8 Contemporary Compatibilism
Seven Recent Views
We turn in this chapter to contemporary compatibilism. There is a striking dif-
ference between contemporary compatibilist proposals and the range of con-
temporary libertarian proposals. As we will explain in Chapter 10, there are three
distinct ways to advance a libertarian theory: event causal, noncausal, and agent-
causal. While each has been developed in interestingly different ways, viable
libertarian proposals all clearly fall into one of those three camps. By contrast,
there is such an array of contemporary compatibilist strategies that it is challeng-
ing even to think about how to sort them into manageable categories. For this
reason, in this chapter, we will consider seven compatibilist proposals, com-
menting only briefly on each. Then in the next chapter, we’ll focus in more detail
on three particularly prominent compatibilist strategies, one developed in terms
of reasons- responsiveness, another in terms of a mesh between different ele-
ments internal to an agent’s psychological architecture, and a third advancing a
contemporary defense of leeway freedom.
Before proceeding to specific compatibilist theories, it will be useful to con-
sider a few important factors influencing recent work. The first three sections
below are devoted to this task.
8.1. The Dispute between Historical and Nonhistorical
Compatibilists
One variable affecting contemporary compatibilism concerns whether free will
and (or) moral responsibility are essentially historical.^1 Until recently, the default
assumption had been that compatibilism is a nonhistorical thesis (e.g., see
Double, 1991: 56–7). The idea was that for the compatibilist it should not matter
how a person came to be the way she is. All that should matter is whether, given
that a person is a certain way when she acts, she does so from resources that are
freedom- conferring. Thinking that the manner of acquiring pertinent freedom-
conferring resources of agency should also matter invites the worry that deter-
minism itself could be the sort of history that is freedom- defeating. Despite
this default assumption, in recent times, several influential compatibilist pro
posals have accepted a historical requirement (e.g., Fischer and Ravizza, 1998;
Haji, 1998; Mele, 1995, 2006b). The general strategy is to point out that some