Desert and dissociation

In this paper, I argue against the idea of basic desert that has been prominent in recent literature on incompatibilism and retributivism. I claim that the supposed normative force of desert considerations is better understood in terms of dissociation. My argument starts from the observation that an important strategy in spelling out the apparent normative force of desert considerations is through the idea of complicity. The intuition I will be interested in is that giving wrongdoers what they deserve is necessary to dissociate oneself from wrongdoing and thus not to become complicit in it. However, I argue that the idea of basic desert cannot give a good explanation of this connection. I thus propose to explore the idea that it is dissociation, rather than desert, that is explanatorily basic. I then argue that the best way to understand dissociation is as an expressive action. Expressive actions are actions that have expressive properties that relate to the salient features of some extraordinary situation. It is through such expressive actions that we attempt to ‘honor’ or do justice to the significance of these situations. Expressive actions are familiar and appropriate in contexts such as welcoming, mourning, thanking, and so on, as well as in contexts of wrongdoing. Dissociation from wrongdoing – expressed as distancing from the wrongdoer – is an expressive attempt to do justice to the significance of wrongdoing in a way analogous to the expressive attempt to thank someone adequately for a favor they have done you