Draft of 12-28-15

PHIL 138: Responsibility UCSD; Winter 2016 Professor David O. Brink Handout #1: Strawson, Responsibility, and the Reactive Attitudes

1. STRAWSON AND THE REACTIVE ATTITUDES P.F. Strawson’s "Freedom and Resentment" (1962) is a touchstone for many contemporary writers on responsibility, especially those who want to explore connections between responsibility and our reactive attitudes and emotions, such as guilt, shame, and resentment. Strawson begins by introducing two opposing views about the relation between determinism and responsibility: pessimism and optimism (59).1 Pessimism is an incompatibilist claim, because it sees the truth of determinism as inconsistent with the ascription of responsibility. Notice that pessimism needn't be pessimistic or skeptical about responsibility if it rejects determinism and embraces libertarianism. Optimists, by contrast, are compatibilists, because they claim that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. Notice that optimism, in this sense, could come in many flavors, corresponding to different ways of making out the compatibilist claim. But Strawson also focuses on a narrower optimist claim, one that reconciles determinism with responsibility by focusing on an instrumental justification of practices of praise and blame. On this view, praise and blame and punishment are justified in a forward-looking way by the way these reactions minimize future harm by the wrongdoer, deter wrongdoing by others, and shape the attitudes of wrongdoers and others so as to produce better behavioral outcomes in the future (60- 61). Strawson is famously critical of this instrumentalist variety of optimism. His claim is that the instrumentalist appeals to the wrong sort of reason for praise and blame (61-62). Indeed, one might think that the instrumentalist is really an incompatibilist who is skeptical about responsibility but nonetheless thinks that our practices of praise and blame might be useful fictions. If so, we might doubt whether instrumentalism is best conceived as a form of optimism. One question is whether forward-looking rationales, as such, are the wrong sort of reason, or whether the problem is with a specifically instrumental rationale. This issue may affect our assessment of Strawson’s own account of whether and, if so, how the reactive attitudes can be justified (see §5 below).

2. THE TRADITIONAL DEBATE Strawson apparently wants to defend a non-instrumental conception of optimism and do so in a way that bypasses traditional debates about freedom of the will and determinism. However, to appreciate this claim, we need to understand that traditional debate. Often, that debate is framed in terms of the compatibility of freedom of the will and the truth of causal determinism -- the thesis that every event is determined or necessitated by the laws of nature and the prior history of the world. Compatibilists, sometimes called soft determinists, insist that freedom is compatible with the truth of causal determinism, whereas incompatibilists insist that the two are not compatible. That means that incompatibilists who are also determinists are hard determinists, embracing skepticism about free will. However, some incompatibilists are libertarians, rejecting determinism and embracing indeterminism. But whereas some regard libertarianism as one form of realism about free will, others think that indeterminism cannot ground responsibility, because we cannot be responsible for uncaused choices, and so regard libertarianism as a different kind of skepticism about freedom. We can represent some of these possibilities diagrammatically.

1 Page numbers are indexed to the reprinting in Free Will, ed. G. Watson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 2

Freedom of the Will/Responsibility

Compatibilism Incompatibilism (Soft Determinism; Compatibilist Realism)

Libertarianism FW/R Skepticism (Hard Determinism)

Libertarian Realism Libertarian Skepticism

Many parties to the traditional debates associate freedom of the will and responsibility; they either identify the two or understand freedom of the will as whatever quality of the will is needed for responsibility. So many compatibilists believe that both freedom and responsibility are compatible with determinism, and many free will skeptics are also skeptics about responsibility. However, some writers distinguish between freedom and responsibility. Perhaps the most famous such position is that of Harry Frankfurt in “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” (1969), where he combines skepticism about freedom and realism about responsibility.2 Frankfurt describes a case in which someone seems to be responsible despite lacking the freedom to do otherwise. In the standard such case, the agent is inclined to act in a certain way for certain reasons and does, but there is a failsafe or backup device in the form of a counterfactual intervener of some sort that would intervene in the agent’s life to ensure that she acts in that way and for those reasons if she didn’t do it of her own accord. For instance, Jack is the counterfactual intervener in Sam’s plan to kill the mayor (29). The classic Frankfurt-style case then is when Sam decides to kill the mayor and proceeds to do so of his own accord, without any intervention by Jack. In this case, Sam seems to lack alternate possibilities, because there’s no alternative in which Sam doesn’t kill the mayor. But Frankfurt insists plausibly that we judge Sam responsible for the killing in the actual scenario in which he acts of his own accord with no intervention from Jack. Such cases seem to show that there can be moral responsibility in the absence of alternate possibilities and freedom of the will. Frankfurt is responding to something like this argument for incompatibilism.

1. Moral responsibility requires freedom of the will. 2. Freedom of the will presupposes the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP) that says that a free agent must have been able to act otherwise than she in fact did. 3. Causal determinism is inconsistent with PAP. 4. Hence, causal determinism is incompatible with moral responsibility.

Frankfurt-style cases supposedly give us reason to reject (1) and so avoid the incompatibilist conclusion.

2 Harry Frankfurt, “Alternative Possibilities and Moral Responsibility” Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 829- 39. 3

1. In Frankfurt-style cases, the agent is responsible when she chooses to act, despite the fact that the existence of the counterfactual intervener means that she could not have acted otherwise. 2. Freedom of the will presupposes PAP. 3. Causal determinism is inconsistent with PAP. 4. Hence, responsibility does not require freedom of the will.

Where does Strawson fit into these traditional debates? On one reading, Strawson is just a certain kind of compatibilist (soft determinist), who eschews both instrumentalism and compatibilist metaphysics. However, on another reading, we might see Strawson as agreeing with Frankfurt in general terms that responsibility does not require any metaphysical claims about freedom of the will, because responsibility and freedom are distinct concepts.

3. THE REACTIVE ATTITUDES Strawson's sympathies lie with optimism (compatibilism), broadly construed. But since he sides with the pessimist against the instrumental optimist, he must find another way forward. His proposal is to focus on the reactive attitudes and the way they mediate interpersonal relationships. The reactive attitudes are or involve emotional responses typically directed to someone in the context of something that person has done. We tend to focus on reactive attitudes directed toward another, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason they couldn’t be self-directed. Reactive attitudes include malice, contempt, love, pride, gratitude, anger, resentment, indignation, and forgiveness (62-63, 66). These seem to be examples of a larger and potentially heterogeneous class, rather than an exhaustive list (64). Not all reactive attitudes have a direct connection with praise and blame and responsibility. Consider regret. Bernard Williams describes the case of a truck driver who, through no fault of his own, hits and kills a child who has darted into the street.3 As Williams claims, it is appropriate for the driver to feel a kind of agent-regret at being the instrument of the child’s death, which is distinct both from the regret or horror that bystanders might feel and from guilt for having been responsible for wrongdoing. Agent-regret seems to be a reactive attitude that does not presuppose responsibility. To understand responsibility, we should focus on a subset of reactive attitudes that are moralized and involve praise and blame.4 Consider the difference between anger and resentment. I may be upset or even angry with a small child who carelessly damages a treasured keepsake, but it would be inappropriate to resent him or to be indignant at him. Resentment may involve anger or related emotions but it also seems to involve or presuppose the belief that one has been treated wrongly. But this moral belief would be an inappropriate thought as applied to a small child. The proposal to see what light the reactive attitudes shed on the optimism/pessimism debate makes most sense if we focus on this narrower class of reactive attitudes that are moralized. We might also distinguish within the class of moralized reactive attitudes between those that are thick and those that are thin. Thick reactive attitudes, such as gratitude or pride, are ones that are tightly tied to particular contexts and relationships and have fairly determinate descriptive content. By contrast, thin reactive attitudes are more invariant with respect to contexts and relationships and apply to very different kinds of behaviors. Condemnation is comparatively thin. We might think that praise, blame, and punishment are themselves thin reactive attitudes (Strawson discusses condemnation and punishment at 78). This distinction is one of degree, but

3 Bernard Williams, “Moral Luck” reprinted in Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 28. 4 Cf. R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), ch. 2. 4

Strawson’s link between the reactive attitudes and responsibility seems to apply to both thick and thin attitudes.5 Strawson distinguishes three kinds of issues about the reactive attitudes: (1) what causes them, (2) the conditions under which they are appropriate and inappropriate, and (3) what is or would be involved in suspending them (64). As he says, he is interested primarily in (2) and (3).

4. THE REACTIVE ATTITUDES, EXCUSE AND EXEMPTION, AND DETERMINISM Strawson asks us to distinguish two different kinds of cases in which we might suspend the reactive attitudes -- cases in which the agent is normal but nonetheless acted wrongly due to inadvertence or compulsion and cases in which the agent is abnormal quite generally, say, because she is immature or insane (64-66). Strawson suggests that in this second kind of case we not only suspend the reactive attitudes but also adopt an objective attitude toward her. The objective attitude, it seems, can include the sort of forward-looking attitudes and strategies of the instrumentalist, though it's unclear if the objective attitude reduces to an instrumental one. One might identify the first sort of case as involving excuse and the second sort of case as involving exemption. These are not Strawson's labels. But others, including Gary Watson, have suggested this way of understanding the contrast.6 I would make few observations about this contrast. First, we should be careful about assuming that exemptions are not excuses. Strawson includes insanity among the exemptions, but the criminal law treats insanity as an excuse. As we will discuss at greater length below, the criminal law censures and sanctions wrongdoing for which the agent is culpable or responsible. These institutionalized responses to culpable wrongdoing are themselves reactive attitudes, but presumably they also influence our more informal interpersonal attitudes. So appealing to criminal law practices of blame and punishment can be instructive. Blame and punishment are treated as fitting responses to wrongdoing for which the agent is culpable or responsible. There are two main sorts of defense that an agent might invoke in response to potential blame and punishment. Justifications deny wrongdoing, whereas excuses deny culpability or responsibility. But that means that excuse and responsibility are inversely related.

• An agent is responsible for wrongdoing iff she is not excused for it.

Call this the Responsibility-Excuse Biconditional. According to this biconditional, an agent is responsible for that for which she has no excuse, and she is excused for conduct for which she is not responsible. But, on this way of thinking, all failures of responsibility are excuses. So exemptions, if they are systematic failures of responsibility, must also be excuses. So there is some reason not to assume that exemptions cannot be excuses. Second, Strawson’s examples are not exhaustive of the possibilities. Strawson's partition is into cases in which the reactive attitudes are generally disabled in regard to a particular agent and cases in which they are not generally disabled but selectively disabled due to inadvertence of compulsion. But the reactive attitudes can be disabled in other ways, in particular, in other selective ways. Perhaps an agent is temporarily unbalanced due to dehydration, depression, or hypnosis. Or perhaps she is disabled in an ongoing but selective way because she is subject to specific irresistible

5 My distinction between thick and thin reactive attitudes is similar to and draws on the tradition of distinguishing between thick ethical concepts, such as bravery and honesty, and thin ethical concepts, such as the good, the right, or the obligatory. See Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978) and Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). 6 Gary Watson, “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme” reprinted in Watson, Agency and Answerability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 224. 5 urges or paralyzing fears. If a glutton had genuinely irresistible urges (big if!), he might be disabled in contexts involving food, but not in other contexts. Children may exhibit generalized incapacity that is not just episodic, but nonetheless the incapacity is temporary in nature. One response to both kinds of issues is to consider all the cases as ones involving potential excuses with varying degrees of generality or selectivity. On such a proposal, exemptions might just be comparatively global or standing excuses. Strawson notes that excusing and exempting conditions depend on specific failings, either in individual cases or with the agent in general. As such, they don't presuppose the falsity of determinism, which is a thesis that applies to all cases (67-69). But if our excusing practices don't depend on the falsity of determinism, then neither do the reactive attitudes themselves. To put it another way, if hard determinism were true, we should excuse everyone, because no one is responsible. But the criminal law and our moral responses are selective about when to excuse. We excuse for particular kinds of incapacity, such as insanity, immaturity, or duress. But then our reactive attitudes and associated practices of excuse presuppose some version of compatibilism. However, Strawson does not provide a comprehensive theory of excusing conditions. He cites examples of excuse (exemption) that do not track the truth of determinism. But he does not say if this list is exhaustive or not, and it seems clear that it is not. In any case, we need to know why or how these conditions are excusing. Understanding this might also help us decide whether other conditions should be excusing. Without such a theory, it's hard to know if our reactive attitudes and their limits, as reflected in our practices of excuse, are justified.

5. JUSTIFYING THE REACTIVE ATTITUDES? Strawson's own position on the justificatory position is frustratingly elusive. He seems to recognize the possibility for internal or local skepticism or reform but not the possibility of external or global skepticism.

Inside the general structure or web of human attitudes and feelings of which I have been speaking, there is endless room for modification, redirection, criticism, and justification. But questions of justification are internal to the structure and relate to modifications internal to it. The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external 'rational' justification [78].

Strawson does not say here why external or global skepticism about the reactive attitudes is impossible. He does suggest at a couple of points that we cannot give up on the reactive attitudes altogether (68-69). Oh Yeah? Some, such as Watson, point to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King as examples of people that led personally and politically engaged lives that were not mediated by retributive reactive attitudes of blame and punishment (257-58). But even if this is a fair description of Gandhi and King, it shows only that they avoided some retributive reactive attitudes. Indeed, Watson says only that they managed to live without “vindictiveness” and “malice” (258). But one can hold others responsible and even blame them without being vindictive or malicious. Indeed, Gandhi and King clearly recognized injustices that required correction, and it’s hard to believe they could stand firm against injustice without sentiments of indignation. And, of course, there’s no reason not to attribute positive reactive attitudes such as pride and gratitude to them. So even if Gandhi and King illustrate how it’s possible to forego selected reactive attitudes, they don’t show that it’s possible to live without the reactive attitudes altogether. Is a more systematic suspension of the reactive attitudes possible? That would seem to require a form of quietism. Does Strawson overlook the possibility of quietest alternatives, for instance, sometimes associated with some strands in Buddhism? 6

So What? Even if we could not help but participate in the culture and practice of reactive attitudes that would not show that the practices and attitudes were justified. In A Treatise of Human Nature David Hume famously says that he finds he cannot sustain his skeptical conclusions outside the confines of his study (I.iv.7). Perhaps wholesale skepticism about the reactive attitudes is a skepticism that cannot be lived, at least outside the confines of one’s study, but I'm not sure that shows external or global skepticism to be incoherent, as Strawson sometimes suggests. However, at other times, Strawson suggests that the question of global skepticism is coherent and tries to answer it by appeal to the value the commitment adds to our lives.

This commitment [our natural human commitment to ordinary interpersonal attitudes] is part of the general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases can come up for review within this general framework. ... [I]f we could imagine what we cannot have, viz. a choice in this matter, then we could choose rationally only in the light of an assessment of the gains and losses to human life, its enrichment or impoverishment; and the truth or falsity of a general thesis of determinism would not bear on the rationality of this choice [70].

This suggests that a broadly forward-looking justification of the reactive attitudes is possible. A natural worry is that this forward-looking response to external or global skepticism invokes the wrong sort of reason, just as Strawson himself suggests the instrumentalist optimist does (see §1 above). I see two ways for Strawson to reply to this worry. First, he could try to distinguish the nature and adequacy of different kinds of forward- looking rationales for our practices. Perhaps he could say that the forward-looking rationale he has in mind is that lives lived in ways regulated by reactive attitudes are necessary for various familiar interpersonal relationships without which our lives would not be worth living. He might try to contrast this kind of consequentialist argument with the one the instrumental optimist provides, but it’s not immediately clear what the contrast would be. This strategy needs to be spelled out further before it can be evaluated. Alternatively, Strawson could claim that it's not so much which consequences matter as when you appeal to them. Perhaps he thinks that consequences cannot be appealed to in justifications made within the framework, but they can be invoked to justify the framework as a whole. If so, his claim would be very much like the claim John Rawls makes in his famous article "Two Concepts of Rules" (1955) when he introduces a rule utilitarian justification of punishment.7 Rawls asks us to distinguish the legislative issues of whether to punish conduct, which conduct to punish, and how to punish such conduct from the judicial issue about the conditions under which particular individuals ought to be punished. He thinks that forward-looking utilitarian considerations are relevant to addressing these legislative issues, but that only backward-looking retributive considerations are relevant to addressing the judicial issue.

The decision whether or not to use law rather than some other mechanism of social control, and the decision as to what laws to have and what penalties to assign, may be settled by utilitarian arguments; but if one decides to have laws then one has decided on something whose working in particular cases is retributive in form [684].

Here, Rawls asks us to distinguish the reasons for having a practice in the first place and the reasons that support certain applications of the practice. He thinks that by recognizing this distinction we can reconcile retributive and utilitarian perspectives on punishment. The practice of

7 John Rawls, "Two Concepts of Rules" Philosophical Review 64 (1955): 3-32 and reprinted in Rawls, Collected Papers, ed. S. Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7 punishment is such that the justification for punishing offenders within the practice is backward- looking and retributive, rather than forward-looking. But if we ask why we should have a system of punishment that operates this way, Rawls thinks, forward-looking utilitarian considerations become relevant. Perhaps Strawson is making a Rawlsian claim here about how consequentialist considerations are not relevant within the framework of the reactive attitudes but are relevant when addressing external or global skeptical challenges.

6. TWO READINGS OF STRAWSON’S THESIS One might avoid this consequentialist response to skepticism without ignoring the skeptical worry altogether by undertaking what Strawson does not, namely, a comprehensive theory about excusing conditions that not only shows that they do not track determinism but also that explains why and how familiar excusing conditions excuse, hopefully providing a more systematic account of the excuses (§4). That is a program that Strawson suggests but does not himself pursue. It is one way of describing the goal of this course. Strawson links responsibility and reactive attitudes, such as those of resentment and indignation, in a biconditional fashion.

Reactive attitudes involving blame and praise are appropriate just in case the targets of these attitudes are responsible.

Call this biconditional claim Strawson’s thesis. Strawson’s thesis can be interpreted in two very different ways, depending on which half of the biconditional has explanatory priority. According to the first interpretation, there is no external, or response-independent justification of our attributions of responsibility. This reading fits with Strawson’s view that our reactive attitudes and ascriptions of responsibility, as a whole, do not admit of external justification. Particular expressions of a reactive attitude might be corrigible as inconsistent with a pattern of response, but the patterns of response are not themselves corrigible in light of any other standard. Similarly, particular ascriptions of responsibility might be corrigible in light of patterns in our ascriptions of responsibility, but the patterns themselves are not corrigible in light of any other standards. Responsibility judgments simply reflect those dispositions to respond to others that are constitutive of various kinds of interpersonal relationships. This is a response-dependent interpretation of Strawson’s thesis. This may be the right interpretation of Strawson. Watson, for instance, interprets Strawson this way (222).8 However, an alternative interpretation of Strawson’s thesis is realist, rather than response- dependent. This interpretation stresses the way that the reactive attitudes make sense in light of and so presuppose responsibility. As such, the reactive attitudes are evidence about when to hold people responsible, but not something that constitutes them being responsible. It’s true that the reactive attitudes are appropriate if and only if the targets are responsible, but it’s the responsibility of the targets that makes the reactive attitudes toward them fitting or appropriate. In the biconditional relationship between responsibility and the reactive attitudes, it is responsibility that is explanatorily prior, according to this realist interpretation. Strawson points out that the limits of our reactive attitudes are indicated by our practices of exemption and excuse. Because the realist believes that the reactive attitudes presuppose responsibility, she can appeal to our practices of exemption and excuse to help understand the conditions under which we are responsible. This involves a response-independent conception of responsibility. The crucial question in deciding between these two different interpretations of Strawson’s thesis is whether our study of excuses and exemptions leads to a conception of responsibility that

8In Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments Wallace defends the response-dependent claim in its own right, and not simply as an interpretation of Strawson (19). 8 can be specified independently of our reactive attitudes and that serves to ground or justify those attitudes. If so, this favors a realist conception of responsibility. If not, it favors a response- dependent conception. That’s a question best addressed at the end, rather than the beginning, of our inquiry.