180028 PS Moral Responsibility and Reactive Attitudes (2020S)

P.F. Strawson’s (1962) influential article “Freedom and Resentment” has fueled the modern debate on moral responsibility. Holding others morally responsible for their behavior is a major part of our social life. We regularly blame or praise people for their (mis)deeds. But our practice of holding others morally responsible seems threatened by the thought that our world is deterministic. This, of course, has been a worry in moral philosophy long before Strawson. But Strawson's novel defense of compatibilism has been a major influence in the modern-day debate on moral responsibility. A key distinction in Strawson’s account of the facts is that between a reactive or participant attitude and an objective attitude. Reactive attitudes are attitudes that belong to participation in with others in the interpersonal realm, for example resentment, anger, gratitude, forgiveness, or love. Strawson shows that this general framework of attitudes is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole it neither calls for nor permits an external rational justification (in terms of either a libertarian or deterministic metaphysics). In this pro-seminar we will look closely at Strawson's defense of (a sort of) compatibilism and the debate that followed it. This means we will be studying answers to related questions of the following sort:
- What does moral responsibility exactly consist in? Are there different kinds of moral responsibility?
- Is moral responsibility reconcilable with causal determinism? If so, how? Does this mean we must stop trying to square our reactive attitudes with a metaphysical picture of the world?
- What are the conditions for moral responsibility?
- What, if any, is the relation between being responsible and holding (an agent) responsible?