Graduate 110: Moral Responsibility 03
Peter Strawson. "Freedom and Resentment." (1963)
[1] Peter Strawson endeavors to speak to the debate between (what he terms) the optimists (compatibilists) and pessimists (libertarian incompatibilists) with respect to the relationship between moral responsibility and the thesis or doctrine of determinism. According to the optimists, the truth of determinism would not (or does not or cannot) undercut moral responsibility; according to the pessimists, the truth of determinism would undercut moral responsibility. Though he claims to be unclear on what exactly is meant by the doctrine of determinism, ("If I am asked which of these parties I belong to, I must say it is the… party of those who do not know what the thesis of determinism is." p. 45) Strawson, nevertheless, attempts to reconcile these positions and to show that the reality of moral responsibility does not hang on (or could not be altered by) one's conclusions about determinism at all.
[2] The problem, as the pessimist sees it, is laid out basically as follows: "that just punishment and moral condemnation imply moral guilt and guilt implies moral responsibility and moral responsibility implies freedom and freedom implies the falsity of determinism." (46) The optimist tries to answer by offering a slightly different account of moral responsibility and freedom, according to which the truth of determinism is compatible with that kind of responsibility and freedom. One way to do that is to develop a picture of moral responsibility as grounded in the regulation of social behavior; to which the pessimist replies: "But the only reason you [the optimist] have given for the practices of moral condemnation and punishment in cases where this freedom (emphasis mine) is present is the efficacy of these practices in regulating behaviour in socially desirable ways. But this is not a sufficient basis, it is not even the right sort of basis, for these practices as we understand them." (47-48) This, then, would seem to be the lacuna in the optimists position. The pessimist is committed to a more robust picture of freedom and moral responsibility that seems to be absent from the optimist's account.
[3] In order to make things clearer, Strawson steers the discussion away from considerations of "punishing and moral condemnation and approval" which are fairly abstract. Instead, he engages with "the non-detached attitudes and reactions of people directly involved in transactions with each other; of the attitudes and reactions of offended parties and beneficiaries: of such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings." (48) His hope is that resolving the debate in this context will shed light on how to resolve it in the more abstract context.
Though benefits and injuries are generally ascribed to individuals--in view of their responsibility for action--quite apart from the reactive attitudes, Strawson also wants to take seriously the ways in which these attitudes are, themselves, forms of benefit and injury. "We should consider also in how much of our behaviour the benefit or injury resides mainly or entirely in the manifestation of attitude itself." (49) This is in response to a concern of Strawson's "to keep before our minds something it is easy to forget when we are engaged in philosophy, especially in our cool, contemporary style, viz. what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary inter-personal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual." (50) This is a valid concern, so stated, but I am concerned that it is not appropriate in this situation. Or I am concerned that focusing unduly on these sorts of non-detached cases may not clarify but rather confuse the issues when thinking about the compatibility of moral responsibility with determinism. We shall see how that move on Strawson's part plays into his analysis and ultimate conclusion.
[4] Having turned to focus on our reactive attitudes, Strawson then asks about the conditions that are appropriate for modifying or mollifying these attitudes. According to the pessimist, the truth of the doctrine of determinism would entail that in situations where we might normally think that it is appropriate to feel gratitude or resentment or another reactive attitude, in fact, it would not be appropriate to do so. Before evaluating that claim, Strawson asks about the situations and circumstances under which we normally think it appropriate to suspend those attitudes. He divides the circumstances into two groups.
In the first group are circumstances that we take to warrant the suspension of responsibility for that particular event but not the total suspension of responsibility for that agent. "To the first group belong all those which might give occasion for the employment of such expressions as "He didn't mean to", "He hadn't realized", "He didn't know"; and also all those which might give occasion for the use of the phrase "He couldn't help it", when this is supported by such phrases as "He was pushed", "He had to do it", "It was the only way", "They left him no alternative", etc." (50)
In the second group are circumstances that we do take to warrant the total suspension of responsibility for that agent. Such cases as " "He's only a child", "He's a hopeless schizophrenic", "His mind has been systematically perverted", "That's purely compulsive behaviour on his part". Such pleas as these do… invite us to suspend our ordinary reactive attitudes toward the agent, either at the time of his action or all the time." (51) Whereas our interactions with ordinary people generally involve a variety of reactive attitudes, in the presence of psychological or moral abnormalities, we are disinclined to engage in the same way as we normally do but tend to adopt a more "objective" stance toward that individual. This "objective" attitude may be adopted with respect to other normal agents—we may (for a time) dispassionately appraise the actions of a person who is hurting us, for instance; but we generally cannot keep that up for long (especially if the hurt is very strong or immediate).
The question then becomes, would the discovery of the truth of determinism qualify as a legitimate (rational) reason to abandon our normal reactive attitudes and traditional ways of interacting with people. "What effect would, or should, the acceptance of the truth of a general thesis of determinism have upon these reactive attitudes? More specifically, would, or should, the acceptance of the truth of the thesis lead to the decay or the repudiation of all such attitudes?" (53) At this point, Strawson's arguments become very strange indeed.
The most significant argument involves the case of individuals with abnormal psychological or moral conditions. It is possible to conceive of an individual who has been incapacitated with respect to commonplace moral sensitivies. "He is thus incapacitated, perhaps, by the fact that his picture of reality is pure fantasy, that he does not, in a sense, live in the real world at all; or by the fact that his behaviour is, in part, an unrealistic acting out of unconscious purposes; or by the fact that he is an idiot, or a moral idiot. But there is something else which, because this is true, is equally certainly not true. And that is that there is a sense of "determined" such that (1) if determinism is true, all behaviour is determined in this sense, and (2) determinism might be true, i.e., it is not inconsistent with the facts as we know them to suppose that all behaviour might be determined in this sense, and (3) our adoption of the objective attitude towards the abnormal is the result of prior embracing of the belief that the behaviour, or the relevant stretch of behaviour, of the human being in question is determined in this sense. Neither in the case of the normal, then, nor in the case of the abnormal is it true that, when we adopt an objective attitude, we do so because we hold such a belief." (55) Basically, the argument is that since we understand certain circumstances to differentiate between the normal and abnormal case, it is not appropriate to claim that all cases are "abnormal" on the grounds of determinism. Strawson restates the basic point as follows: "when we do in fact adopt [an objective] attitude in a particular case, our doing os is not the consequence of a theoretical conviction which might be expressed as "Determinism in this case", but is a consequence of our abandoning, for different reasons in different cases, the ordinary inter-personal attitudes." (55) And this seems right, but doesn't go as far as Strawson seems to want to take it.
Just because determinism does not play a role in our normal reasoning about when it is appropriate to adopt the objective attitude does not rule out the possibility that it might serve as a reason. Strawson might still argue that if determinism were true then since every case would be "abnormal" it would not be possible to distinguish a set of, perhaps, "doubly-abnormal" (my locution) cases. But that doesn't seem right. Considerations of psychopathy or moral idiocy yield different reasons from those that follow from the truth of determinism.
Strawson offers another argument to the effect that while the idea of a world devoid of reactive attitudes is not "absolutely inconceivable", it is "practically inconceivable"; but that argument seems mistaken as well, as is his earlier claim that "it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition." (54) By no means is it inconceivable that abnormality would be the universal condition. Imagine that the entire human population is infected with a disease that causes every person to die at the age of forty. That is an "abnormal" condition given the natural human condition; but nothing precludes our ability to envision it being the universal condition. What about the case of suspending reactive attitudes? Imagine that the entire human population is infected with a disease that produces certain psychopathic tendencies or other moral-sensitivity-inhibiting condition in its subjects. In fact, conceivability does become a problem when we try to envision what it would be like to have that disease and be in an actually-morally-impaired state, but that is as much a problem for the psychopathy case as it is for the determinist case. The point is that it is not inconceivable that a set of circumstances should obtain wherein a condition that compromises the appropriateness of reactive attitudes becomes ubiquitous.
Finally, there seems to be one key gaping hole in Strawson's analysis. He is willing to accept psychological abnormalities as candidates for suspending reactive attitudes but not determinism. But the pessimist will argue that what is salient about the psychological cases is the compromise of a certain kind of control—a compromise that is also manifest in the determinism scenario. Strawson does not offer an alternative account as to why cases of psychological abnormality legitimately call for the suspension of reactive attitudes. Such an analysis seems indispensable if he is to make a convincing argument that the truth of determinism does not call for the same. [Apparently Jay Wallace offers just such an analysis.]
Strawson's argument on the basis of human enrichment or impoverishment strikes as curious. Certainly, as we are now, it would seem that abandoning reactive attitudes would result in a very poor quality of life, but that is not necessarily the case. One can imagine a spiritist saying the same thing about the advancement of empirical science—that a world in which everything is accounted for in terms of the movement of molecules and atoms is one that is impoverished when compared to a world alive with the supernatural; but such an argument has not stood in the way of science. The natural intuition that drives the advancement of science is something along the lines of this: the best life is one that is best aligned with reality. It seems odd to say that, if determinism is true, we ought to ignore the natural consequences of that discovery. Sure, embracing determinism might eliminate many of the "goods" in the world; but it would also eliminate many of the "evils"; moreover, we may discover that a Stoic ideal is actually far superior to the chaos of emotion in which we live now. [I don't actually agree with the position I am advancing here, but it seems a plausible counter-position to that proposed by Strawson and, thus, should be considered.]
[5] Strawson next sets about expanding his picture of the reactive attitudes to those that reflect our understanding, not only of others obligations to us, but also of others obligations to others and of our obligation to others. Similar problems to those found in the paradigm case also emerge in these cases, in Strawson's view, when we ask whether they might be suspended based on some discovery of the truth of determinism. Here he is even stronger than before: "First, we must note, as before, that when the suspension of [a reactive] attitude or such attitudes occurs in a particular case, it is never the consequence of the belief that the piece of behaviour in question was determined in a sense such that all behaviour might be, and, if determinism is true, all behaviour is, determined in that sense. [This seems an untroubling observation; one might still argue that determinism offers a reason to suspend reactive attitudes.] For it is not a consequence of any general thesis of determinism which might be true that nobody knows what he's doing or that everybody's behaviour is unintelligible in terms of conscious purposes or that everybody lives in a world of deluson or that nobody has a moral sense, i.e. is susceptible of self-reactive attitudes, etc. [All of this is quite true (except, perhaps, for the part about self-reactive attitudes), and also quite irrelevant to the question of whether determinism actually would compromise moral responsibility.] In fact no such sense of "determined" as would be required for a general thesis of determinism is ever relevant to our actual suspensions of moral reactive attitudes. [This is also true, but we're not talking about past "actual" suspensions of moral reactive attitudes.]" (59-60)
Again, Strawson acknowledges that there are contexts in which it is appropriate to adopt an objective attitude toward agents. But this is not the norm. It either emerges in cases of the intractably abnormal or with individuals who are, by degrees, being brought into a state of full responsibility. So he uses the example of child-rearing. He says, "The punishment of a child is both like and unlike the punishment of an adult." (61) Inasmuch as the child is not a full responsible agent, punishment serves the role of regulating his or her behaviour; but it also serves the purpose of bringing that child into full standing as a responsible agent. Strawson balks at a picture of child-development as moving from a state of determination to one of non-determination. But there is a part of me that balks at the idea of child-development as moving from a state of non-responsibility to one of responsibility. Is that the most accurate picture? This raises, I think, a point that I made in my treatment of "Two Faces of Responsibility" about the problem of construing responsibility principally in terms of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of sanctions. Better to let a child remain in a state where they are not the appropriate object of censure, punishment, and retributive attitudes. Maybe? Or maybe the picture of responsibility is fundamentally flawed.
[6] The result of our analysis is to bring us back to consider that lacuna in the optimist's argument—the inadequate view of responsibility that the pessimist finds unacceptable. Indeed, what seems to be so objectionable about that picture of responsibility is that it amounts only to responsibility in that objective sense that falls so far short of our robust experience of responsibility in the context of social interactions and reactive attitudes. But Strawson concludes that both the optimist and the pessimist have erred in their construals of moral responsibility. "Both seek, in different ways, to overintellectualize the facts. … The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society." (64) The implication is that those attitudes cannot be suspended on merely theoretical grounds and that attempts to do so or debates along those lines fail, fundamentally, to understand the close relationship between those attitudes and human society.
Strawson concludes from this that moral responsibility is the sort of thing that is totally indifferent to the truth or falsity of determinism. In some respects, he acknowledges, his view is closer to the optimists, but he altogether repudiates the construal of responsibility, in terms of the regulation of behaviour in a social context, that arises from that perspective. Yet, I cannot help feeling that his view may be closer to the optimists than he is willing to admit. The last pages of this essay are a pseudo-critique of traditional metaphysics and theoretical science/philosophy. I suspect that Strawson's analysis would have benefited from a little bit more of both.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
[1] Peter Strawson endeavors to speak to the debate between (what he terms) the optimists (compatibilists) and pessimists (libertarian incompatibilists) with respect to the relationship between moral responsibility and the thesis or doctrine of determinism. According to the optimists, the truth of determinism would not (or does not or cannot) undercut moral responsibility; according to the pessimists, the truth of determinism would undercut moral responsibility. Though he claims to be unclear on what exactly is meant by the doctrine of determinism, ("If I am asked which of these parties I belong to, I must say it is the… party of those who do not know what the thesis of determinism is." p. 45) Strawson, nevertheless, attempts to reconcile these positions and to show that the reality of moral responsibility does not hang on (or could not be altered by) one's conclusions about determinism at all.
[2] The problem, as the pessimist sees it, is laid out basically as follows: "that just punishment and moral condemnation imply moral guilt and guilt implies moral responsibility and moral responsibility implies freedom and freedom implies the falsity of determinism." (46) The optimist tries to answer by offering a slightly different account of moral responsibility and freedom, according to which the truth of determinism is compatible with that kind of responsibility and freedom. One way to do that is to develop a picture of moral responsibility as grounded in the regulation of social behavior; to which the pessimist replies: "But the only reason you [the optimist] have given for the practices of moral condemnation and punishment in cases where this freedom (emphasis mine) is present is the efficacy of these practices in regulating behaviour in socially desirable ways. But this is not a sufficient basis, it is not even the right sort of basis, for these practices as we understand them." (47-48) This, then, would seem to be the lacuna in the optimists position. The pessimist is committed to a more robust picture of freedom and moral responsibility that seems to be absent from the optimist's account.
[3] In order to make things clearer, Strawson steers the discussion away from considerations of "punishing and moral condemnation and approval" which are fairly abstract. Instead, he engages with "the non-detached attitudes and reactions of people directly involved in transactions with each other; of the attitudes and reactions of offended parties and beneficiaries: of such things as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, love, and hurt feelings." (48) His hope is that resolving the debate in this context will shed light on how to resolve it in the more abstract context.
Though benefits and injuries are generally ascribed to individuals--in view of their responsibility for action--quite apart from the reactive attitudes, Strawson also wants to take seriously the ways in which these attitudes are, themselves, forms of benefit and injury. "We should consider also in how much of our behaviour the benefit or injury resides mainly or entirely in the manifestation of attitude itself." (49) This is in response to a concern of Strawson's "to keep before our minds something it is easy to forget when we are engaged in philosophy, especially in our cool, contemporary style, viz. what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary inter-personal relationships, ranging from the most intimate to the most casual." (50) This is a valid concern, so stated, but I am concerned that it is not appropriate in this situation. Or I am concerned that focusing unduly on these sorts of non-detached cases may not clarify but rather confuse the issues when thinking about the compatibility of moral responsibility with determinism. We shall see how that move on Strawson's part plays into his analysis and ultimate conclusion.
[4] Having turned to focus on our reactive attitudes, Strawson then asks about the conditions that are appropriate for modifying or mollifying these attitudes. According to the pessimist, the truth of the doctrine of determinism would entail that in situations where we might normally think that it is appropriate to feel gratitude or resentment or another reactive attitude, in fact, it would not be appropriate to do so. Before evaluating that claim, Strawson asks about the situations and circumstances under which we normally think it appropriate to suspend those attitudes. He divides the circumstances into two groups.
In the first group are circumstances that we take to warrant the suspension of responsibility for that particular event but not the total suspension of responsibility for that agent. "To the first group belong all those which might give occasion for the employment of such expressions as "He didn't mean to", "He hadn't realized", "He didn't know"; and also all those which might give occasion for the use of the phrase "He couldn't help it", when this is supported by such phrases as "He was pushed", "He had to do it", "It was the only way", "They left him no alternative", etc." (50)
In the second group are circumstances that we do take to warrant the total suspension of responsibility for that agent. Such cases as " "He's only a child", "He's a hopeless schizophrenic", "His mind has been systematically perverted", "That's purely compulsive behaviour on his part". Such pleas as these do… invite us to suspend our ordinary reactive attitudes toward the agent, either at the time of his action or all the time." (51) Whereas our interactions with ordinary people generally involve a variety of reactive attitudes, in the presence of psychological or moral abnormalities, we are disinclined to engage in the same way as we normally do but tend to adopt a more "objective" stance toward that individual. This "objective" attitude may be adopted with respect to other normal agents—we may (for a time) dispassionately appraise the actions of a person who is hurting us, for instance; but we generally cannot keep that up for long (especially if the hurt is very strong or immediate).
The question then becomes, would the discovery of the truth of determinism qualify as a legitimate (rational) reason to abandon our normal reactive attitudes and traditional ways of interacting with people. "What effect would, or should, the acceptance of the truth of a general thesis of determinism have upon these reactive attitudes? More specifically, would, or should, the acceptance of the truth of the thesis lead to the decay or the repudiation of all such attitudes?" (53) At this point, Strawson's arguments become very strange indeed.
The most significant argument involves the case of individuals with abnormal psychological or moral conditions. It is possible to conceive of an individual who has been incapacitated with respect to commonplace moral sensitivies. "He is thus incapacitated, perhaps, by the fact that his picture of reality is pure fantasy, that he does not, in a sense, live in the real world at all; or by the fact that his behaviour is, in part, an unrealistic acting out of unconscious purposes; or by the fact that he is an idiot, or a moral idiot. But there is something else which, because this is true, is equally certainly not true. And that is that there is a sense of "determined" such that (1) if determinism is true, all behaviour is determined in this sense, and (2) determinism might be true, i.e., it is not inconsistent with the facts as we know them to suppose that all behaviour might be determined in this sense, and (3) our adoption of the objective attitude towards the abnormal is the result of prior embracing of the belief that the behaviour, or the relevant stretch of behaviour, of the human being in question is determined in this sense. Neither in the case of the normal, then, nor in the case of the abnormal is it true that, when we adopt an objective attitude, we do so because we hold such a belief." (55) Basically, the argument is that since we understand certain circumstances to differentiate between the normal and abnormal case, it is not appropriate to claim that all cases are "abnormal" on the grounds of determinism. Strawson restates the basic point as follows: "when we do in fact adopt [an objective] attitude in a particular case, our doing os is not the consequence of a theoretical conviction which might be expressed as "Determinism in this case", but is a consequence of our abandoning, for different reasons in different cases, the ordinary inter-personal attitudes." (55) And this seems right, but doesn't go as far as Strawson seems to want to take it.
Just because determinism does not play a role in our normal reasoning about when it is appropriate to adopt the objective attitude does not rule out the possibility that it might serve as a reason. Strawson might still argue that if determinism were true then since every case would be "abnormal" it would not be possible to distinguish a set of, perhaps, "doubly-abnormal" (my locution) cases. But that doesn't seem right. Considerations of psychopathy or moral idiocy yield different reasons from those that follow from the truth of determinism.
Strawson offers another argument to the effect that while the idea of a world devoid of reactive attitudes is not "absolutely inconceivable", it is "practically inconceivable"; but that argument seems mistaken as well, as is his earlier claim that "it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition." (54) By no means is it inconceivable that abnormality would be the universal condition. Imagine that the entire human population is infected with a disease that causes every person to die at the age of forty. That is an "abnormal" condition given the natural human condition; but nothing precludes our ability to envision it being the universal condition. What about the case of suspending reactive attitudes? Imagine that the entire human population is infected with a disease that produces certain psychopathic tendencies or other moral-sensitivity-inhibiting condition in its subjects. In fact, conceivability does become a problem when we try to envision what it would be like to have that disease and be in an actually-morally-impaired state, but that is as much a problem for the psychopathy case as it is for the determinist case. The point is that it is not inconceivable that a set of circumstances should obtain wherein a condition that compromises the appropriateness of reactive attitudes becomes ubiquitous.
Finally, there seems to be one key gaping hole in Strawson's analysis. He is willing to accept psychological abnormalities as candidates for suspending reactive attitudes but not determinism. But the pessimist will argue that what is salient about the psychological cases is the compromise of a certain kind of control—a compromise that is also manifest in the determinism scenario. Strawson does not offer an alternative account as to why cases of psychological abnormality legitimately call for the suspension of reactive attitudes. Such an analysis seems indispensable if he is to make a convincing argument that the truth of determinism does not call for the same. [Apparently Jay Wallace offers just such an analysis.]
Strawson's argument on the basis of human enrichment or impoverishment strikes as curious. Certainly, as we are now, it would seem that abandoning reactive attitudes would result in a very poor quality of life, but that is not necessarily the case. One can imagine a spiritist saying the same thing about the advancement of empirical science—that a world in which everything is accounted for in terms of the movement of molecules and atoms is one that is impoverished when compared to a world alive with the supernatural; but such an argument has not stood in the way of science. The natural intuition that drives the advancement of science is something along the lines of this: the best life is one that is best aligned with reality. It seems odd to say that, if determinism is true, we ought to ignore the natural consequences of that discovery. Sure, embracing determinism might eliminate many of the "goods" in the world; but it would also eliminate many of the "evils"; moreover, we may discover that a Stoic ideal is actually far superior to the chaos of emotion in which we live now. [I don't actually agree with the position I am advancing here, but it seems a plausible counter-position to that proposed by Strawson and, thus, should be considered.]
[5] Strawson next sets about expanding his picture of the reactive attitudes to those that reflect our understanding, not only of others obligations to us, but also of others obligations to others and of our obligation to others. Similar problems to those found in the paradigm case also emerge in these cases, in Strawson's view, when we ask whether they might be suspended based on some discovery of the truth of determinism. Here he is even stronger than before: "First, we must note, as before, that when the suspension of [a reactive] attitude or such attitudes occurs in a particular case, it is never the consequence of the belief that the piece of behaviour in question was determined in a sense such that all behaviour might be, and, if determinism is true, all behaviour is, determined in that sense. [This seems an untroubling observation; one might still argue that determinism offers a reason to suspend reactive attitudes.] For it is not a consequence of any general thesis of determinism which might be true that nobody knows what he's doing or that everybody's behaviour is unintelligible in terms of conscious purposes or that everybody lives in a world of deluson or that nobody has a moral sense, i.e. is susceptible of self-reactive attitudes, etc. [All of this is quite true (except, perhaps, for the part about self-reactive attitudes), and also quite irrelevant to the question of whether determinism actually would compromise moral responsibility.] In fact no such sense of "determined" as would be required for a general thesis of determinism is ever relevant to our actual suspensions of moral reactive attitudes. [This is also true, but we're not talking about past "actual" suspensions of moral reactive attitudes.]" (59-60)
Again, Strawson acknowledges that there are contexts in which it is appropriate to adopt an objective attitude toward agents. But this is not the norm. It either emerges in cases of the intractably abnormal or with individuals who are, by degrees, being brought into a state of full responsibility. So he uses the example of child-rearing. He says, "The punishment of a child is both like and unlike the punishment of an adult." (61) Inasmuch as the child is not a full responsible agent, punishment serves the role of regulating his or her behaviour; but it also serves the purpose of bringing that child into full standing as a responsible agent. Strawson balks at a picture of child-development as moving from a state of determination to one of non-determination. But there is a part of me that balks at the idea of child-development as moving from a state of non-responsibility to one of responsibility. Is that the most accurate picture? This raises, I think, a point that I made in my treatment of "Two Faces of Responsibility" about the problem of construing responsibility principally in terms of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of sanctions. Better to let a child remain in a state where they are not the appropriate object of censure, punishment, and retributive attitudes. Maybe? Or maybe the picture of responsibility is fundamentally flawed.
[6] The result of our analysis is to bring us back to consider that lacuna in the optimist's argument—the inadequate view of responsibility that the pessimist finds unacceptable. Indeed, what seems to be so objectionable about that picture of responsibility is that it amounts only to responsibility in that objective sense that falls so far short of our robust experience of responsibility in the context of social interactions and reactive attitudes. But Strawson concludes that both the optimist and the pessimist have erred in their construals of moral responsibility. "Both seek, in different ways, to overintellectualize the facts. … The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society." (64) The implication is that those attitudes cannot be suspended on merely theoretical grounds and that attempts to do so or debates along those lines fail, fundamentally, to understand the close relationship between those attitudes and human society.
Strawson concludes from this that moral responsibility is the sort of thing that is totally indifferent to the truth or falsity of determinism. In some respects, he acknowledges, his view is closer to the optimists, but he altogether repudiates the construal of responsibility, in terms of the regulation of behaviour in a social context, that arises from that perspective. Yet, I cannot help feeling that his view may be closer to the optimists than he is willing to admit. The last pages of this essay are a pseudo-critique of traditional metaphysics and theoretical science/philosophy. I suspect that Strawson's analysis would have benefited from a little bit more of both.
--
God is in this place,
And that reality, seen and understood by the grace of God in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit, makes all the difference in the world.
posted by Metaphysician_delta | 4:13 PM
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