Abstract
Derk Pereboom disagrees with P.F. Strawson that abandoning the reactive attitudes associated with praise and blame would come at the price of exiting our personal relationships. According to Pereboom, we can contain or modify our attitudes in ways that preserve, and perhaps even enrich interpersonal relationships. In a recent article, Seth Shabo defends “the inseparability thesis” in order to undermine Pereboom’s containment policy. Drawing on David Goldman’s work on non-antagonistic responses to wrongdoing, we defend Pereboom from Shabo’s critique.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For our purposes we will limit those reactive attitudes associated with desert-based praise and blame to gratitude, resentment and indignation. We will at times describe these as “moral reactive attitudes,” though—following Shabo—our focus will be primarily on resentment.
Hard incompatibilism is so-named because it claims that free will and moral responsibility are incompatible with both determinism and indeterminism. Pereboom (2014) now seems to prefer to call this position “free will skepticism.”
We wish to thank an anonymous referee for emphasizing this point.
As we stated in Section 2, this should not be construed as a replacement strategy whereby we endeavor to feel disappointment instead of resentment. Rather, the claim is that in the absence of resentment there exist other attitudes, such as disappointment, that maintain our relationships.
This is also in keeping with the kinds of examples Strawson mentions in his discussion of the circumstances in which we retreat towards objectivity or withhold reactive attitudes. Many of these examples involve a rational impairment of some kind due to immaturity, mental illness, or compulsion.
It is also worth noting that Pereboom approvingly cites the work of Fischer and Ravizza (1998) in connection with his approach to blame.
Since Goldman himself claimed that his approach should be consistent with many ways of understanding what it means to be a full-fledged agent, we also see no reason to think he would object to our proposal.
Goldman does not specifically address this issue in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, but this is the impression one gets from his treatment of the example of the racist.
Lindemann (2014) describes a similarly multidimensional approach in connection with Strawson.
We also suspect that this model accords better with experience. We will not argue for this point here, but it does seem plausible to say that our reactions to the actions and attitudes of others are complex in ways that fit the model. We often find ourselves simultaneously guarded and open, embracing and distancing, though in different ways; our retreat to the objective attitude “as a refuge … from the strains of involvement” (Strawson 1962, 585) is normally only part of the story.
We wish to thank two anonymous referees for this journal for their helpful comments and suggestions. We have also benefitted from the discussion following our presentation of a version of this paper at Wilfrid Laurier University, and from conversation with Louis Charland.
References
Bennett J (1980) Accountability. In: In Straaten, ed, Philosophical Subjects. Oxford University Press, Oxford
D’Arms J, Jacobson D (2003) The significance of recalcitrant emotion (or, anti-Quasijudgmentalism). In: In Hatzimoysis, ed, Philosophy and the Emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Ekstrom LW (2000) Free Will: A Philosophical Study. Westview Press, Boulder, Colo.
Fischer JM, Ravizza M (1998) Responsibility and Control: A Theory of Moral Responsibility. Cambridge University Press
Goldman D (2014) Modification of the reactive attitudes. Pac Philos Q 95:1–22
Haji I (2003) Determinism and its threat to the moral sentiments. Monist: An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry 86:242–260
Lindemann H (2014) Holding and Letting Go: The Social Practice of Personal Identities. Oxford University Press, New York
McKenna M (2012) Conversation and Responsibility. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Pereboom D (1995) Determinism Al dente. Nous 29:21–45
Pereboom D (2001) Living without free will. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Pereboom D (2005) Defending hard incompatibilism. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 29:228–247
Pereboom D (2008) A compatibilist account of the epistemic conditions on rational deliberation. Journal of Ethics: An International Philosophical Review 12:287–306
Pereboom D (2009) Hard incompatibilism and its rivals. Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 144:21–33
Pereboom D (2014) Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, 1st edn. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Shabo S (2012) Where love and resentment meet: Strawson’s intrapersonal defense of compatibilism. Philos Rev 121:95–124
Shariff AF, Vohs KD (2014) The world without free will. Sci Am 310:76
Shariff AF, Greene JD, Karremans JC, Luguri JB, Clark CJ, Schooler JW, Baumeister RF, Vohs KD (2014) Free will and punishment. Psychol Sci 25:1563–1570
Smilansky, Saul. 2011. Free will, fundamental dualism, and the centrality of illusion. In: Kane, ed, The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. Oxford: Oxford university press. Second edition
Sommers T (2007) The objective attitude. Philosophical Quarterly 57:321–341
Strawson, P.F. 1962. Freedom and Resentment, Proceedings of the British Academy, 46: 1–25. Reprinted In: Andrew Bailey, ed., First Philosophy. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002. Page references are to the reprint
Wallace RJ (1994) Responsibility and the moral sentiments. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass.
Waller BN (1990) Freedom without responsibility. Temple University Press, Philadelphia
Watson G (1987) Responsibility and the limits of evil. In: In Schoeman, ed, Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Wolf S (1981) The importance of free will. Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy 90:386–405
Wolf S (1990) Freedom within reason. Oxford University Press, New York
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Campbell, N., Scharoun, J. A Defense of Derk Pereboom’s Containment Policy. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 19, 1291–1307 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9736-3
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-016-9736-3