This volume collects most of the author's publications on human action since the 1970s. The essays collected here are concerned to answer the questions ‘What makes us agents?’ and ‘What makes us responsible to one another for how we live our lives?’ The author develops a unified account of human agency and responsibility in terms of our capacity for critical evaluation, or normative competence. We are agents because we have (and to the extent that we exercise) this capacity, and we are responsible to each other for our lives as reflections of our exercise of this capacity. The account is developed in these essays largely by considering possible sources of normative incapacity, such as compulsion, addiction, manipulation, childhood deprivation, and one's own desires. Many of these essays engage critically with contemporary accounts of free will, action, and moral responsibility.
form of compatibilism" An action or attitude manifests a virtue or vice "Judgments indicate what reactive attitudes are reactions to, but they are not themselves reactions." (pg. 226
Strawson attempts to defuse the debate about determinism, understanding our moral practices, in which we demand good will and respect from one another, as constitutive of the conditions for moral responsibility. Scepticism about responsibility would call into question this fundamental form of human concern. Holding one another responsible does not derive from metaphysical commitments but simply expresses our natural concerns as moral beings. Strawson shows that our blaming or reactive attitudes, which express these demands, can be explained in these terms. However, his appealing view fails to explain clearly why we exempt certain individuals who are capable of hostile and disrespectful attitudes towards others. This leaves Strawson's expressivism vulnerable to the libertarian challenge that what exempts these individuals is their incapacity to do otherwise. This chapter suggests strategies for a Strawsonian theory of exemption.
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