Reactive Attitudes and Volitional Necessity

Abstract

The varieties of philosophical skepticism purport to be pressing an intellectual challenge: what’s your justification for believing that there is an external world (or that there are other minds, etc.)? The relevant question is, of course, asked in a tone of voice which implies that a justification is needed and can’t be had. But skeptical worries also present a more personal challenge – or, at least, one that can be more disquieting. By raising doubts about whether the way things seem to us really does map onto the way things are, skeptical worries can lead us to doubt ourselves. These two faces of skepticism – the challenge to our intellect, and the challenge to our self-confidence – are nicely captured by the ambiguity of one way to state the skeptical question: how can you be sure? From one perspective, this is a request for the reasons that reliably put you in contact with the truth; from another perspective, it’s an attempt to sow self-doubt. The two challenges are not completely independent, of course. For example: if you manage to find justifying reasons, then that alone is likely to ease whatever anxiety was induced by the skeptical challenge in the first place. But the reverse is also true: if you can overcome your anxiety some other way and as a result regain your self-confidence, then that alone may be enough to blunt the force of the request for justifying reasons – not because you will have found some, but because you will have come to see the request itself as idle, a mere philosophical curiosity. P. F. Strawson’s response to skepticism about moral responsibility is evidently of this latter variety, an attempt to help us regain our confidence in the face of