Strawsonian Compatibilism 141suffering on a wrongdoer” as Strawson would put it (77). Our practices them-
selves dispose us to so acting, and this is just part of our nature.
These claims of Strawson’s appear to be the least defensible, and for reasons
similar to those enlisted in Section 5.4. Worries about whether a person genu-
inely deserves blame or punishment are themselves part of the very system
Strawson contends we must accept as a natural fact (Strawson, 1986). But the
seeds of the demand for wholesale, external justification derive from an element
inside of our conceptual scheme that seems crucial to our understanding of moral
responsibility. For as Jonathan Bennett (1980: 24–5) argues, the desert element
located in our concept of moral responsibility really does seem to presuppose a
set of metaphysical requirements—Bennett calls them Spinozistic—incongruent
with Strawson’s naturalistic thesis.
There is, moreover, a more general point to make about Strawson’s natural-
ism here in relation to a wider set of philosophical issues. Our moral responsib-
ility practices, to the extent that they involve harming others, are the sorts of
practices which it seem we ought to be able to justify. Rather than treat them as
mere brute, natural facts—metaphysics aside—it would be more satisfying if we
had some normative account of the justification or warrant for harming others in
these distinctive ways (in particular blaming and punishing). So, for instance,
both Scanlon (1988, 1998, 2008) and Wallace (1994) embrace much of Straw-
son’s approach to theorizing about moral responsibility’s nature. But when it
comes to offering an account of the normative basis for our practices, they depart
from Strawson’s approach. Both, in different ways, attempt to justify our moral
responsibility practices, to the extent that, as they saw it, they could be justified,
by appeal to a broader set of normative considerations. Scanlon (1988, 1998)
argued from appeal to contractualist resources that our responsibility practices
(in suitably revised form) could be justified. Wallace (1994), instead, appealed to
considerations of fairness.
6.6. Reflecting on Strawsonian Compatibilism
It will be useful to conclude this chapter by contrasting Strawson’s contribution
to the free will debate with the two others we have just considered in previous
chapters. Recall in Chapter 3, in closing our discussion of the debate between
classical compatibilists and classical incompatibilists, we explained that the phil-
osophical landscape regarding the free will topic changed radically in the period
of the 1960s due to the influence of three striking contributions. The first of
these, which we examined in Chapter 4, was the influence of an especially crisp
argument for the incompatibility of leeway freedom and determinism. This argu-
ment, the Consequence Argument, remains a central topic and point of departure
for numerous contemporary philosophers writing on free will. And it is widely
regarded by many (perhaps mistakenly, perhaps not) as strongly favoring an
incompatibilist diagnosis of the relation between determinism and leeway
freedom. The second equally influential contribution, which we examined in
Chapter 5, concerns Harry Frankfurt’s argument that leeway freedom is not