204 Seven Views of Contemporary Compatibilism
is not aligned with the sort pertaining to the traditional free will problem. The
natural way to understand accountability- responsibility is in terms of backward-
looking considerations, ones in virtue of which a blaming or praising response is
taken to be appropriate, and, importantly deserved just because of the way an
agent acted. The reason giving resources that justify blaming on Bok’s
legitimately- called-to- moral-improvement view, having the forward- looking ori-
entation they have, are not suited to treat questions of responsibility as settled by
attending just to what a person has done and what she deserves because of that.
Second, the sort of conditional freedom Bok identifies for this sense of freedom
is clearly compatible with determinism in a way that is entirely unproblematic
(Pereboom, 2007: 72). In a deterministic environment, one’s self assessment and
others’ assessments of one can be useful means of causally influencing a person
in morally laudatory ways that will shape her subsequent behavior. But as we
have explained above (Section 8.3), many incompatibilists see any conception of
freedom that is so clearly compatible with determinism as orthogonal to the phil-
osophical puzzles related to the (strongest) sort of freedom necessary for moral
responsibility.
8.11. A Continuum Ranging from Normative to
Metaphysical Approaches
We began this chapter by noting that the many contemporary compatibilist views
currently in circulation defy easy categorization. Here we note one interesting
way of sorting contemporary compatibilist proposals. Rather than think of dis-
tinct categories, we propose a continuum of views that emphasize at one end
almost exclusively normative considerations and forgo attention to action-
theoretic and metaphysical considerations. At the other end of the spectrum, we
find approaches that tend almost exclusively to issues in the theory of action and
to related metaphysical questions. This appears to be on display in the seven
previous sections. Scanlon’s view, for instance, seems to be at the most extreme
normative end of the spectrum, while Mele’s appears to be located at the most
extreme action- theoretic and metaphysical end of the spectrum. Plausibly, Wolf
and Nelkin are squarely in the middle. While Bok, Russell, and Wallace are
closer to Scanlon than to Mele, Dennett is closer to Mele than to Scanlon. We
turn in the next chapter to three general compatibilist strategies, two of which
seem also to fall somewhere between these two extremes, mesh theories and
reasons- responsive theories. A third, devoted to leeway compatibilism, is located
at the action- theoretic and metaphysical end of the spectrum, perhaps even at a
point further along than Mele’s.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Given that we have covered so many compatibilist proposals, we limit our rec-
ommendations in this section just to the major works by the central authors for
each of these views: