14 Free Will, Moral Responsibility, Determinism
moral anger can function as a way of holding an agent to account. Likewise for a
positive moral emotion like gratitude—it can be a way of holding the agent
accountable by praising her.
Now consider the contention that when a person is morally responsible and
blameworthy, others are warranted or entitled to blame them. One might also
claim that it is appropriate or fitting to blame them. What is the normative basis
for these claims of warrant, entitlement, appropriateness, or fittingness? Some
have argued that the justification for blaming those who are blameworthy, a jus-
tification that would account for the sanctioning element in blaming, should be
based on consequentialist or utilitarian considerations. There are benefits of
various sorts for blaming those who are blameworthy, and these benefits can be
invoked to justify a blaming and punishing practice (e.g., Dennett, 1984; Smart,
1963). Others have considered different normative bases for blaming. One option
is to appeal to considerations of fairness (e.g., Wallace, 1994). The idea is that
those who freely and knowingly do wrong and are thereby blameworthy cannot
claim that blaming responses are unfair.
There are yet further options. But the most widely shared view is that the
grounds for claims of warrant, entitlement, appropriateness, or fittingness are
exhausted in the notion of fundamental or basic desert. A person who is blame-
worthy deserves blame on this view just because she has acted wrongly (e.g.,
Feinberg, 1970; Pereboom, 2001, 2014). And the desert at issue is basic because
it is not justified by considerations of utility or any other further norm at all
(even arguably fairness). It is simply good or right, because deserved, to blame
and perhaps in some cases punish one who is blameworthy for her wrongdoing.
We note one more refinement in our account of moral responsibility. These
claims of warrant, etc., no matter how developed, whether in terms of utility,
fairness, or basic desert, are best understood as offering justifications for a pro
tanto, that is, a defeasible, reason to blame a person. For example, a blame-
worthy person might deserve to be blamed for some wrongdoing, but one cannot
conclude just from this that it is all- things-considered the morally right thing to
do to blame her. Maybe other moral considerations are overriding. For example,
imagine a person who wronged you by lying to you about a small matter. She
might deserve your blame. But suppose that as chance would have it, after lying
to you, her child is killed in a car accident. Mercy might provide an overriding
reason here not to blame, even if the blame is deserved.
With the preceding discussion of moral responsibility available, we can now
chart the important connections between moral responsibility in the sense we are
interested in and considerations of free will. Because being morally responsible
makes one liable to justified hard treatment when one is blameworthy, there is
something at stake in a person’s being morally responsible in this way.^7 This
makes clear why there is a control or a free will requirement on being morally
responsible in the accountability sense. It seems manifestly unfair, or unjust, or
undeserving for someone to be subject, on the basis of what she did, to hard treat-
ment and the angry demands of others blaming her if, in acting as she did, her
action was not in her control, and in this way she was not free in acting as she did.