ABSTRACT
At this point, one might ask whether the fact that the expression of the attitudes is typically harmful is by itself enough to give a unified explanation of how the Reactive Attitudes Thesis and the Desert of Sanctions Thesis are related. If the relationship between the reactive attitudes and sanctions is that the (expression of) the attitudes are typically, but not essentially, a harming response, then it would seem that if we take the appropriateness in the Reactive Attitudes Thesis to be understood as desert, then a revised version of the thesis may seem called for. For example: A person is typically blameworthy to the extent that it is appropriate to adopt (or express) the reactive attitudes toward her. Now one way of avoiding this sort of weakening of the thesis, but still highlighting the fact that the expression of the attitudes typically – if not always – constitutes a harm, is to return to an idea of Feinberg’s that I rejected earlier. The idea is that what is deserved should itself be understood only in terms of what is typically, or “generally”, disfavored. In other words, on Feinberg’s view, “X deserves response R” can be true even if X welcomes R, as long as R is generally disfavored. This move seems to me to give up the core idea that what distinguishes desert from at least some other notions of fittingness is that what is deserved in any particular case is good or bad for the person. To illustrate: suppose that someone does something seriously wrong. He then receives a response that is neither unwelcome in his eyes nor bad for him in any other way, but it is a response that is “generally” bad for its targets. It seems odd to say that he got what he deserved. Perhaps the response is fitting in an important way, but it is not what he deserved in the distinctive sense at issue here.
