PP 470Y

P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” marked an intriguing turning point in debates about free will and moral responsibility. Strawson sought to divorce the nature of and ground for responsibility from metaphysical concerns about free will by analyzing the former in terms of our susceptibility to reactive attitudes such as resentment and indignation. Notoriously, Strawson claimed that when responsibility is understood in this way the truth or falsity of determinism is irrelevant to the legitimacy of our practices of holding one another morally responsible. In his view, it is simply not possible for us to abandon the reactive attitudes due to theoretical convictions about determinism because these attitudes constitute our uniquely human way of life (what he sometimes calls “the participant attitude”); to give them up would amount to exiting our personal relationships and embracing “the objective attitude.” Our central goal in this course is to explore the nature of the reactive attitudes and how they contribute to our personal engagement with one another so that we can better evaluate Strawson’s broader compatibilist strategy. Our discussion will involve several strands of Strawson scholarship and work in the philosophy of emotion and will focus on the following questions: What are the reactive attitudes? How might the reactive attitudes constitute or reinforce the participant attitude? What roles might love, caring, and vulnerability play in the reactive attitudes? Is Strawson correct that we cannot embrace the objective attitude universally?