Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism 181justifying our practices of holding morally responsible, especially blaming and
punishing. The general strategy is to identify an adequate justification for, say,
blaming, and then ask what presuppositions about agency are entailed by a justi-
fication of this sort. On such a view, it would be misleading to claim that there
are no metaphysical requirements at all on free and responsible agency. Rather,
whatever requirements there are will hinge on the normative conditions needed
to justify our practices of holding responsible. Suppose, for instance, that a justi-
fication for blaming was advanced in terms of fairness. A plausible condition on
blaming might be that those blamed were able to understand moral demands,
because otherwise it would be unfair to hold them to account for wrongdoing. It
would then be a requirement of responsible agents, flowing from considerations
of fairness, that they are able to understand moral demands. The question would
then become: Do we have any reason to think that all (or most) persons are
unable to understand moral demands, and is there any reason to think that deter-
minism is incompatible with persons being so constituted?
8.3. The Proliferation of Senses of Moral Responsibility
We turn now to the proliferation of distinct kinds of moral responsibility identi-
fied within our moral responsibility practices. Until fairly recent times, the
default assumption was that moral responsibility was one kind of thing, and the
debate about the (strongest sense of ) freedom required for that one kind proceed
from there. But in his highly influential article, “Two Faces of Responsibility,”
Gary Watson (1996) identified two kinds of moral responsibility: attributability
and accountability. Moral responsibility in the attributability sense, on Watson’s
view, concerns evaluations of what is revealed about an agent or her character
in acting as she does, about what she stands for or cares about. Such a
responsibility- evaluation, according to Watson, is different from what is
involved in evaluating an agent’s conduct in ways that involve holding her to
account for how she acts. In this stronger sense, her being responsible warrants
(at least some) others treating her in certain ways, in making demands for
apology, reparation, and so forth. More recently, David Shoemaker (2015) has
argued that there is a further kind of moral responsibility distinct from the attrib-
utability and the accountability notions: answerability (cf. Bok, 1998; Smith,
2004). Answerability concerns responsibility for one’s judgments as revealed in
one’s agency, and presupposes that an answerability responsible agent is able to
answer for her exercising of her judgment- sensitive capacities. Others have pro-
posed different ways of carving up the domain of moral responsibility (that do
not seem to map clearly onto the distinctions drawn above), including Scanlon
(1998, 2008), whose views we will discuss below.^2
There are more minimal senses of moral responsibility as well. On Moritz
Schlick’s (1939) proposal, for instance, the point of blaming and praising is to
reduce the incidence of bad action and to increase the frequency of good action.
As we saw in Chapter 6, P.F. Strawson pointed out that such a forward- looking
“optimist” conception does not capture our entire actual practice of holding