Where Love and Resentment Meet: Strawson's Intrapersonal Defense of Compatibilism

Abstract

In his seminal essay “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson drew attention to the role of such emotions as resentment, moral indignation, and guilt in our moral and personal lives. According to Strawson, these reactive attitudes are at once constitutive of moral blame and inseparable from ordinary interpersonal relationships. On this basis, he concluded that relinquishing moral blame isn't a real possibility for us, given our commitment to personal relationships. If well founded, this conclusion puts the traditional free-will debate in a new light. In particular, insofar as incompatibilists believe that we can or should forgo moral blame if determinism is true, their stance may seem out of touch with our emotional reality. This essay examines Strawson's claim that the reactive attitudes are inseparable from ordinary interpersonal relationships. Strawson says surprisingly little to support this intriguing claim, and thus far no argument for it has emerged in the literature. This essay's aim is to remedy this. Specifically, it sets out an argument for a suitably formulated version of the inseparability claim, an argument that appeals to the relationship between the reactive attitudes and other elements of our emotional lives. It then shows how this argument helps to answer an important recent challenge to Strawson's position. If this essay is right, there is good reason to doubt that the reforms envisaged by some incompatibilists, reforms to our blame-related practices, are a real possibility for us.

Retributivism, Justification and Credence: The Epistemic Argument Revisited

“…For the purposes of this paper, I completely ignore everyday, interpersonal blame. For all I say, blaming each other for wrongful behavior might be an inescapable part of ordinary, human relationships [8,9]. Within the confines of this paper, I take no stand on this issue at all.…”

“…However, even if this attitude can be warranted in some situations (I leave this open, for the purposes of this paper), it would be absurd to take this attitude towards my intuitions and judgments that rely on them; to simply assume that whereas my intuitions offer true insight, your intuitions do not. 8,9 When Vilhauer writes that compatibilists and libertarians should acknowledge that skeptics bring reasonable doubts to the debate, he essentially says that we should take peer disagreement into account. He writes that this is conditional, though, on us finding the debate truth conducive, and when elaborating on what this means, talks about arguments and theories improving over time in response to one' s opponent s' objections.…”

Reactive attitudes and personal relationships

“…Shabo’s Strawsonian argument that abandoning the reactive attitudes precludes the formation and maintenance of personal relationships can be understood in the following way (2012a, 140; 2012b, 111–113).…”

“…Non-blaming disappointment and frustration are no less backward-looking than resentment. When we take an action personally, we care about the attitude that the action betrays and its ‘meaning’ given our relationship in addition to the inconvenience or hurt it may cause (2012b, 112). I believe that the father described above can take a non-reactive stance toward his daughter, but also take personally the hurtful things she says.…”

The Basic Argument and Modest Moral Responsibility

“… Seth Shabo () makes a related claim about the connection between taking others' actions personally in a way that is required for love and taking their actions personally in a way that makes resentment a fitting response to disregard. For Shabo, however, the connection in question is apparently psychological.…”