Freedom and Resentment

P.F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, (London: Methuan, 1974).

Participatory vs. Objective Attitudes: not entirely mutually exclusive (e.g. attitude taken in child-rearing may straddle the two); participatory attitude involves responding to self and others with reactive attitudes; objective attitude may be “emotionally toned,” but cannot include the attitudes “which belong to involvement of participation with others in inter-personal human relationships.”

Reactive Attitudes, categories and paradigmatic examples:
• (Other)-reactive
o Personal
> Resentment
o Impersonal
> Indignation
• Self-reactive
>Sense of obligation
>Guilt

Two kinds of consideration that mollify/modify reactive attitudes:
• Considerations that invite us to view the injury as something the attitude should apply to, or as something for which the agent was not (fully) responsible
o E.g. “She didn’t mean to;” or “She couldn’t help it”
• Considerations that invite us to view the agent as someone reactive attitudes in general should apply to, or as someone who is not (fully) responsible for her behavior
o E.g. “She’s only a child;” or “She’s schizophrenic”

Why determinism wouldn’t undermine reactive attitudes:
1. It’s not (psychologically/humanly) possible for us to adopt “a thoroughgoing objectivity of attitude to others as the result of a theoretical conviction of the truth of determinism”
2. If it were possible for us to make such a “god-like choice, the rationality of making it or refusing it would be determined” by the “gains and losses to human life” that would result from the choice,” and “the truth or falsity of a general thesis of determinism would not bear on the rationality of this choice.”

A diagnosis of the free will debate: Optimists/Compatibilists and Pessimists/Incompatibilists both “misconstrue the facts in very different styles,” or “over-intellectualize:”
• Optimists try to justify moral practices (punishment, praise & blame) in purely pragmatic/consequentialist terms, and thereby lose sight of the “human attitudes of which these parctices are, in part, the expression”
• Pessimists insist that these practices are justified only if a metaphysical thesis is true
• But in fact:

“Inside the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings of which I have been speaking, there is endless room for modification, redirection, criticism, and justification. But questions of justification are internal to the structure or relate to modifications internal to it.”

Tags: freewill, agency, reactive attitudes, emotions