Thomas Nagel · I’m not sorry: Should we punish?
I’m not sorryThomas Nagel
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Vol. 48 No. 9 · 21 May 2026
I’m not sorry<br>Thomas Nagel
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Morality and Responsibility<br>by T.M. Scanlon.<br>Polity, 254 pp., £18.99, April 2025, 978 1 5095 6697 6Show More
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The appearance of a new ethical theory is a rare event, but it happened in 1982 with the publication of T.M. Scanlon’s essay ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism’. Although he called his theory contractualism, Scanlon does not postulate an actual social contract between the members of a society, like Hobbes, or a hypothetical contract under imaginary conditions, like Rawls. Instead, he finds the foundation of morality in principles that reasonable people would find mutually acceptable. He holds that an action or policy is wrong if any principle that permitted it could be reasonably rejected by someone affected adversely by that principle. Whether such a rejection is reasonable depends roughly on a comparison between the burdens that the principle imposes on the rejector and the benefits it provides to other individuals, taken one at a time. (I’ll say more about what this means below.)<br>Scanlon’s theory was fully developed in his book What We Owe to Each Other (1998) and extensive commentary and criticism have grown up around the work. The book also incorporated ideas about the problem of freedom and moral responsibility first presented in Scanlon’s 1988 Tanner Lectures on ‘The Significance of Choice’. He has never stopped thinking about these topics, responding to criticisms, modifying his views and offering additional arguments. Morality and Responsibility collects twelve essays – four on the general theory of morality and eight on responsibility – that reflect on his theories and the way they compare with the alternatives.<br>Let me begin with the topic of freedom and responsibility, on which Scanlon holds distinctive and complex views. The traditional problem is this: we blame and punish people for the bad things they have done, which seems to presuppose that they have free will. But even if those actions were a result of their bad character, that character is ultimately caused, if we go back far enough, by biological, psychological and social factors over which they have no control. Whether the causal order of nature is deterministic or partly random, people do not create themselves. So how can it make sense to blame them for what they do? Punishment makes sense only as a deterrent, not as retribution, and feelings of condemnation and resentment towards a criminal are as out of place as they would be towards a tiger.<br>Scanlon’s response is complicated. First, he doesn’t see how people can have free will, since this implies that ‘our thoughts and actions are not all caused, ultimately, by factors over which we have no control.’ Second, he believes that whether or not we have free will in this sense, retributive punishment is never justified, because it is never a good thing for someone to suffer, no matter what he has done. But, third, he holds that many forms of adverse treatment and negative attitudes can be warranted by the bad things a person has done and by what he is like, even though he is not ultimately responsible for his character. Most of our moral reactions and judgments of responsibility do not require free will in order to make sense.<br>Instead of searching for a single general condition of moral responsibility, Scanlon argues, we should identify the kinds of change in treatment or attitude towards an offender that seem called for in each particular case, and determine whether they are appropriate in light of the breach in our relations that is revealed by the offender’s conduct. Like anyone treating this topic, Scanlon is indebted to Peter Strawson’s essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (1962), which drew attention to the unavoidability of ‘reactive attitudes’ like indignation and resentment towards people who have violated the terms of our human relations with them – relations we could not give up without ceasing to live a recognisably human life. We could not have friends, for...