Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism 195something about the person’s attitudes toward the friend that impairs their rela-
tionships by normative standards of friendship. The betrayed friend, in modify-
ing her understanding of her relation with this person in ways that are appropriate
or deserved, thereby blames that person.
Why doesn’t blameworthiness require free will? Because a blameworthy per-
son’s objectionable attitudes as revealed in her actions are reason providing for
another’s modifying her relations with the person. If the betraying friend really
does display objectionable attitudes toward the betrayed friend, the betrayed
friend is given reasons to adjust her assessment of the so- called friend, regard-
less of how “free” the friend is in acting as she does.^6 There is, thus, no special
freedom requirement of an “opportunity to avoid” blame as a normative con-
straint on the aptness of blaming (2008: 186–7). Furthermore, the appropriate,
fitting, or deserving forms of treatment constitutive of blaming only involve
modifications to one’s regard and treatment of the blamed person that are not
owed unconditionally (187), as a contractualist might think of it. If a poor atti-
tude of a blameworthy person makes a response by a blamer appropriate, it only
involves modifications that are not unconditionally owed to others by principles
no one could reasonably reject. Hence, a blamer is permitted to so respond
regardless of any putative robust freedom requirements.
As Scanlon acknowledges, if the ethics of blame as he understands it were to
justify harsher treatment, then perhaps it would seem reasonable to ratchet up the
freedom requirements in a way friendly to incompatibilism (190). At this junc-
ture, it is worth considering two related points bearing upon the topics discussed
above (Section 8.3). First, it is not clear whether and if so how Scanlon’s notion
of attributability- responsibility (which appears not to be designed to capture
what Watson meant by the term attributability) overlaps with the core notion of
accountability responsibility identified in the previous section. It is that latter
notion, we claimed, that is most relevant to questions of free will. One worry is
that we are just talking about different things. So it is not surprising that Scanlon
is able to specify transparently compatibilist- friendly freedom conditions.
But set this worry aside. Suppose there is enough overlap between Scanlon’s
proposed notion of attributability- responsibility and the Watsonian notion of
accountability responsibility that we can take Scanlon’s proposal as a genuine
contender for how we ought to understand responsibility in that overlapping
domain. There arises a second problem. Many incompatibilists, such as Pere-
boom (2001, 2014), claim that only the basic desert- entailing moral responsib-
ility is genuinely at issue in the free will debate, and this is so even when
attending to the narrower notion of accountability- responsibility. There is a ques-
tion about this shared domain as to whether Scanlon’s proposal is such a notion,
or is at least the same sort of desert- entailing notion that these incompatibilists
have in mind. Scanlon now embraces a limited basic desert- based theory as it
pertains to his notion of attributability- responsibility (2008: 188–9; 2013), and
he thus departs from his prior (1998) rejection of desert- based theories. But
he emphasizes that on his view of blame, what is deserved is not to be under-
stood in terms of the goodness of harming a blameworthy person (188) or the