198 Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism
relevant norms by way of a broader set of ethical commitments, which for
Scanlon issues from his contractualism and for Wallace issues from considera-
tions of fairness. Nevertheless, there are important differences. One is that
Wallace restricts his account of holding morally responsible to the morally
reactive emotions and their appropriate expression, whereas Scanlon (2008:
128–31) takes these emotions to be but one factor in the larger spectrum of atti-
tudinal modifications that involve blame. This is because, for Scanlon, under-
standing one’s relations with another to be modified in response to the other’s
objectionably impairing their relationships encompasses more than what is
involved in manifesting or finding fitting a negative moral emotion.
Another difference concerns the nature of blame, and the resulting strength of
the normative warrant needed for justifying it. Scanlon explicitly denies that he
thinks of blame as a kind of sanction (2008: 184–5). He even grants that if it
were, it would seem plausible to require a condition of fair opportunity to avoid
(184), which could help support the rationale for incompatibilist freedom con-
ditions. Wallace (1994: 51–2), by contrast, makes clear that he thinks of blame
as of a piece with a spectrum of sanctioning responses. This, in turn, suggests a
further interesting difference between Wallace and Scanlon. In the previous
section, a worry was raised about whether the sense of desert- entailing moral
responsibility Scanlon endorsed was the same sort that various incompatibilists
take to be central to the free will debate. The worry was, first, that the kind of
responsibility Scanlon focused on (attributability in Scanlon’s sense of the term)
was different from what animates other theorists (accountability in Watson’s
sense of the term), and, second, that the modes characteristic of deserved blame
for Scanlon were not very burdensome for the one blamed, and so perhaps he
does not really engage incompatibilists. Wallace, on the other hand, is clearly
interested in the accountability sense of moral responsibility. He also under-
stands blame in a way that imposes harms, and while he does not justify this so
much in terms of basic desert but instead fairness, it seems he is more in the
ballpark of the sort of desert- entailing accountability- responsibility that is the
focus of concern for incompatibilists.
But what of Wallace’s positive account of the freedom required for morally
responsible agency? Does it provide robust resources to silence the incompatibil-
ist worries that Scanlon sought to avoid? As we noted, Wallace only requires
source freedom. His view does not require that, at the time of action, an agent
must be able to do otherwise, given the particular conditions she is in. Hence, as
he sees it, he can avoid the challenges of the Consequence Argument. All he
requires is a general capacity to comply with moral reasons when one fails to do
so, and for him this involves a compatibilist- friendly general capacity to do
otherwise in some sense, one that is uncontroversially compatible with determin-
ism. But one might worry that this is not enough to satisfy further considerations
of fairness that are of a piece with those to which Wallace is committed. An
agent might do morally wrong, violate a moral obligation to which she is and
ought to be held, possess the relevant general capacities, and yet be covertly
made to do so by means that are beyond her control, as in a manipulation case.