Here is a summary and comments on the essay Freedom and Resentment by PF Strawson. He makes some great points, and when he is wrong, it is in such a way as to clarify things a great deal. My non-deterministic position is much better thanks to having read this. I’ll summarize it in this post and respond in a later one.
In a nutshell: PFS first argues that personal resentment that we may feel toward another for having failed to show goodwill toward us would have no problem coexisting with the conviction that determinism is true. Moral disapprobation, as an analog to resentment, is likewise capable of coexisting with deterministic convictions. In fact, it would seem nearly impossible for a normally-constituted person (i.e., a non-sociopath) to leave behind the web of moral convictions, even if that person is a determinist. In this way, by arguing that moral and determinist convictions can coexist in the same person, PFS undermines the libertarian argument that determinism is inconsistent with morality.
PFS begins by calling those who think that free will is inconsistent with determinism “pessimists” (rather than libertarians) and those who think the two consistent with each other “optimists” (rather than compatibilists). Clearly, he has sympathies with the optimists. But he sees himself not as taking sides, but as trying to find a way to reconcile them with each other. In the course of his essay, he criticizes both. He criticizes optimists for trying to justify morality in crudely utilitarian terms, i.e., as a form of social control. Instead, when philosophizing, they should reflect on what it’s like for them to be engaged in interpersonal relationships. When so engaged, we are deeply concerned about the goodwill or lack thereof of those with whom we are interacting. A favorable or unfavorable attitude comes naturally rather than at the end of a syllogism towards those with whom we are interacting. We don’t draw an inference like, “It is fitting to disapprove of X, therefore I do so.” (I think this is his point when he makes disparaging remarks about the intution of fittingness). Rather, we will simply find themselves thinking that certain types of actions, emanating as they do from a bad will, are bad and others, emanating from a very different sort of will, are good. Moral approbation and disapprobation are mere “expressions of our moral attitudes and not merely devices we calculatingly employ for regulative purposes.
His primary criticism is directed toward the pessimists for trying to shore up morality with something PFS sees as extrinsic to morality itself--metaphysical non-determinism But he tempers this criticism by empathizing with the pessimists in their revulsion for the optimists’ utilitarian justification of morality as a form of social control. This sort of justification leaves something important out of morality. Moreover, it seems to provide an opening to the powerful to do whatever they may. While the pessimists’ revulsion is understable, their response is not. In resorting to metaphysics to shore up morality they resort to something extrinsic to morality to justify it. In behaving as if morality needed an extrinsic justification they do morality no favor. Instead they skittshly make an assertion that they cannot prove because it is beyond experience. If morality needs such a justification, well, then morality is in trouble. But it does not. Rather than give the impression that it does, rather than looking for something extra-empirical for justification of morality, they should recognize that the web of beliefs, attitudes and practices in which moral convictions are found supplies all their needs. Therein the reasonableness of moral convictions become manifest and whatever freedom is needed can be found.
So PFS criticizes both pessimists and optimists , but he comes down, at the end of the day, in favor of a modified version of optimism (one which sees no need to justify morality, especially a utilitarian justification). That is not to say that PFS himself is, as optimists are portrayed in his essay, a determinist: he explicitly denies that he understands what “determinism” means, so that he could not commit to its being true. Rather, he thinks that the libertarian argument against determinism doesn’t work.
Let’s look at some key terms.
What does the word “freedom” mean? To an optimist it means the absence of certain conditions whose presence would make moral condemnation inappropriate. That is, the absence of compulsion, innate capacity or insanity. Or the lack of the knowledge that would have made one not want to do the action. Later on, PFS complements this negative definition with a positive one, which the optimist would also grant. When applied to humans, it indicates that they “really intend to do what they do, know just what they’re doing in doing it; the reasons they thing they have for doing what they do, often really are their reasons and not just rationalizations.” He adds that th is “concession [i.e., the positive definition of freedom] is compatible with the truth of the determinist thesis.”
If his essay were a lever, the fulcrum would be the distinction between a “participatory” attitude and an objective one. The first attends many of our interactions with fellow humans. If we reflect on our attitude when so engaged, we will notice that we tend to attach a great deal of importance “to the attitudes and intentions towards us of other human beings.” It is an attitude about attitudes. When the other’s action shows goodwill, we may feel gratitude or the like; when the other’s actions shows malevolence or some other defect of will, we show resentment (hence the title of the essay). Resentment and gratitude are “personal reactive attitudes.” When this attitude is generalized (i.e., takes on the form of what a human expects of another human rather than what I expected you to do at such and such a time) it triggers moral attitudes. As a generalized attitude, it even includes an attitude toward one’s own actions or a “self-reactive” attitude. Feeling bound or obliged to act a certain way, responsible, shame are all examples of a self-reactive moral attitude. So the distinguishing characteristic of moral attitudes is not so much that they are impersonal as it is that they are essentially “capable of being vicarious.”
When our interactions are permeated by the awareness of other’s attitudes they may be moral or something more immediate. At other times, however, we show an attitude that he calls “objective.” This attitude does not concern itself with the other’s attitude, neither with goodwill nor malevolence. Instead, it regards the other simply as something to be reacted to, acted upon, as something to be managed. When we are dealing with a
Contemporary philosophers (including both the optimists and pessimists mentioned in this essay) are on the wrong side of this divide between the participatory and objecxtive attitude. Aspiring as they do to reason in a cool-headed manner, they have shied away from considering “what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary interpersonal relationships,” opting instead for the objective attitude. The optimists, for example, attempt to justify morality by appealing to its utility. The pessimists rush to justify free will by asserting the existence of something outside of human interactions and experience: another example of an objective attitude. By having us recall how what it’s like to have this participatory attitude, PFS brings us to a place where extrinsic justification is no longer needed: the truth of moral statements becomes obvious, for they are simply expressions of attitudes that arise when we engage in interpersonal relationships and turn our attention and concern to the attitudes of those with whom we interact.
PFS argues not so much that freedom and determinism are compatible as he does that that belief in determinism is inconsistent with the sort of objective attitude that the libertarian argument (in his opinion) requires. He does this by first considering what sort of thing makes us suspend the participatory attitude and instead adopt one that is objective. Next, he applies what he has learned to the case in which someone believes in determinism, and he fines that such a person would not only lack motivation to suspend the interpersonal attitude, but that he or she would not even be capable of doing so. This two-part argument actually unfolds twice in his essay. First, to consider interpersonal attitudes like resentment and gratitude, which have a here and now, me and you flavor. Secondly, to consider properly moral attitudes, which are characterized by generality, impersonality, etc.
Let’s see how he develops this argument vis-a-vis resentment. We may suspend this feeling when we recognize that the one performing the offending action didn’t know what he or she was doing. In such a case, we don’t so much suspend our reactive attitude as we carve out an exception. We may in other cases suspend “our ordinary reactive attitudes,” for example, when someone just “[isn’t] himself” today or is under a great strain. More importantly, we may more fixedly alter our attitude when we regard the other as abnormal--as “warped or deranged, neurotic or just a child.” In such a case, we view the other as an object “of social policy; as a subject for what , in a wide range of sense, might be called treatment.” The objective attitude that we take on cannot include “involvement or participation,” and it certainly does not include resentment or the like.
Now that PFS has set the stage, he asks us to consider “what effect would or should the acceptance of the truth of a general thesis of determinism have upon these reactive attitudes” such as resentment? Answer: no one even claims that determinism implies that those who injure others are “quite simply ignorant” of causing the injury or the like. As for the thesis of determinism causing us to regard others as abnormal, PFS says, “it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition.” This seems true by definition, and hence trivial, so PFS goes over this possibility more carefully. He says, “
The human commitment to participation in ordinary inter-personal relationships is, I think, too thoroughgoing and deep rooted ofr us to take seriously the thought that a general theoretical conviction might so change our world that, in it, there were no longer any such things as inter-personal relationships as we normally understand them…
In other words, we are incapable of the sort of sustained objectivity that the libertarian argument requires. Nor would it be rational to even try to act that way, given the impossibility of successful acheivement. And when we do adopt the objective attitude, it is never because we think determinism is true. So determinism is neither sufficient nor necessary to bring about resentment.
Finally, PFS addresses the question as to whether one who affirmed determinism could justify “ordinary interpersonal attitudes.” To ask that question, PFS informs us, is to fail to grasp how this attitude is not something we can deliberate about: it’s just natural to be that way. But if per impossibile we could deliberate about whether to relate to others in a participator or in an objective manner, we would do so on the basis of which choice would be more enriching, not on the basis of the truth or falsity of determinism.
Next, he asks the same sort of question about moral disapprobation as he did about resentment. The answers are predictably similar. When faced with someone who is “wholly lacking, as we say, in moral sense…” we adopt a “objective view” rather than a moral attitude. Actually, the “tension between objectivity of view and the moral reactive attitudes” is less than in the former case, so that one can be somewhat objective and moral in one’s perspective at the same time. The two attitudes can, so to say, be placed side by side rather than one being suspended when the other is engaged. The latter disanalogy with resentment is not as important, however, with the following analogy. The suspension of the moral attitude is never the result of the belief that the other’s behavior is determined (at least, not in the way “that all behavior might be ...if determinism is true”). That is because, determinism doesn’t imply that no one knows what they are doing; acts in an intelligible manner; lives delusionally; or lacks a moral sense. And if the acceptance of determinism does not lead to the abolition of resentment, then a fortiori it does not lead to the abolition of moral disapprobation, resentment’s analog. These two attitudes “stand or lapse together,” so it is “not in our nature to be able to” suspend either of them. Let’s suppose once again that we could deliberate about this sort of thing: it would be insuperably difficult for the pessimist to explain why one who is convinced that determinism is true would find it more reasonable to adopt an objective attitude. And the burden of proof, it would seem, lies with him.
Now for my reply to Strawson: I'm hoping to post that soon.
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