194 Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism
chemicals at a clean- up site. She bears the burdens of her harms to herself and so
is substantively responsible for her own condition because the community took
very reasonable and extensive steps to warn her. In the face of these warnings,
she chose poorly. In such a context, choice still has its value even in the face of
determinism’s truth, and so choice can still settle questions regarding the scope
of our substantive responsibility. As Scanlon puts it:
Choice can still retain its value even if it is caused, ultimately, by factors
outside of us... so long as these factors operate “through us.” (262)This, in compressed form, is Scanlon’s (1998) argument for the compatibility of
determinism and substantive responsibility.
At this juncture, a critic might resist as follows: It may be true that by con-
tractualist reasoning the distributions of burdens are best allotted by means that
give weight to the value of choice. As an upshot of this, those who bear consider-
able burdens as a result of choosing poorly might not have a complaint against
others that they have these burdens to bear; their substantive responsibilities are
allotted in a justified way. But in a context in which, because determinism is
true, these agents do not possess a more basic kind of freedom as to how they
choose and thus what burdens they come to bear, there is a deeper sense, as some
might see it, in which they do not deserve the lot they find for themselves in life.
While this does not undermine the justification Scanlon offers, the threat is that
the allotment of our substantive responsibilities is in some sense just a matter of
luck. It is not grounded on anything deeper about our own nature.
Now consider, Scanlon’s treatment of attributability responsibility and with it
the aptness of blame and praise. Here, we turn to Scanlon’s more recent book
Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning and Blame (2008), in which he
expands upon and also departs to a certain degree from his earlier treatment.
Scanlon takes up the Strawson- inspired strategy noted above (Section 8.2)
whereby exploring the normative grounds for our holding- responsible practices
will shed light on the presuppositions about free and responsible agency. In the
course of developing an interpretation of the ethics of blame, he proposes to
“examine why blame might be thought to be appropriate only for actions that are
undertaken freely, and explain why moral blame... does not presuppose free
will” (6). In this passage and others, it appears Scanlon means to advance com-
patibilism by bypassing altogether a freedom condition on action. But at other
points it seems he only means to take aim at a “strong kind of freedom” (123)
rather than one that would be compatible with determinism. We’ll assume the
latter in what follows.
Scanlon argues that the blameworthiness of an action is a function of its
meaning, and its meaning indicates “something about an agent’s attitudes that
impairs his or her relations with others” (6). Blaming is in turn a matter of under-
standing one’s relations with a person as modified in a way rendered appropriate
by the meaning of that person’s action (6). When, for instance, a person betrays
a friend by speaking disparagingly about her out of turn, this action reveals