186 Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism
Consider this much- discussed example Wolf uses to advance the part of her
asymmetry thesis that concerns praiseworthiness:
Two persons, of equal swimming ability, stand on equally uncrowded
beaches. Each sees an unknown child struggling in the water in the distance.
Each thinks “The child needs my help” and directly swims out to save him.
In each case, we assume that the agent reasons correctly—that child does
need her help—and that, in swimming out to save him, the agent does the
right thing. We further assume that in one of these cases, the agent has the
ability to do otherwise, and in the other case not. (Wolf, 1990: 81–2)Wolf contends that both agents are morally responsible and praiseworthy. Nelkin
concurs (2011: 21). Wolf considers a competing perspective—the Autonomy
View, as she calls it—that requires the ability to do otherwise for moral respons-
ibility (82). On this conception, only one of the two swimmers is morally
responsible for saving the child. But Wolf finds this implausible: “For there
seems to be nothing of value that the first agent has but the second agent lacks.
Both examples are examples of agents’ thinking and doing exactly what we want
agents to think and do” (82).
As for the other half of the asymmetry thesis, concerning blameworthiness,
Wolf uses as a foil a view she calls the Real Self View (1990: 85–9). We’ll
examine these positions in detail in the next chapter. For present purposes, it is
enough to note that the Real Self View explains free agency in terms of the
architecture of an agent’s internal mental states when her internal subsystems are
working in harmony. When an agent’s real self is manifested in her actions, she
acts from desires or motivations that at a deeper level she wants or values. When
she acts in this way, she acts freely. As Wolf sees it, the problem with views of
this sort is that an agent could act from values that are truly hers and reflect who
she is, but if she is blinded to the wrongness of her values or if is she is incap-
able of acting contrary to them when she sees that they are wrong, then she is
intuitively not morally responsible for what she does. For Wolf, the crucial
missing requirement is that the values or deep desires a person acts from and that
reflect who she really is must be ones that she is psychologically capable of
aligning with The True and the Good (75), or, as Nelkin would put it, with good
reasons. Hence, an agent who does not act for good reasons must be psychologi-
cally capable of doing so. The upshot is that blameworthiness requires the ability
to do otherwise.
Wolf ’s and Nelkin’s asymmetry thesis gives rise to the possibility of a puzz-
ling metaphysical result, as Nelkin notes (2011: 18). Suppose the Consequence
Argument is sound, and that thus leeway freedom is incompatible with determin-
ism. Suppose as well that an adequate compatibilist account of source freedom
was identified and shown to be immune to source incompatibilist arguments (such
as those canvassed in Chapter 7). The upshot would be that praiseworthiness
and the freedom required for it would be compatible with determinism, but
blameworthiness and the freedom required for it would be incompatible with