182 Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism
morally responsible, and in particular misses the component connected with the
reactive attitudes. But we can identify Schlick’s notion with yet another sense of
moral responsibility.
The freedom or control conditions implicit in these different senses of moral
responsibility are liable to differ. This gives rise to the question of just what sort
of moral responsibility is at issue in the free will debate. Especially relevant to
compatibilism is the fact that some of the senses of responsibility recently identi-
fied, for example, the attributability sense and the one that Schlick has in mind,
seem to have minimal freedom requirements that are obviously compatible with
determinism—so much so that it would be odd to think that there is even on the
face of it any reason to think that determinism could pose a threat to this sort of
freedom. In light of this, we think it is most useful to proceed under the assump-
tion that the relevant sense of moral responsibility at issue in the free will debate
is the accountability sense. This is the sense in which a morally responsible
agent is liable to the sanctioning responses of others holding her to account for
her conduct by way of blaming and punishing and so exposing her to harms of
various sorts. It is the sense that seems to presuppose the need for relatively
robust freedom requirements, and so it is most likely to give rise to potential
philosophical problems as to whether and how such freedom can be satisfied.
Even once the sense of moral responsibility relevant to the free will debate(s)
is limited to accountability, there are further difficulties zeroing in on what is at
issue between compatibilists and incompatibilists. Some contend that the tradi-
tional free will debate should be conceived as limited only to whether we have
the free will required for a basic desert- entailing sense of moral responsibility
(e.g., Pereboom, 2001, 2014). In this desert- entailing sense, a person is morally
responsible and blameworthy for an action only if she deserves blame for it in a
basic sense. Basicness in this context is a matter of an agent’s deserving blame
just because she culpably acted wrongly and not for any further reasons, such as
those that follow from a consequentialist or a contractualist moral theory. Hence,
even restricting attention to moral responsibility in the accountability sense, if
the justification offered by a compatibilist for blaming is by appeal to normative
considerations of a consequentialist or contractualist sort, some will object that
the compatibilist misses the mark or changes the subject. Of special importance
here—so the charge goes—is that the freedom required for justifying
accountability- blame by way of these non- basic-desert- based resources is much
easier to come by and obviously compatible with determinism. Hence, it is not
plausible to think that freedom in that sense, relying on these justificatory
resources, should have any bearing on the traditional free will problem (e.g.,
Pereboom, 2007: 86).
8.4. Dennett’s Multiple- Viewpoints Compatibilism
In Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting (1984), Daniel Dennett
defends compatibilism in a way inspired by important developments in the philo-
sophy of mind. More recently, in Freedom Evolves (2003), Dennett has drawn