2 Introduction
Harris was in an almost lighthearted mood. He smiled and told Daniel
that it would be amusing if the two were to pose as police officers and
inform the parents that their sons were killed. Then, for the first time, he
became serious. He thought that somebody might have heard the shots and
that the police could be searching for the bodies. He told Daniel that they
should begin cruising the street near the bodies, and possibly kill some
police in the area.
[Later, as they prepared to rob the bank,] Harris pulled out the Luger,
noticed the blood stains and remnants of flesh in the barrel as a result of the
point- blank shooting, and said, “I really blew that guy’s brains out.” And
then, again, he started to laugh.^1In the LA Times article, Corwin comments upon how even the inmates at San
Quentin prison were planning to celebrate Harris’s execution. Harris, it seems,
was regarded as a terror of a man, even among the most hardened of criminals.
And Corwin details a prior life of crime, which began with torturing animals at a
young age, car theft, and beating a neighbor to death in a dispute, for which
Harris was convicted of manslaughter.
What are we to make of Robert Harris? And what are we to make of our
reactions to him, of our judgments about what he deserves, our feelings of
anger, and (for some of us) our desire that he is made to suffer by being pun-
ished? It is natural in these cases, at least as many people see it, to think of
Harris as more than an insane monster or a wild animal. Our indignation toward
him and our judgments about what we presume he deserves are bound up with
our thinking that somehow it was up to him how he acted. He was in the driv-
er’s seat of his own actions, of his life. He was not forced by his nature or any-
thing else to murder those boys. He could have done otherwise than to murder,
or for that matter, to make the choices he made earlier in life that led him to that
place where doing these terrible things would count for him as a source of
amusement, even delight. He, not someone or something else, was in control
in the murdering, or, earlier on, in control of the torturing of those animals,
and so on. And to the extent that he found himself in a place where it seemed
only a joy to so act, we also want to think—or at least many of us are so
inclined—that he made himself to be that way. He shaped himself to be this
brutal man by his own free choices. To many, this helps to justify our sense of
justice in a legal system that holds people to account. And even if one thinks
the death penalty is never deserved, it remains very compelling to think that
men like Robert Alton Harris deserve to be punished harshly for their crimes in
some way because they freely so acted, freely so chose, freely came to be as
they are.
These presuppositions embedded in the way so many of us think about a case
like Harris’s reveal an important feature of the conceptual framework many
people are committed to in their thinking: Persons are in some important way
free in acting as they do. This is a philosophical thesis, and it is not just some
esoteric one. It is embedded in so much of our way of understanding the world