Abstract
Is moral responsibility compatible with determinism? Peter Strawson’s first answer is: I do not know what the thesis of determinism is. His second answer seems to be: Yes, it is, and we can see this by looking to relevant pockets of our ordinary practices and attitudes, especially our responses (resentment, anger, love, forgiveness) to quality of will. His second answer has shaped subsequent discussions of moral responsibility. But what exactly is Strawson’s compatibilism? And is it a plausible view? By attending to Strawson’s account of parenting and the development of moral agents from children to adults, I’ll clarify and defend the following account: For Strawson, the appropriateness conditions for holding responsible change by degrees, over time, based on an agent’s susceptibility to empathy and quality of will, and this shows us that determinism is irrelevant to responsibility.
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Notes
But in Sect. 5 I’ll have some more remarks about why (6) is not as radical as it might seem.
See Beglin’s (2018) concern-based construal of the Strawsonian reversal, a careful elaboration of (3).
Manual Vargas (2007: 148) is similarly puzzled by the suggestion or implication that there is some specific age at which children go from determined to do what they do to no longer determined to do what they do, that is, a specific age at which the indeterminism unique to human decision-making kicks in.
For Fischer and Ravizza, taking responsibility is a distinctively human process that begins its development in early childhood, long before we are capable of contemplating the subtleties of abstract metaphysical principles (1998: 242).
Note that nothing in what I say here undermines Strawson’s claim that objectivity of attitude and the normal reactive attitudes are incompatible. That claim is still true when understood as a claim about the full weight and range of the reactive attitudes and a total objectivity of attitude.
Perhaps we can also make better sense of why (6), “There is no fact of the matter as to whether an agent is morally responsible” (Bennett (2008)), might seem like an attractive reading (though I do not wish to endorse (6)): responsibility facts become so context-sensitive, on the picture I suggest here, that one might well think that even if there is some fact of the matter as to whether or not S is responsible for A, we often cannot realistically determine whether or not S is responsible for A. Additionally, we might say that (1) it is unimportant whether or not S is responsible for A—what matters is how responsible S is for A, (2) determinations about the degree of responsibility of S for A hinge on the progressive development of S as a moral agent, and (3) given (1) and (2), it is misleading to characterize responsibility ascriptions as ‘facts’.
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Acknowledgements
For helpful suggestions, I am grateful to Michael McKenna, Alastair Norcoss, Robert Pasnau, Gagan Sapkota, and Susan Wolf. In addition, I am grateful to thoughtful suggestions from two anonymous reviewers for Erkenntnis.
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Coren, D. Resentment, Parenting, and Strawson’s Compatibilism. Erkenn 88, 43–65 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00339-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00339-9