202 Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism
to our responsibility practices. Now, Russell agrees with compatibilists in reject-
ing free will and moral responsibility skepticism. Our moral responsibility prac-
tices require a capacity for agency that includes a moral sense, and we agents
retain such capacities even if determinism is true. But even while rejecting skep-
ticism, we nevertheless have reason to be pessimistic at, as Russell puts it, the
horizon (2002b). The reason is that we cannot be the ultimate originators of our
actions. They were ultimately settled for us in the distant past. Looking at the
horizon of our own conditions in the natural world, we come to see that no con-
clusion of the compatibilists’ can silence the powerful thought that our place in
the world and our playing out our part in the moral community as we do is rele-
vantly beyond our control or just a matter of luck. Russell’s view here is provoc-
ative insofar as it makes considerable concessions to the moral responsibility
skeptic (see Chapter 11) despite not sharing her thesis in an unqualified way.
This pessimism at the limit, Russell holds, should not warrant anything as dra-
matic as “Pascalian despair”; it is, rather, just disconcerting (2002b: 251).
8.10. Bok’s Practical- Standpoint Compatibilism
In Freedom and Responsibility (1998), Hilary Bok advanced a form of compati-
bilism by way of what might be called a standpoint argument.^11 According to
Bok, there is a legitimate standpoint at which judgments of responsibility arise.
This is distinct from a standpoint at which questions of determinism would be
settled. Responsibility or freedom concepts at work within this former viewpoint
are not threatened by the possibility that determinism is true. The relevant stand-
point arises by distinguishing, in Kantian fashion, between the practical and the
theoretical points of view. The former is the stance of practical deliberation, and
has as its goal figuring out how one ought to act, which goals to set, how to plan
one’s life, by considering and weighing reasons. The latter standpoint is con-
cerned to describe and explain events as resulting from antecedent conditions
(Bok, 1998: 62–5). According to Bok, while both libertarian and compatibilist
notions of free will are found within the range of the “ordinary” concept of
freedom, the one that matters to the free will debate is the one that a practical
agent would have good reason to adopt (1998: 100). It is not that only one of
these standpoints captures the “real” truth about what the concept of free will is.
It’s that one is pertinent to agency in a way that the other is not. Bok thus seeks
to settle the free will problem by focusing on the role of the concept of freedom
from the point of view of a deliberator engaged in settling practical issues.
Given her practical standpoint approach, Bok maintains that the sort of
freedom of use to deliberators concerns possibilities restricted in scope to those
consistent with what an agent understands to be practically possible from her
limited epistemic perspective (1998: 108). These possibilities are much looser
than the sort required by libertarian free will, the latter requiring attention only
to possibilities given a precisely specified past and holding fixed the actual laws
of nature. Bok’s favored possibilities allow an agent to reason about alternative
courses of action conditional upon her choosing in one manner as opposed to