Moral Responsibility: The Difference of Strawson, and the Difference it Should Make

Abstract

P.F. Strawson's work on moral responsibility is well-known. However, an important implication of the landmark "Freedom and Resentment" has gone unnoticed. Specifically, a natural development of Strawson's position is that we should understand being morally responsible as having externalistically construed pragmatic criteria, not individualistically construed psychological ones. This runs counter to the contemporary ways of studying moral responsibility. I show the deficiencies of such contemporary work in relation to Strawson by critically examining the positions of John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza, R. Jay Wallace, and Philip Pettit for problems due to individualistic assumptions.What I call the individualist assumption in the philosophy of psychology is the assumption that whatever we find it significant to name -whatever patterns of feeling and behavior we find salient enough to use in explanations of ourselves and othersmust also pick out complex events, states, or processes with respect to some theory of the functioning of individual organisms (for example, neurophysiology) (Scheman, 1996).

P. F. Strawson was neither an externalist nor an internalist about moral responsibility

“…A version of this argument was first made by Sneddon (2005, p. 245) and has been approvingly cited by Ciurria, who stresses that ‘causal explanations [are] ipso facto … external to the participant perspective’ (Ciurria, 2014a, p. 551; see also Ciurria, 2014b, p. 273).…”

“…Third, this should not lead us to think that non‐ordinary, scientific causal explanations must be explanations in terms of strict law. While it is clear that, according to Sneddon and Ciurria, explanations in terms of inner psychological mechanisms are causal explanations belonging to scientific psychology and not to ordinary discourse (Sneddon, 2005, p. 246; Ciurria, 2014b, p. 273), the exact nature of causal explanations in scientific psychology can be left open. Sneddon and Ciurria do not specify whether they are thinking of explanations in terms of strict laws, or ceteris paribus laws, or even whether the causal explanations they have in mind appeal to laws at all, and there is a lot of controversy about the kind and scope of causal explanations in the special sciences (for a good overview, see Kincaid, 2009).…”

Social Constraints On Moral Address

“…(Wolf 1990, 3, emphasis added) 14 See Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil" (1987) for more discussion of Strawson's distinction. 15 Andrew Sneddon (2005) has argued, also via Strawson, that moral responsibility should be understood as an "externalistically construed" social competence rather than an "individualistically construed" one. I take his view to be consistent with mine, though ultimately aimed at answering a slightly different question.…”

“… Andrew Sneddon () has argued, also via Strawson, that moral responsibility should be understood as an “externalistically construed” social competence rather than an “individualistically construed” one. I take his view to be consistent with mine, though ultimately aimed at answering a slightly different question.…”

On being and holding responsible

“…That essay has sparked various novel and interesting reflections on a range of related topics (see, for instance Russell 1995;Fischer and Ravizza 1998;Vargas 2004;Sneddon 2005). At one level of abstraction, Strawson's essay suggests that we should think of what it is to be morally responsible for an action in terms of what it is to hold someone responsible for that action.…”