Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism 13moral blameworthiness. As the terms suggest, what an agent’s being morally
praiseworthy or morally blameworthy for something makes apt or fitting, in
standard or paradigm cases, is a response of moral praise or moral blame.^5
Even once we have zeroed in on moral responsibility, distinguishing it from
other sorts of responsibility, there is more work to do. Although controversial,
many philosophers have become convinced that there are different species or
senses of moral responsibility (e.g., Pereboom, 2001, 2014; Scanlon, 1998, 2008;
Shoemaker, 2011, 2015; Watson, 1996). These different senses involve distinct
types of judgments of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and so make apt or
fitting distinct types of praising or blaming responses. Gary Watson (1996), for
instance, has distinguished between moral responsibility in the attributability
sense and moral responsibility in the accountability sense. To be morally
responsible for an action in the attributability sense is for that action to reveal or
express one’s nature or self, what one stands for or who one is. In this way, acts
that are courageous or cowardly, magnanimous or petty, grand or shoddy, are
acts that allow us to attribute to the agent something about her—and these attri-
butions are in various ways means of judging her attributability- praiseworthy or
attributability- blameworthy. In light of these sorts of evaluations, we are often
given reasons to adjust our behavior and tailor our expectations toward those so
judged. Those inclined toward shoddy conduct, for instance, are better avoided,
and are best not trusted with the church’s donation box. Despite these qualifica-
tions, a person’s being merely responsible in the attributability sense does not
entail that she is liable to expressions of indignation toward her because of what
she did, or to demands that she rectify her bad conduct, or to being required to
apologize to those she wronged. These are all manifestations of moral responsib-
ility in the accountability sense, the core of which is the legitimacy of holding
someone to account for her actions.^6
Some have argued that there are yet further species of moral responsibility
(e.g., Pereboom, 2014; Shoemaker, 2011, 2015). We do not need to enter that
debate at this point (we will do so in our discussion of free will skepticism in
Chapter 11). Given the task at hand of surveying the various positions in the free
will debate, we are specifically interested at this stage in the sense that Watson
identified as accountability. A key feature of moral responsibility in this sense is
its connection with how others in a moral community are thought to be morally
permitted or entitled to treat others in certain, say, blaming way, ways that
involve taking up a blameworthy person’s moral transgressions and demanding
apology, acknowledgment of wrong done, a commitment to rectify the wrong,
compensation or punishment. There appears to be in these forms of treatment the
presumption of a morally justified mode of sanctioning.
A natural, albeit not universally shared, assumption about the means of moral
praising and blaming responses is that they involve manifestations of what are
known as the morally reactive attitudes (Strawson, 1962). These attitudes are
moral emotions that are responses to a morally responsible agent in light of her
actions. Moral anger, in the forms of moral resentment and indignation, is
revealed in a blamer’s treatment of a blameworthy agent, and manifesting such