NDPR Michael McKenna Responsibility and Desert

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Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.11.10 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Michael McKenna, Responsibility and Desert, Oxford University Press, 336pp., $99.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780197679968.

Reviewed by Adam Piovarchy, The University of Notre Dame, Australia

When we ask what justifies blaming or punishing someone, a common answer is ‘they deserve it’. How should we understand this idea, and is it true? Free will sceptics like Pereboom take the fundamental notion at issue here to be ‘basic desert’, understood as desert that is not justified in terms of some further notion, e.g., consequentialist considerations. It is difficult to know how to assess whether agents can be basically deserving of blame and punishment, as providing reasons in support risks introducing some other normative bedrock. What more can be said about something that, by hypothesis, has no further...