Sep 28, 2026 · 1h 24m
Caruso rejects desert while preserving responsibility
369 | Gregg Caruso on Living Well Without Free Will
The conversation tests whether morality, accountability, and a humane social order can survive without believing anyone ultimately deserves praise or blame.
- 1Neither determinism nor indeterminism supplies the ultimate control required for basic-desert responsibility.
- 2Forward-looking responsibility preserves deliberation, moral evaluation, rehabilitation, and social protection without retributive punishment.
- 3Free-will skepticism can deepen compassion while retaining meaningful differences in agency, choice, and obligation.
Don't miss
Caruso’s public-health model replaces retributive punishment with social protection, rehabilitation, prevention, and humane treatment.
The brief
Gregg Caruso defends hard incompatibilism: neither a determined world nor an indeterministic one gives people the ultimate control required to deserve praise or blame.
A brain-tumor case sharpens the challenge, but the deeper argument is that ordinary decisions are also produced by neurological and social causes, not exempt from them.
Caruso separates free-will skepticism from fatalism: people still deliberate, respond to reasons, make choices, and differ in practical control even without ultimate authorship.
The sharpest policy consequence concerns punishment. Caruso rejects retribution while defending quarantine-like protection, rehabilitation, prevention, and humane treatment.
The closing question is existential rather than merely legal: Caruso argues that love, friendship, creativity, dignity, and moral responsibility can survive—and improve—without free will.
Books & mentions
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