form of punishment aims to elicit appropriate guilt from the criminally culpable, and that the pain of guilt for the deserving is noninstrumentally good. (Something is noninstrumentally good if its value is not just in the service of something else that is good.) In The Ends of Harm (2011), Victor Tadros argues that aside from instrumental value, it is never good that one feel badly about one’s own wrongdoing. But even if it is, Tadros argues, punishing a person in order to bring about the (supposed) good of their feeling guilty is never itself good. On page 99 I set aside Tadros’s first point for a later chapter devoted to deserved guilt. But I respond to Tadros’s second point. Tadros thinks of the punishments delivered to the criminally responsible as mere deprivations of the goods that the punished would otherwise have access to. In response, I argue that the only harmful forms of punishment the culpable deserve are those that facilitate an appropriate response of guilt for wrongdoing. Mere suffering or harming has no justification. It is, I argue, only punishment serving to communicate to the culpable an expectation of the sort of attitude of guilt they ought to experience. And the guilt they ought to experience should be fitted for the particular harms they have wrongly caused others. No more. As I note, the crude forms of incarceration in current penal systems like the United State are not equipped to dispense such subtle forms of punishment.

Page 99 does not reveal the quality of the whole of Responsibility and Desert. Instead, it narrowly focuses on one potential objection to one particular point about how to justify punishment. Nevertheless, it’s relation to the whole is telling. This book develops a conversational theory of moral responsibility, wherein both blame and punishment are conversation-like responses to culpable wrongdoing. The conversation theory treats blameworthy conduct as having a meaning revealing the quality of the will (the attitude) of an agent when she does wrong. This meaning can be treated on analogy with a speaker who initiates a conversation with other speakers of a shared language. When others blame or punish the wrongdoer, their responses can be understood on analogy with a conversational response to the meaning of the speaker who initiated the conversation. So, blame and punishment, as well as emotional expressions like anger or indignation, have a communicative and conversational character.

But when are blame and punishment justified? The most common justification is cast in terms of desert; the culpable deserves blame, and in more egregious cases punishment. The central argument of Responsibility and Desert is that what a culpable agent deserves is that others communicate their demands and expectations by way of blaming or punishing. If so, what is deserved has to have the right conversational meaning as a fitting reply to the wrongdoer. Mere eruptions of hostility directed at the culpable, or punishments just in the form of dispensing any sort of suffering, convey no meaning of the distinct wrong done. Moreover, for the wrongdoer to appreciate what is conveyed, she must adopt an appropriate—deserved—response. Plausibly, the response involves accepting and experiencing fitting guilt—guilt tailored to the unique nature of the moral infraction.

Many object to desert as a justification for blame and punishment because it is committed to the noninstumental goodness of harming the guilty. Harming any person, it is argued, is never in itself good. I argue that, indeed, desert implies the noninstrumental goodness of harming the culpable. But, I argue, once one appreciates the limited kinds of harms, the seemingly barbaric character of the thesis disappears. What is good, for instance, is that a wrongdoer feels badly about the harms she has caused others. That’s not objectionable. It’s a better world that one feel badly for wronging others as compared to a world where one does not.

Visit Michael McKenna's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eric S. Haag's "The Other Big Bang"

Eric S. Haag is professor of biology and director of the Biological Sciences Graduate Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has conducted research on the evolution of sex and reproduction in animals such as sea urchins, roundworms, and hermaphroditic fish for three decades.

Haag applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Other Big Bang: The Story of Sex and Its Human Legacy, and reported the following:

Page 99 is the second page of Chapter 7, “Land Ho.” Its first paragraph reads:

[As] I rounded a bend, what was left of a puddle a few feet across came into view. I bent down to discover a sad tableau of mass tadpole mortality. One hundred or so whip-tailed, jet-black blobs were cradled in the drying mud, dead or dying and on their way to becoming pollywog jerky. They were optimistically produced by a pair of red-spotted toads a couple of weeks before, and a few even had managed to start sprouting their hind legs before the dry warm air, breezes, and lack of more rain doomed their bid.

While unlucky tadpoles may seem to be unrelated to sex, by the end of the page we learn how the evolution of a different way of reproducing strongly conditions how humans experience sexuality. So, I’d argue that The Other Big Bang passes the Page 99 Test with flying colors.

The passage, recounting a hike in the Mojave Desert, underscores how the need for standing water limits where amphibians can live. It is frankly amazing that any of them succeed there. The vignette sets up the rest of the page, which introduces the evolution of a new type of vertebrate, the amniote. Amniotes include familiar desert animals like lizards, rattlesnakes, tortoises, roadrunners, jackrabbits, coyotes, and other mammals (including humans). They became the dominant land vertebrates by evolving new anatomies that allow internal fertilization (e.g. penises) and new protections for embryos (membranes and the egg shell). With such “reproductive superpowers” amniotes could reproduce virtually anywhere, including very arid or very cold places.

Before amniotes, males and females often differed only in gamete type: males make sperm, and females eggs. In present-day fish the sexes cannot be distinguished until months after hatching, and even then only by closely examining the developing gonads. Fish and amphibians generally lack external genitalia, and the ducts that carry sperm or eggs to the outside are shared between the sexes. Any sex differences in color or body shape develop only with adulthood, under the control of hormones. In the laboratory, adult fish can be easily sex-reversed with hormones. For example, females can be permanently converted into fertile males by adding testosterone to their water. Outside of the lab, hundreds of fish species naturally change sex over their lifetime, with individuals living as both fertile female and fertile males.

In contrast, amniotes develop sex-specific tissues, inside and out, early in embryonic development. At birth it is easy to tell male and female apart (rare intersex cases excepted). This early developmental divergence is associated with the loss of the sexual plasticity found in our ancestors. Like it or not, much of how we experience sex and gender directly connects to these anatomical sex differences, differences that first evolved in our ancient amniote ancestors. Imagine what it would be like if, instead, we humans retained the sexual plasticity of fish. From this one page, the broader message of The Other Big Bang is apparent: we understand ourselves and our human predicament better when we know how we got here.

Visit Eric S. Haag's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's "America Under the Hammer"

Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis, and author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America Under the Hammer: Auctions and the Emergence of Market Values, and reported the following:

In 1786, lawyer John Antsey was sent by Britain’s Loyalist Claims Commission to the new United States of America on a mission of value. During the war, patriot governments had seized property—land, livestock, clothing, enslaved human beings—from men and women accused of being loyal to Great Britian and auctioned it off to their neighbors. Now in exile with the war over, loyalists demanded that the British government reimburse them for their suffering. Unsurprisingly, they often lacked proper receipts and made questionable assertions about their property’s value. Antsey’s charge was not only to find out how much the goods had sold for, but also to figure out what they had really been worth. Page 99 captures his frustrated conclusion about the relationship between value and price: “The Answer is always in a Circle, it will bring as much as it is worth—and it is worth as much as it will bring.”

Page 99, by summarizing Antsey’s dilemma, highlights one of the central arguments of America Under the Hammer—that value is a social and historical problem, not a number determined by the impersonal forces of the market—and in this way the test works. Antsey could discover the price paid for property, but he knew this was hardly the last word on its value. Rather, it was a product of dozens of forces that my book brings to light. Bids reflected community beliefs, personal jealousy, side conversations, pragmatic deal-making, misinformation, and many more social considerations. Auctions themselves were structured around legal conventions that were designed to uphold social hierarchies, relegating participants to the roles of bidders, bystanders, or property themselves. The shocking notion that a person could be sold in the same way as a chair fundamentally shaped the modern capitalist idea that everything has its price and that price is the measure of value. That modern understanding of markets conceals a long history of sorting out what value itself could or should mean. As they debated the nature of value in everyday life, early Americans deployed auctions to convert familial, labor, and diplomatic relationships into exchanges of goods for money.

In order to trace the history of market-oriented ideas about value, my book investigates many more types of auctions than the loyalist sales discussed on page 99. Auctions in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century North America took place on street corners, courthouse steps, and even jail cells, and they trafficked in a wide variety of new, used, and living “goods.” Chapters discuss the fraught public sales of land seized from Indigenous Americans, the bargain auctions of imported overstock by which female retailers stocked their shelves, and the desperate tragedy of slave auctions. The result is a history of early American capitalism that places complex human relationships at its center.

Visit Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue