Abstract
If I do you a good turn, you may respond with gratitude and express that gratitude by saying “Thank you.” Similarly, if I insult you, you may react with resentment which you express by shouting, “Screw you!” or something of the sort. Broadly put, when confronted with another’s morally significant conduct, we are inclined to respond with a reactive attitude and to express that reactive attitude in speech. A number of familiar speech acts have a call-and-response structure. Questions, demands and hails are all call-types, and each seeks a defining response. Questions seek answers, demands seek compliance, and a hail, for example, “Hi Coleen” seeks a “Hi” in return. Many theorists claim that expressions of the reactive attitudes also have this structure. Yet, this insight raises a number of questions. There are, after all, many familiar call-types, not only questions, demands and hails, but also requests, invitations, recommendations and entreaties. Given this, it is natural to wonder whether the expressed reactive attitudes are a sui generis call-type or whether they can be properly assimilated to one of the better-known forms. Further, we might wonder about the response component. It is utterly familiar that the response suited to a demand is compliance, and that the response sought by a question is an answer, but what response do the expressed reactive attitudes seek? The answer to this question is not similarly ready to hand. In this paper, I provide a recognition-based theory of the call-and-response structure of the expressed reactive attitudes. On my account, both the positive and negative expressed reactive attitudes are modes of recognition that seek for their target to give expression to her recognition of having been appropriately recognized. In the negative case, the target does this by feeling and expressing guilt or remorse, and in the positive case, by feeling and expressing self-approbation.
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Notes
Darwall (2006) emphasizes the responsible to piece.
Walker (2006) emphasizes this point.
See Kukla and Lance (2009) for an argument for this view of address.
My use of the term ‘expressive’ follows Searle and Vanderveken. For Searle and Vanderveken not all speech acts that express an underlying mental state have as one of their defining functions to express that mental state. In other words, while it may be true that all speech acts express an underlying mental state, not all speech acts are expressives. This follows from their distinction between sincerity conditions and illocutionary point (pp. 1–60).
I am unpacking the claim that expressions of the reactive attitudes call for a response from their target. Though I am following the majority of theorists on this point, Walker is the exception. On her view, the expressed reactive attitudes call for a response not just from their target but also from the moral community at large. I am inclined to think she is mistaken. In saying this I do not mean to deny that the moral community has an obligation to speak up for those who have been wronged. They do. But it is one thing to claim that the moral community is obligated in this way and another to claim that the expressed reactive attitudes call on the moral community to meet this obligation. However, even if Walker is not mistaken, this would not negatively affect the arguments made in this paper. At worst it means that a full account of the expressed reactive attitudes will have to include a characterization of the response sought from the moral community.
When Smith uses the term explanation, I take her to be referring to a specific species of explanation, namely justification. I read her in this way for two reasons. First, she begins the sentence by talking about explanation or justification and ends with simply justification. This suggests that she takes explanation and justification to be synonyms in this context. Second, I cannot make sense of how offering non-exculpatory justification could reasonably be construed as a way of acknowledging an expressed negative reactive attitude.
Some theorists identify regret rather than guilt or remorse as the emotional component of apologies.
To be sure, the speaker’s aim and the speech act’s aim can come apart, but paradigmatically these aims coincide.
See Walker (2006) for a thorough treatment of this idea.
See Talbert (2012) for another objection to the standing moral requirement view of content.
Some of what Darwall says suggests that he might hold a hybrid view of content (Darwall 2010a, p. 37; 2010c, p. 21). On this view, the expressed negative reactive attitudes are implicit demands to stop violating the demand and to acknowledge fault. If this is his view, it fails for the same reason that the acknowledgment of fault view fails.
For additional objections to Darwall’s characterization of the reactive attitudes see Wallace (2007).
A number of the paragraphs in this section come from Macnamara (2013).
Evidence that Darwall does not hold a demand view of the expressed positive reactive attitudes includes the fact that Darwall’s treatment of the positive reactive attitudes diverges from his treatment of the negative in a crucial way. Darwall is very explicit that the conceptual connections between demands and the negative reactive attitudes go beyond warrant conditions. He emphasizes not just that the negative reactive attitudes are not just warranted when someone violates a demand, but also that the negative reactive attitudes themselves address demands. He is not as explicit about the latter in the case of positive reactive attitudes. When talking about specific positive reactive attitudes—and gratitude in particular—he never explicitly says that they address demands. He only explicitly states that they are warranted when the actor acts in a way that goes above and beyond what can be demanded of her. Evidence that Darwall does hold a demand view of the expressed positive reactive attitudes includes the fact that in many places he claims that the class of reactive attitudes addresses demands, never qualifying this claim so as to indicate that only the negative reactive attitudes address demands.
This lovely characterization of forms of comportment is from Little (1998).
A number of the above paragraphs explicating my view of the unexpressed reactive attitudes come from Hurley and Macnamara (2011).
I am borrowing the term “recognitive” from Kukla and Lance, but I am using it differently. That said, the idea that there is a kind of speech that recognizes another person in a particular guise, and that seeks acknowledgement by the target of that recognition comes from Kukla and Lance (2009). The existence of this kind of speech act follows directly from their analysis of hails.
Kukla and Lance agree that “Hello,” a wave, or a nod of the head in the speaker’s direction can be a way of giving expression to one’s recognition of having been appropriately recognized by a hail. In other words, we agree that “Hello” and the like can function to acknowledge a hail. That said, my analysis diverges from Kukla and Lance’s because I take these familiar acts to function as acknowledgment insofar as they serve to discursively register Ernie’s receptive encounter of himself as Ernie. In contrast, Kukla and Lance hold that all speech acts impose deontic normative burdens on their target and thus that the target of a speech act gives expression to her recognition of having been appropriately recognized by the speech act by giving expression to her receptive recognition of the normative burden imposed by the speech act. Thus in the case of hails, Kukla and Lance take a returned “Hello” to function as acknowledgement insofar as it gives expression to one’s receptive recognition of the normative burden imposed by the hail.
I do not subscribe to the view that all speech acts impose normative burdens and thus I give an analysis of giving expression to one’s receptive recognition of having been appropriately recognized that does not involve the receptive recognition of normative burdens.
For psychological research on moral approval, see Algoe and Haidt (2009).
A number of the above paragraphs explicating my view of the unexpressed reactive attitudes come from Hurley and Macnamara (2011).
To be sure, “You’re welcome” and “Thank you” uttered in these contexts may serve other functions. For one thing, responding to expressions of gratitude and approval with these locutions fulfills social expectations. Norms of etiquette require that we respond to expressions of gratitude with “You’re welcome” and to expressions of approval with “Thank you.” More than that, when I thank another for a moral compliment, my “Thank you” may function to express the gratitude I feel on account of the person taking the time to notice and say something to me about my good deed. In a similar vein, “You’re welcome” may function to tell one’s beneficiary that what one did, one did out of genuine regard for her.
Also, this paper aims to give an account of the expressed other-regarding reactive attitudes. This topic, though, has led to a discussion of the self-regarding reactive attitudes and the speech acts associated with them. For purposes of this paper I am agnostic as to how to characterize expressions of the self-regarding reactive attitudes. In particular, I remain agnostic on the questions of whether they are recognitives and whether they are expressives in Searle and Vanderveken’s sense (see footnote 4).
For further arguments against a demand-based account of the unexpressed reactive attitudes see Macnamara (2013).
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Acknowledgments
My sincerest thanks to Elisa Hurley, Christina Hollowell, Zac Bachman, Dan Ehrlich, Chris McVey, Philip Swenson, David Copp and the participants of the 2011 USF Conference on Responsibility, Agency, and Persons for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I owe special debts of gratitude to Maggie Little, Joshua Hollowell and Monique Wonderly for countless conversations on the issues discussed in this paper and for reading and commenting on numerous drafts.
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Macnamara, C. “Screw you!” & “thank you”. Philos Stud 165, 893–914 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9995-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-012-9995-3