Scepticism Without Consequence? On Hard Incompatibilism and Its Normative Recommendations

Abstract

Free will scepticism about moral responsibility denies that human agents possess the kind of control required for basic desert moral responsibility. This position is often taken to have substantive normative implications, including the rejection of retributive punishment and support for reformist approaches to criminal justice. This paper challenges that assumption. We argue that scepticism about moral responsibility, considered in isolation, is normatively inert. While it undermines backward‐looking justifications of blame and punishment grounded in basic desert, it does not itself yield positive conclusions about how offenders ought to be treated. A central source of confusion is a category mistake: The rejection of basic moral responsibility is taken to establish moral innocence, when in fact it renders the distinction between such basic guilt and innocence inapplicable. We show how this mistake operates in pessimistic responses to scepticism, such as Smilansky's appeal to a ‘practical reductio.’ By contrast, so‐called optimistic sceptics such as Pereboom and Caruso avoid this error, yet still risk overstating the normative significance of scepticism by closely linking it to reformist proposals, including quarantine‐based models of punishment and limits on penal severity. While these proposals are defended on independent normative grounds—notably, self‐defence—we argue that they are not entailed by scepticism itself. Eliminating retributive desert removes one ground for punishment, but it neither constrains penal severity nor justifies offender‐focused detention except on forward‐looking and predictive bases. Any appeal to moderation or humanitarian restraint therefore depends on normative commitments and empirical assumptions, rather than on scepticism about moral responsibility alone.