Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Reading Group

Reading group: P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment” (1962)

Brian Otieno Ouma Contributor
· 6 replies · 202 views
Free willAnalyticPeter Strawson#blame#punishment#reactive-attitudes#resentment
Follow

I teach a reading class at a men's prison twice a week, and free will comes up in nearly every session, never in the abstract. A man asks whether he deserves his sentence, or whether his father's violence "made him". I want to read the essay that, more than any other, changed how philosophers think about this, and I want to read it with people from different walks of life.

Strawson's move is to stop asking whether determinism is true and start from our actual practices: resentment, gratitude, indignation, forgiveness, what he calls the reactive attitudes. His claim is that these are not theories that could be refuted by metaphysics.

Plan (the essay is about 25 pages; it is widely anthologised and freely available in several collections):

  • Session 1: the opening sections, the "optimist" and "pessimist", and the list of reactive attitudes.
  • Session 2: excuses versus exemptions, and the "objective attitude": seeing someone as something to be managed or treated.
  • Session 3: the closing argument, that a general belief in determinism could not, and should not, make us give up the reactive attitudes.

I'll post my men's reactions (anonymised, with their permission) alongside mine.

LikeReply
Follow6 replies

Members reply here. Reading is always free.

Sign in to reply

6 replies

  1. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Contributor

    Session 1. What my class noticed first: Strawson begins with how it feels to be treated with contempt or goodwill. One man said: "So he starts with the injury, not with the brain." That seemed to me exactly right. The essay is about what we demand of each other, and it treats that demand as the basic fact.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Khalid Mahmood Awan

    Fellow

    Session 2 is where my old profession lives. Strawson's distinction maps directly onto the courtroom. An excuse ("he did not mean to", "he was pushed") suspends resentment for this act while treating the person as a full participant. An exemption ("he is a child", "he is not himself", "he is mentally ill") takes the person out of the circle of participants, at least for now.

    What troubled me on the bench, and troubles me rereading this, is how much of the "objective attitude" a court must take simply to sentence. We assess risk, we manage. Strawson says this attitude is available to us but that we cannot sustain it towards everyone. A court sustains it professionally. I am not sure that is healthy.

  3. Choi Byeong-hun

    Contributor

    Session 2, from a different angle. In the army we had men who had done things in combat that left them unable to forgive themselves. Moral injury is, in Strawson's terms, a reactive attitude turned inward. What struck me is that no argument about determinism has ever helped any of them. Something like recognition, from someone whose judgment they trust, sometimes does. That supports Strawson more than I expected.

    Helpful · 1
  4. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Session 3. The famous ending complains about the "obscure and panicky metaphysics of libertarianism". It's a good line, but the argument behind it is subtler: even if we could give up the reactive attitudes wholesale, the question whether we should would be answered by asking what we would gain and lose in human life, not by asking whether determinism is true. I found that convincing as an account of reasons, and less convincing as an account of desert, which is exactly what Brian's men are asking about.

    Helpful · 2
  5. Andrés Zuluaga

    Contributor

    Coming late. I have sat with former combatants and their victims in the same room, and the reactive attitudes are the whole substance of those meetings. One thing Strawson does not much discuss is that they can be transformed without being abandoned: resentment can become a demand for acknowledgment rather than for suffering. That seems to me what reconciliation processes try to do. It's a Strawsonian point he doesn't make.

    Helpful · 3
  6. Brian Otieno Ouma

    Contributor

    Thank you all. Andrés, I'll bring your point to class: "resentment becoming a demand for acknowledgment" is something several of the men are, in their own way, trying to do with the people who harmed them as children. We finished by agreeing with Strawson that the attitudes are not optional, and disagreeing about whether that settles what anyone deserves.