Responsibility and the Aims of Theory: Strawson and Revisionism

Strawsonian approaches to responsibility, including more recent accounts such as Dennett’s and Wallace’s, face a number of important objections. However, Strawsonian theories can be recast along revisionist lines so as to avoid many of these problems. In this paper, I explain the revisionist approach to moral responsibility, discuss the concessions it makes to incompatibilism (including the point that compatibilists may not fully capture what our commonsense understanding of responsibility), why it provides a fruitful recasting of Strawsonian approaches, and how it offers an alternative to the pattern of dialectical stalemates exhibited by standard approaches to free will and determinism. In recent years, reflection on the relationship between individual moral responsibility and determinism has undergone a remarkable renaissance. Incompatibilists, those who believe moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism, have offered powerful new arguments in support of their views. Compatibilists, those who think moral responsibility is compatible with determinism, have responded with ingenious counterexamples and alternative accounts of responsibility. Despite the admirable elevation of complexity and subtlety within both camps, the trajectory of the literature is somewhat discouraging. Every dialectical stalemate between incompatibilists and compatibilists seems to be superseded by a similar though often more subtle stalemate. 1 The stalemates have two sources. On the one hand, incompatibilists again and again find powerful intuitive support from our folk concept. On the other hand, compatibilists seem right to insist that even if determinism were true, this would not mitigate our need for a concept of responsibility. RESPONSIBILITY AND THE AIMS OF THEORY 219 © 2004 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishing Ltd. In this paper, I attempt to show how principled and systematic pursuit of an approach I call revisionism might push us through this stalemate. The central idea of revisionism is that an adequate theory of responsibility will depart significantly from our commonsense understanding of responsibility. My point of departure is P. F. Strawson’s justly influential “Freedom and Resentment” and some of the work that article has inspired. 2 I start with Strawsonianism because careful attention to how it fails suggests a way to rehabilitate it along systematically revisionist lines. This recasting requires that we make some important concessions to incompatibilists, including the idea that no compatibilist theory may be able to respect the constraints of the ordinary concept of moral responsibility. 3 However, if we adopt my approach we have good reason to think we can make real progress against the pattern of dialectical stalemates. This paper is divided into three parts. In part one, I describe Strawson’s original account and the main lines of criticism it provoked. In part two, I argue that no standardly compatibilist Strawsonian account has the resources to answer traditional incompatibilist worries. In part three, I say what the revisionist alternative is, how it can be pursued, and why it constitutes a promising alternative to standard forms of compatibilism and incompatibilism.