Few claims are made with as much unearned confidence as the assertion that skepticism offers a humane alternative to retributive justice. Yet under conceptual scrutiny, this humane facade collapses into an administrative framework that threatens the core of human dignity. Far from protecting the individual, Skepticism strips away basic desert reducing human beings to biological variables in a system of institutional risk management.

Proponents of skepticism argue that detaining dangerous individuals under a public health model, guided strictly by the principle of least infringement, avoids the harshness of punitive state action. However, relabeling non-consensual state detention as quarantine does not alter its structural reality. If the state detains an individual against their explicit will, the act remains fundamentally coercive. Attempts to salvage this model by appealing to hypothetical rational consent (claiming an agent behind a veil of ignorance would agree to such rules) fails to bridge the gap to reality. Forced state detention of an actual, non-consenting human being in the real world is not rendered consensual just because a philosopher constructs a theoretical scenario where a rational proxy ought to agree to it.

Furthermore, Skepticism falls into a dilemma regarding how the state responds to past actions. If the skeptic rejects preemptive detention to avoid punishing pre-crime, they must wait to react until after an act occurs. Yet if their post-act response is justified on purely forward-looking grounds, such as public safety or deterrence, the individual’s past action serves as an empirical trigger for state risk management rather than a moral boundary on the state's response. Conversely, if the state’s response is constrained strictly by what the individual did rather than what they might do in the future, the model silently relies on the logic of desert to set those bounds. The skeptic cannot disavow basic desert while simultaneously using past choices to limit state overreach.

Even when skeptics appeal to non-utilitarian frameworks like humanitarian duty or competing rights, the underlying objectification remains. Under a public health quarantine model, an individual is no longer detained because they autonomously chose a wrongful act and bear proportionate responsibility for it. Instead, they are contained because they are treated as an unsafe vector of harm, structurally identical to a carrier of a contagious virus.

Treating a human being primarily as a vector to be neutralized for collective safety instrumentally uses the person. Basic desert functions not as a justification for punishment, but as an indispensable upper bound on state power, dictating that the state may only intervene to the exact degree an agent's past moral choices warrant. Stripping away basic desert removes the only mechanism that requires the state to treat citizens as moral agents rather than hazardous biological entities.

This framework is further undermined by an internal inconsistency regarding its own foundational principles. A core premise of skepticism relies on the principle that ought implies can, asserting that agents cannot be held morally responsible because they lack the literal capacity to do otherwise than what determinism dictates. Yet if causal determinism rules out basic desert on these grounds, then the state, its policymakers and society at large are equally determined in how they respond.

Skepticism cannot coherently condemn retributive justice as morally unjustified or cruel while simultaneously maintaining that no individual possesses the moral agency required to act. By the skeptic's own foundational axiom, the institutional actors executing public health policies could no more choose a different verdict or system than the criminal could choose a different action.

If the skeptic attempts to escape this contradiction by redefining terms like "injustice”, cruelty”, or "harm" as shorthand for inefficient utility management, they fall into a self-defeating trap. Stripped of authentic moral agency, concepts like "undesirable outcomes”, safety”, or "societal harm" lose all normative force, reducing the skeptic's critique from a moral objection to mechanical noise. A skeptic cannot indict the cruelty of a system while erasing the very foundation of meaning that makes cruelty matter.

Ultimately, human dignity requires that an individual is treated as a moral subject (a rational agent capable of genuine choice and answerability) rather than an object, a dangerous animal or a disease vector. By replacing basic desert with systemic risk management, skepticism strips away human dignity, reducing moral subjects to complex biological mechanisms subject to administrative control.

Probably the biggest misconception and category error in this debate.

Agency is a scientific concept, but free will is always a metaphysical concept which is central to morality, specifically to moral responsibility related issues. This fact does not change even if you reject religion or souls - majority of philsophers are in fact physicalists and atheists, along with being compatibilists.

So if you say there is no free will, you are taking a stance on moral responsibility. And this is where the problem is for the worldview:

Some hard determinists/hard incompatibilists are nihilists who believes there is morality at all (who still seems to adopt pragmatic compatibilism).

For some, nothing changes at all (how can that be? its almost as if free will exists then).

For some, the debate shifts to only a particular kind of desert, but this concedes compatiblism.

For some it becomes 'there is no moral responsibility but there is accountability' but this did not change the underlying reality in any way.

Some of the giants in philosophy have this term called causal deviance.

It seems to imply that action is capable of deviating in such a way that thinkers might tend to believe that accidents are uncaused.

Freedom to act on one’s will is real. It is the difference between “I want to and I can” and “I want to, but I can’t.” A person who can leave a room and a person locked inside it are not equally free, even if their desire is the same. A person with Parkinson’s whose tremor is suppressed by deep brain stimulation can once again carry out their intention to pour tea. The freedom restored is entirely at the level of execution. The will does not need to have created itself for it to matter whether it encounters a locked door.

Freedom of origination, however, is a mirage. The feeling that “I am the source” is an internal signal, not an observation of causal origins:

The Minnesota twins raised apart often have similar habits, tastes, and choices. “My personality” turns out to be largely set in advance.

Wegner: people attribute movements to themselves that they did not cause, provided the thought preceded the action.

Gazzaniga: in split-brain patients, the left hemisphere invents a reason for an action triggered by the right, and the patient experiences that reason as their own.

Phineas Gage and tumors in the frontal cortex show how fragile the “essence” from which our choices supposedly arise can be.

Religion is best predicted by place of birth. “I chose my values” is true only within a framework that no one chose.

Strawson’s regress: to be responsible for what you do, you must be responsible for the way you are, which requires a prior choice, and so on indefinitely.

The mirage is convincing because we see only the final stage: deliberation, weighing the options, making the decision. The absence of a visible cause is experienced as the absence of a cause, or as “I am the cause.” As with visual illusions, the result is presented without its history.

This is where the hard determinist and the compatibilist diverge: according to the former, genuine freedom to act on one’s will is insufficient for moral responsibility, because responsibility requires ultimate sourcehood. According to the latter, the requirement of ultimate sourcehood is impossible to satisfy and therefore unnecessary.

The weakness in the compatibilist argument is that “impossible, therefore unnecessary” does not logically follow. If a condition is impossible to satisfy, there are two possible conclusions: either the condition was never necessary, or the concept that requires it is empty. The compatibilist chooses the former; the hard determinist chooses the latter.

We can use the following analogy here: if it turns out that witches do not exist, it does not follow that “witch” simply means “an eccentric woman.” It follows that witches do not exist. The question, then, is whether our ordinary concept of responsibility really includes a requirement of ultimate sourcehood. If it does, the compatibilist has not saved that concept but replaced it.

I believe we never have been. Freedom, as we imagine it, feels like a huge illusion. What exists might be a very limited freedom inside boundaries we were handed.

We did not choose, our country, class, family, and era were assigned at birth. A child born into poverty in a developing country and a child born into wealth in a developed one start with very different ranges of possible lives. Our minds were also formed without our consent. Language, culture, beliefs, and early experiences shape what we want and how we decide, so the person doing the choosing was already built by forces we did not select.

Add borders, laws, and authorities that most people cannot meaningfully defy, and the picture is one of choices made from a menu someone else wrote.

The strongest objection is that if freedom means choosing without any prior cause, nobody could ever be free, so the definition may be the problem. I agree the standard is demanding, but I think it is the honest one. A freedom that depends entirely on luck is not the same as the freedom we earned.

Still, we are free within what we have been given. A person can question their conditioning and act against it sometimes. That freedom is real, but it is unequal: some people have a wide room to move in and others a very small one.

If our starting points are a matter of luck, should we judge people's choices and outcomes as harshly as we do?