Contemporary Incompatibilism: Skeptical Views 279significant harm, such as death or severe physical or psychological suffering.
Rather, in the case of violent and dangerous criminals it would at best justify
only incapacitation by preventative detention. But this suggests an intuitively
legitimate theory of crime prevention that is neither undercut by the skeptical
view, nor threatened by other sorts of considerations. Ferdinand Schoeman
(1979) argues that if we have the right to quarantine carriers of serious commu-
nicable diseases to protect people, then for the same reason we also have the
right to incapacitate the criminally dangerous by preventatively detaining them.
Note that quarantining someone can be justified when she is not morally respons-
ible for being dangerous to others. If a child is infected with a deadly contagious
virus that was transmitted to her before she was born, quarantine can still be jus-
tifiable. So even if a dangerous serial killer is not morally responsible for his
crimes in the sense at issue, it would be as legitimate to incapacitate him by pre-
ventative detention as it is to quarantine a non- responsible carrier of a serious
communicable disease.
It would be morally objectionable to harm carriers of communicable diseases
more severely than is required to protect people from the resulting threat. Sim-
ilarly, the free will skeptic would not advocate treating criminals more harshly
than would be needed to protect society against the danger they posed. More-
over, just as moderately dangerous diseases may allow for only measures less
intrusive than quarantine, so moderately serious criminal tendencies might only
justify varieties of incapacitation less intrusive than preventative detention. In
addition, an incapacitation theory supported by the analogy to quarantine would
recommend a level of concern for the rehabilitation and well- being of the crimi-
nal that would alter much of current practice. Just as it’s fair for us to try to cure
the people we quarantine, it would be fair for us to attempt to rehabilitate those
we preventatively detain. If a criminal cannot be rehabilitated, and if protection
of society demands his indefinite detention, there would be no justification for
making his life more miserable than required to guard against the danger he
poses.
11.8.3. Meaning in Life
Would it be difficult for us to cope without a conception of ourselves as credit-
or praiseworthy for achieving what makes our lives fulfilled, happy, satisfactory,
or worthwhile—for realizing what Honderich calls our life- hopes (1988:
382ff.)?^6 He contends that there is an aspect of these life- hopes that is undercut
by determinism, but that nevertheless determinism leaves them largely intact,
and this seems plausible. First, it is not unreasonable to object that our life- hopes
involve an aspiration for praiseworthiness in the basic desert sense, which on the
skeptical view determinism would undermine. Life- hopes are aspirations for
achievement, and it is natural to suppose that one cannot have an achievement
for which one is not also praiseworthy in this sense, and thus giving up this kind
of praiseworthiness would deprive us of our life- hopes. However, achievement
and life- hopes are not as closely connected to basic desert praiseworthiness as