Punishment and Personal Responsibility

1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Viewed from the outside, the process of writing this dissertation must
have appeared uneventful, indeed even boring: I was accepted as a PhD
student; I went by tram to the department of political science a lot; I sat
around in my office, visited the occasional seminar and drank a lot of
coffee; I kept on playing for my beloved Hybris Basketball Club; I bought
a scrappy old car; and I did some travelling (though not as much as I
would have liked). Most of all, I read a lot and wrote a lot.
From a first-person perspective, however, the years I have spent
working on this book have been anything but uneventful. Though writing
a dissertation can be mind-numbingly boring at times – especially
when you after a period of frenzied writing have to go back and get all
the poorly specified footnotes right – the placid and tedious impression it
can give the outside observer is entirely wrong. Scratch the surface of a
PhD student and you’ll find a person in turmoil: beneath are doubts,
grandiose hopes and aspirations, bright and not so bright ideas, and all
kinds of practical and theoretical problems. Some people are under the
frankly ridiculous impression that the reason why PhD students are often
reluctant to discuss their projects with non-academics is that they feel
superior to them - that we do not want to sully our bright research by
communicating it to laypersons. This is by no means the case. Rather, the
reason why we become shifty-eyed and evasive when you ask us about
our work is that, most of the time, we firmly believe that what we are
producing is an instance of the subject matter discussed by Harry Frankfurt
in that small and cherished book of his. A PhD student generally
walks under a cloud of imminent doom. Having completed this book, I
do hope that cloud will now disappear.
This dissertation is about the importance of the notion of personal
responsibility, and the attractive and empowering nature of being judged
as praise- or blameworthy. It is curious to see how often academics are
confused about these concepts. The typical academic book begins by listing
the people or organisations that have helped the project, either intellectually
or financially, and then proceeds, in an exercise of supreme
humility, to state that most of the credit belongs to those acknowledged,
while the blame remains entirely the author’s. This strikes me as a ques-