Punishment and Personal Responsibility

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as any other factor in the calculus of utility, if indeed he or she can take
independent impression by moral reasons at all. 183
The most dramatic difference between the models emerges, however,
when we consider the notion of alternative possibilities. As we have
seen, the AM retains the alternative possibilities condition as fundamental.
The notion that people “could have done otherwise” is taken as central
for the appropriateness of the retributive conception of punishment.
The RM, on the other hand, either rules out alternative possibilities or
deems them entirely irrelevant. Here’s why:
According to RCT, rationality minimally requires that we (a) rank
feasible alternative courses of action, and then (b) choose the highestranking
one. We do not have to assume, as RC theorists tend to do, that
rational agents have transitive, reflexive and complete preferences, nor
that they are able to correctly assign probabilities to different outcomes
of alternatives. The relevant part is that rational agents, regardless of
their criterion or criteria for ranking, are able to rank the alternatives
they consider on an ordinal scale, ranging from the best to worst choice.
Rationality then requires that the best alternative be chosen. RC theorists
call the highest-ranked alternative or alternatives the maximal set
(McCarty & Meirowitz 2007). The maximal set can contain more than one
alternative but that implies that the agent is strictly indifferent between
the elements of the maximal set. Rationality then requires that the decision
between the alternatives is made with some random decisionmaking
process. If there is one alternative that is strictly preferred to the
others, there is a single element in the maximal set. A rational agent will
opt for this alternative.
The notion of choosing the alternative in the maximal set is fully
compatible with the voluntarist conception of freedom as defined above,
but it either renders irrelevant or rules out the alternative possibilities
condition. Colin Hay has therefore argued that RCT, far from being a
theory of free agency, in fact is a deterministic theory. He writes:
183 Thus, having a guilty conscience or the intrinsic disutility involved in breaking
one’s own moral standards would be costs just as any costs, capable of being
overridden by sufficiently large gains. Another way of saying this is that every
value should be translatable to a master value (cf. Scanlon 1988).