Most contemporary accounts of moral responsibility take desert to play a central role in the nature of moral responsibility. It is also assumed that desert is a backward-looking concept that is not directly derivable from any forward-looking or consequentialist considerations, such as whether blaming an agent would deter the agent from performing similar bad actions in the future. When determining which account of moral responsibility is correct, proponents of desert-based accounts often take intuitions about cases to provide evidence either in favor of or against a proposed theory. In this paper, I discuss two experiments that test whether folk intuitions accord with what desert-based accounts would predict. Results suggest that moral responsibility intuitions are sensitive to forward-looking considerations, thus posing a problem for desert-based accounts of moral responsibility. If appealing to intuitions about cases is a valid method of discovering the nature of moral responsibility and desert, it seems either desert is not entirely backward-looking or moral responsibility is not exclusively desert-based. These experimental results also suggest that consequentialist accounts of moral responsibility, which have largely been abandoned due to their counterintuitive nature, are perhaps not so counterintuitive after all.

当代大多数关于道德责任的论述都把沙漠在道德责任的本质中发挥了核心作用。还假设沙漠是一个前瞻性概念，它不能直接从任何前瞻性或结果主义的考虑中得出，例如，怪罪代理人是否会阻止该代理人将来执行类似的不良行为。在确定哪种道德责任说明是正确的时，基于沙漠的说明的支持者通常会对案件有直觉，以提供赞成或反对所提议理论的证据。在本文中，我讨论了两个实验，这些实验测试了民间直觉是否符合基于沙漠的说法所能预测的结果。结果表明，道德责任的直觉对前瞻性考虑敏感，因此对基于沙漠的道德责任说明构成了问题。如果诉诸于案例的直觉是发现道德责任和沙漠性质的有效方法，那么似乎沙漠不是完全落后的，或者道德责任并非完全基于沙漠。这些实验结果还表明，因果而论的道德责任说明由于其反直觉的性质而在很大程度上被放弃了，也许毕竟不是那么反直觉的。