Responsibility, Personal Relationships, and the Significance of the Reactive Attitudes

Abstract

Abstract P. F. Strawson held that relinquishing moral blame and punishment isn’t a real possibility for us, given our commitment to ordinary interpersonal relationships. In Strawson’s view, this is because these practices are at root expressions of resentment, moral indignation, and guilt, and because our proneness to these reactive attitudes is inseparable from the emotional involvement on which such relationships depend. If Strawson is right, denying these attitudes a prominent place in human affairs isn’t a credible aim of social policy, despite what some theorists have maintained. Focusing on resentment, this chapter distinguishes two ways of fleshing out Strawson’s reasoning, both of which are adumbrated in his landmark essay. According to the Constitutive Expectations Argument, we cannot strive to supplant resentment because it’s a response to violations of the normative expectations that partly constitute such relationships. According to the Psychological Nexus Argument, the obstacle to supplanting resentment lies in other, reinforcing emotional responses, especially feeling hurt and feeling aggrieved, the presence of which makes resentment harder to sincerely disavow and set aside than it would otherwise be. It will be argued that the Psychological Nexus Argument has advantages over the Constitutive Expectations Argument, as can be seen by examining the conditions for sincerely disavowing unavoidable resentment. For the idea is, it’s often the case that people cannot reasonably be expected to sincerely disavow their putatively appropriate resentment when these reinforcing responses are present.