Philosophy of Disability: A Reconsideration of the Strawsonian View of Reactive Attitudes in an Employment Scheme

In " Freedom and Resentment, " P.F. Strawson seeks to recast the ordinary debate about moral responsibility and accountability. His main opponent is the incompatibilist – someone who does not believe that the claim that free will exists and the claim that everything that occurs is causally determined are compatible. Strawson also offers a critique of the view that is held by a certain kind of compatibilist: the kind who believes that our practice of holding people morally responsible – blaming and praising them, for example – can be justified by the causal efficacy of these attitudes in shaping future behavior. Strawson does not dwell on the issue of whether or not determinism is true, but proceeds by examining everyday interactions and the resulting emotions and reactive attitudes that we have towards others. He hopes that by doing so he can make his compatibilist opponent concede that there is a deeper rationale for these attitudes than their causal efficacy. Regarding his incompatibilist opponent, Strawson tries to show that since we are not capable of completely suspending all of our attitudes of praise and blame and our other reactive attitudes, it is unreasonable to argue that if determinism is true, we ought to do so. Though reactive attitudes like resentment and gratitude are not widely discussed, Strawson makes the case that these attitudes are much more important to the conversation about moral responsibility than one would ordinarily think, and indeed that they are much more important than quarreling over determinism to get at the root of this issue. 4 Strawson argues that, of the set of philosophers who claim that they know what determinism is, there are the 'pessimists' – those who, if determinism is true, believe that such things as " the concepts of moral obligation and responsibility really have no application, and the practices of punishing and blaming, of expressing moral condemnation and approval, are really unjustified. Others – the optimists, perhaps – hold that these concepts and practices in no way lose their raison d'être if the thesis of determinism is true. " 1 To use more traditional 'free-will-debate' terminology, the 'pessimists' would be called incompatibilists, and are made up of both the hard determinists and libertarians. Hard determinists uphold the deterministic side of the debate, meaning that they believe there is a deterministic universe, which by their thinking precludes the possibility for human beings to have free …