Essay on Strawson’s Freedom and Resentment

Strawson claims that even were determinism known to be true, it would not affect our moral psychology. Why does he think that objecting that this does not rationally justify our moral practices misses the point, and is he right?

In P.F. Strawson’s essay Freedom and Resentment, he argues that the truth or falsity of the determinist thesis would have no effect on our moral psychology and therefore the common worry that determinism undermines ordinary moral concepts and practices is unwarranted (Strawson, 2003). In addressing the objection that this still does not justify our moral concepts and practices, he says that this misses the point since our moral concepts and practices are intrinsic to our psychology, which is unaffected by determinism. This essay will attempt to argue that Strawson fails to address key issues about his moral psychology which could strengthen the stance of the objector, and that his dismissal of the objection is therefore not fully qualified. The structure of the essay will be as follows: the first section will explain the ‘pessimist’ worry over the determinist thesis, as framed by Strawson, and his attempt to reconcile it to the ‘optimist’ view; the second will explain the objection to Strawson’s argument and his reply; and the third section will criticise Strawson’s approach to the problem.

In the opening paragraph of his essay, Strawson characterises a few possible perspectives on the question of determinism and morality. He assigns the label ‘pessimist’ to a person who believes that determinism threatens ordinary moral concepts and practices, and the label ‘optimist’ to a person who does not. The pessimist’s claim is that the determinist thesis implies that humans lack freedom and therefore those moral concepts and practices which are assumed to be justified by human freedom are rendered unjust by the truth of determinism – for example, it is normally assumed that it is only just to punish a person for a moral transgression if they were not forced to transgress by previous events, so determinism, which assumes that all human actions are determined by prior events, would make all punishment unjust on this assumption.

An optimist argues that determinism does not undermine punishment or any other moral practices, and Strawson attempts to reconcile pessimists to this view by arguing that our moral concepts and practices are not dependent on the truth or falsity of determinism, but on what he calls reactive attitudes and their vicarious analogues. Reactive attitudes, such as resentment or gratitude, are our commonplace subjective responses to the way people act on us. For example, if someone injures us, we will resent them if we feel they did so because of a malevolent attitude towards us, but we won’t resent them if this attitude is not perceived, such as when an injury is caused by accident. In either case, the agent is held responsible for the injury, but whether or not we will feel a negative attitude towards them depends on their own exhibition of such an attitude: we will only resent them if we feel they injured us out of spite or indifference and not by accident. The vicarious analogues of these reactive attitudes are such feelings as indignance, which are felt on behalf of another in light of the perception of malevolent or benevolent attitudes in people who act on them. It is normal for

someone to feel indignance on behalf of victims of a crime, for example, even if they are uninvolved themselves.

Strawson argues that our ordinary moral practices of praise and condemnation, reward and punishment are dependent on the reactive attitudes that agents exhibit. Likewise, the suspension of ordinary practices – not resenting an agent for an injury they cause, for example – does not happen when the responsibility or freedom of the agent is compromised, but when they do not exhibit the appropriate attitudes or when normal personal interaction with them is impossible. Hence determinism, since it would not compromise our reactive attitudes, does not compromise ordinary moral practices.

An objection to this argument is that, although our moral practices may be an unavoidable part of our nature, they are still not rationally justified. Strawson’s reply is that anyone who raises this objection has “wholly failed to grasp the import of the preceding answer” (Strawson, 2003). It is no use to ask if we should continue our moral practices and concepts when we are incapable of doing otherwise. Even if we were able to abandon them, he argues, whether we would do so or not would not depend on the truth or falsity of determinism, but on the presence or absence of reactive attitudes in humans – since their presence is indisputable, we would not abandon our moral concepts and practices.

A possible criticism of Strawson’s reconciliatory approach is that he makes too simplistic a link between our natural reactive attitudes and our ordinary moral practices. He draws a line beneath the personal interactions of agents and reduces all questions of objective moral standards (such as how we ought to treat moral transgressors) to questions of individual attitudes. At the beginning of section 3 in his essay, he expresses that he is “not much concerned” with “the general causes of these reactive attitudes I have alluded to” (Strawson, 2003). In dismissing questions about the causes of our moral psychology, he avoids entering into a dispute of what might be called moral sociology, in which it could well be argued that our personal subjective attitudes are caused or at least modified by our objective moral standards and practices. In this kind of moral ‘structuralist’ model, the way we react to agents at an interpersonal or vicarious level would depend partly or wholly on objective standards – such as the assumption that an agent who is not free ought not to be resented for injuries they cause.

If it could be shown that the relation between reactive attitudes and objective moral standards is not as one-sided as Strawson portrays, then determinism could indeed have a bearing on the way we react to moral agents and hence could affect the way we conduct our moral practices. Liberty of indifference – the ability to act in more than one way in a particular situation – is an important criterion for deciding whether or not to reward or punish an agent in the normal moral setting. If it were known that determinism was true, and an agent is determined to act in a particular way in any given circumstance, this might cause us to regard all agents in a different light, and in fact make us react differently to their moral actions.

In support of a structuralist account of morality, the psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg argued that that majority of adults develop into a ‘conventional’ level of moral reasoning that is almost exclusively defined by the conventions of their society. In this conventional stage of moral development, “there is much conformity to what is majority or ‘natural’ behaviour” (Kohlberg, 1973). From this point of view an individual does not gauge their responses to other moral agents

purely by their perception of malevolent or benevolent attitudes in them, but with recourse to the prevailing moral structures that have been established by society as a whole. Since reactions to particular kinds of transgressions vary between cultures, this seems at least plausible; if our reactions were entirely natural, one might expect them to be the same with all people.

Does the objection, then, miss the point? If our moral concepts and practices are alterable, and are specifically jeopardised by the determinist thesis, then they still require rational justification. It is pointed out several times in Strawson’s essay that the efficacy of our practices in standardising and regulating behaviour is not enough in itself to justify them. The important question is whether or not our circumstantial methods of regulating behaviour are effective at producing a kind of behaviour which is rationally justified as being ethical; to answer this question involves a different kind of discussion altogether. Strawson’s essay simply engages in a rather more academic dispute over whether or not the determinist thesis affects our ability to normalise behaviour with objective standards (which is possibly why this field “is less crowded with disputants”1), and his answer is that it does not. One might even argue that determinism must be true in order to make the regulation of behaviour a more realistic endeavour: free agents are decidedly less predictable and controllable than determined ones. In any case, whether or not our moral concepts and practices are rationally justified will only be resolved by a deeper ethical discussion.

In conclusion, Strawson is wrong to dismiss the objection that our moral concepts and practices still need to be rationally justified. It is not immediately clear that the interplay between reactive attitudes and objective moral standards is as simple as he implies, and the determinist thesis may in fact threaten those standards and attitudes. By insisting that our reactive attitudes towards moral agents are intrinsic to our nature, Strawson evades more difficult questions, and claims that our moral concepts and practices are in some sense immutable and therefore in no need of rational justification. In truth, his attempt at reconciliation fails to address the real issue of how the determinist thesis affects the outcome more fundamental disputes in normative ethics.

Works CitedKohlberg, L. (1973). The Claim to Moral Adequacy of a Highest Stage of Moral Judgment. The Journal of Philosophy , 70 (18), 630-646.

Strawson, P. F. (2003). Freedom and Resentment. In S. Guttenplan, J. Hornsby, & C. Janaway, Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners (pp. 193-209). Oxford: Blackwell.

1 See opening paragraph of Section III, Freedom and Resentment (Strawson, 2003)