The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1990) Vol. XXVIII, No. 1

THE MORAL IMPORTANCE OF FREE ACTION Paul Benson The University of Dayton

Traditionally, we have thought that philosophical examination of free action is important because we believed that freedom is morally necessary. It seemed that we can only be appropriate targets of moral judgments based on evaluations of our actions if we are responsible for those actions. And it seemed that free agency is an essential component of responsibility, so that we cannot rationally be held responsible for our actions unless it is rational to believe that we performed them freely. This line of thinking, which links the significance of free agency to the significance of moral judgment, is theoretically independent of fears about the implications that a deterministic natural science might have for free action. While compatibilists and incompatibilista continue to debate whether or not free agency involves humanly satisfiable causal conditions, it has therefore been possible for all sides of this dispute to agree that the fundamental appeal of the issue ultimately lies in its moral seriousness.

Rather recently, Susan Wolf1 and Jonathan Bennett2 have raised objections to this traditional understanding of the importance of free agency. Their objections develop (in different ways) a central thesis of P. F. Strawson’s classic, “Freedom and Re~entment.”~ According to Strawson, to think that attributions of responsibility stand in need of any systematic rational justification is gravely mistaken. For attributions of responsibility express a complex network of reactive attitudes4 which are natural to human beings in a manner which precludes any need for a general rationale of responsibility-attribution. Wolf and Bennett both suggest that Strawson’s thesis would block the traditional strategy for explaining what is importantly at stake in our having or

Paul Benson is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Dayton. Writing on issues at the intersection of ethics and metaphysics, he has recently published in the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

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lacking capacities for free action. That strategy presupposes that the justification of our practices of responsibility- attribution is a potentially live issue. But if, as Strawson contends, those practices are reflections of reactive attitudes which are rationally unconnected with any general facts about human powers of free action, then it would be unclear why free agency should have any particular moral import.

In the following discussion I examine these Strawsonian critiques of the traditional view that what it is rational to believe about free agency matters because it bears on the rational defensibility of practices of responsibility-attribution. I maintain that these critiques fail and that, ironically, the very distinction on which they all place so much weight- Strawson’s distinction between reactive and objective attitudes-is best understood in the terms of a certain version of the traditional view.

I. Susan Wolf proposes a fairly direct route to the unorthodox

conclusion that human inability to act freely would not give us any reason whatsoever (much less a sufficient reason) to give up attributing re~ponsibil i ty.~ Wolf contends that the traditional view’s insistence to the contrary is incoherent. In order to show this, she has us consider the implications for a n ideally rational being of holding the traditional view in a world in which, we are to suppose, no one has the power to act freely. Since the traditional view (as described thus far) asserts that people can justifiably be held responsible for their actions only if they have performed those actions freely, the imagined absence of free agency would require that a fully rational person never have reactive, responsibility-imputing attitudes toward anyone, including herself. Where attitudes toward agents are reasonably to be taken, such a being would regard people with Strawsonian objectivity, as objects to be managed or controlled so as to fashion the most desirable available states of affairs.

Wolf argues that this scenario is incoherent. A fully rational attitude-taker who reflectively adjusts her attitudes on rational grounds must regard her attitude-taking as an enterprise that is under her rational control. She must regard herself as a free and responsible attitude-taker, else she could not rationally view her critical assessment of her attitudes as being rational. Hence, Wolf maintains, to the extent that we are rational, a world devoid of free agency could not present us with any reason on the basis of which we rationally could

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abandon responsibility-attribution. For we rationally could not regard that very revision of our attitudes as unfree.

Wolf realizes that this conclusion blocks the traditional account of freedom’s importance. If, in virtue of the nature of rational attitude-revision, there can be no rational attitudinal response to a world without freedom, then it cannot be a general rational requirement that in such a world we give up responsibility-attribution. Consequently, the threat of such a requirement is empty, leaving the traditional view without an explanation of the importance of free agency which connects it to the justification of responsibility-attribution.6

’ Wolf’s point is persuasive only so long as we do not consider third-person assessments of responsibility. If the truth were that no other person could act freely, and I knew this to be so, then that fact apparently would give me some reason to cease to regard others as being responsible for what they do. Nothing about the ineradicability of my belief in my own freedom and responsibility as a rational attitude-taker need stand in the way of reasons I might have to abandon my reactive attitudes toward others. No matter how I treat myself, it would be unfair for me to regard as responsible persons who really cannot help what they do or really cannot be expected to know any better than to do it-that is, persons who cannot act freely. This is so regardless of how they view themselves. So even if Wolf is correct that rational self- regarding attitudes exclude one’s having a reason to regard oneself as other than responsible, at least as an attitude-taker, it does not follow that, as Wolf implies, considerations about other persons’ freedom are incapable of affording anyone with reasons to continue or to cease attributing responsibility to them.

Wolf’s claim about rational first-person assessment of responsibility notwithstanding, the traditional view still has something to say about third-person assessment. It explains that whether or not others are free agents matters deeply, because facts about their freedom can provide reasons for us to give up regarding them as responsible. However, with modification, the account can also explain the significance of first-person determinations of freedom, even if these are justified asymmetrically relative to third-person determinations. The modified account holds that if one has sufficient reason to believe that a person is not able to act freely, then one has an important reason not to regard the person reactively, not to hold her responsible. This is compatible with Wolf’s point about rational first-person beliefs about our freedom as attitude-takers. So long as one can never

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have sufficient reason to believe that one is wholly unfree, the modified account can allow (though it does not assert) that one can never have any reason to regard oneself as other than responsible. Therefore, the modified traditional view survives Wolf’s analysis: what we have reason to believe about free agency is important, since those beliefs are connected to the reasons we have for treating persons as appropriate objects of moral evaluation.

This way of dealing with Wolf’s argument could seem counter-productive. Some will wonder how the traditional account (as modified) can be tenable if the price of accepting it in the face of Wolf’s objection is to allow that first- and third-person assessments of responsibility may be irreconcilable. However, the main thing to appreciate about this possibility is that it is not the result of the proposed version of the traditional view. Whatever worries arise from Wolf’s point about first-person assessments of freedom and responsibility are independent of theses concerning the significance of well-grounded beliefs about our freedom. Instead, those worries concern the grounds we have for thinking ourselves to be free agents. That is a matter that properly lies beyond the scope of this discussion.

Wolf makes another point in her essay which usefully clarifies the claim being advanced in the traditional view. Wolf suggests that conditions having to do with the meaning created in inter-personal relations of which responsibility- assigning attitudes are an integral part may afford overriding reasons to retain practices of responsibility-attribution, regardless of any reasons that the absence of free agency may present for abandoning those practices (cf. p. 392). A defense of the traditional account can admit this. Freedom can be morally significant without being a strictly necessary condition on justifiable responsibility-attribution. I have incorporated this in the modified version of the traditional account stated above. Freedom is morally important because, if we have adequate reasons for believing that persons cannot act freely, then we have an important (but not necessarily overriding) reason not to hold them responsible for their actions.

11. Strawson’s objection to the traditional account apparently

strikes at a broader problem with that account than does Wolf’s criticism. Whereas Wolf’s argument focuses upon a certain feature of any rational individual’s attitudes toward her own responsibility, Strawson argues that there is

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something amiss in the very aim of rationally justifying the practice of attributing responsibility to normal adults. Strawson would object to the traditional view because it maintains that what it is reasonable for us to believe about persons’ powers to act freely places a general condition on the rationality of our ever holding anyone responsible (even if, as pointed out above, this is an overridable condition); and this implies that, as rational persons, it is in order to ask, not just that particular ascriptions of responsibility be justified, but t h a t the entire practice of attr ibuting responsibility be justified.’ For Strawson, our practice of regarding normal adults as responsible agents amounts to our regarding one another as liable to be targets of reactive attitudes and thus subject to the demand for minimal goodwill which those attitudes express. Strawson also believes that regarding persons as liable to reactive responses for their conduct is a necessary feature of anything we could recognize as an interpersonal relationship among normal adults. Therefore, Strawson takes the idea that the practice of attributing responsibility may be subject to genuine rational scrutiny to imply that there potentially could be reasons for ceasing to participate in interpersonal relationships. If there could be reasons for our systematically relinquishing attributions of responsibility, then in the absence of any stronger competing considerations those reasons would recommend that we forgo interpersonal relationship.

This sets up Strawson’s initial objection to the traditional view. He objects that it is “practically inconceivable” that we might be moved to ac t on any such criticism of responsibility-attribution and make efforts to give up participation in interpersonal relationships. If there could be reasons to give up reactivity, those reasons could not make any practical difference to us, for Strawson believes that we care too profoundly about interpersonal relationship for us ever to be able to choose to forsake it altogether. Thus, Strawson judges the traditional account of freedom’s moral significance to be, at best, a practically idle hypothesis.

By itself, however, doubt about the practical efficacy that the traditional view could have shows nothing about the view’s reasonableness. Strawson’s idea that our concern for interpersonal relationships which involve liability to reactive attitudes is too deep to yield to any opposing reasons which might arise from examination of human abilities to act freely may indicate only that reasons for abandoning the reactive attitudes will always be overridden by reasons to retain reactivity which originate from the depth of our commitment

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to certain sorts of relationship. It would not show that there could not be reasons for trying to give up reactivity entirely or that considerations about free action never could be such reasons.

But Strawson has much more to say. He rarely mentions the practical obstacles to our willingly relinquishing responsibility-attribution without also claiming that proneness to reactive attitudes belongs to the nature of human social interaction. Strawson thinks that our preferring to persist in reactive attitude-taking, even in the face of serious doubts about the extent of human free agency, reveals at quite a fundamental level what sort of creature we are, what sort of life human beings can find fulfilling. Strawson asserts that responsibility-attribution belongs to “. . . anything that we could find intelligible as a system of human relationships, as human society” (p. 24). Reactivity is “. . . a natural fact, woven into the fabric of our lives, given with the fact of human society as we know it.”8

Strawson’s appeal to the naturalness of human commitment to reactivity suggests that the motivational inefficacy of potential criticism of responsibility-attribution might raise a more serious difficulty for the traditional view than it initially appeared capable of raising. If we are not creatures who, by rationally considering the extent of human powers to act freely, could ever be moved to prefer (other things being equal) that normal human interactions be rid of responsibility- imputing attitudes and exhibit objectivity of attitude in their place, then, on many influential (internalist) accounts of practical reason, this would establish that there could not be reasons for us to abandon responsibility-attribution. In this manner, the practical inconceivability of our being moved to replace reactivity with objectivity as a normal term of human interaction could be used as evidence for Strawson’s ultimate conclusion that the practice of responsibility-attribution is not susceptible as a whole to rational review.

Although much of what Strawson says is amenable to this way of spelling out his argument, Strawson actually expresses his central point by employing a distinction between issues that can only arise “internal to a framework” and those that pertain to a framework “externally.” Thinking of ordinary reactive attitudes as a framework which naturally structures human social interactions, Strawson asserts that questions about rational justification only may arise internally, addressing the responsibility of particular agents, typically in connection with particular actions. Questions about the rationale for attributing responsibility cannot properly be

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directed at the whole framework of reactivity. Strawson writes, “The existence of the general framework of attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external ‘rational’ justification” (p. 23). Strawson supplies no explicit account of the inference by which he arrives at this conclusion.9

Since Strawson does not make it clear what exactly constitutes a framework of the relevant sort, or what marks the boundary between internal and external issues, or why rational criticism is confined to a framework’s interior in the case of certain frameworks, I will try as far as possible to assess Strawson’s position independently of these unclarities.

It is daring of anyone to claim that there never could be any reason for humans to do something which a number of philosophers have proposed that it might be reasonable to do. (I am thinking of certain familiar consequentialist arguments that assigning praise and blame, as it is ordinarily practiced, is morally perverse and should be discontinued.10) It is still more daring to base such a claim, as Strawson does, on certain purportedly “natural human commitments” without supplying any critical apparatus for determining whether or not those commitments are genuinely natural ones and whether or not the senses in which they might be natural are capable of sustaining Strawson’s thesis about the nonrationality of responsibility-attribution. More positively, we should be worried about the strategy of appealing to (allegedly) natural features of human relationship as a means of dealing with potential criticisms of attitudes we normally take toward one another. This strategy implies that, no matter how dramatically our attitudes might shift, and no matter how fruitful for human well-being those shifts might be, there would remain fixed truths about natural human relationship on the basis of which the imagined changes could be shown to be unfounded. Contrary to this view, it seems to be the case that the general “framework” of human relationship simply does change when our attitudes change profoundly and fruitfully enough. Hence it appears impossible to establish narrow and unalterable limits on the rational criticism of presently predominant attitudes solely on the evidence of common features of the types of human relationship with which we are familiar. What is to differentiate a genuine boundary on legitimate rational criticism from an irrationally stubborn refusal to entertain alterations in what is familiar?

Near the end of his essay, Strawson gestures toward some of the more obvious difficulties with his invocation of what

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is natural in human relations. He admits that what he judges to be natural forms of interpersonal relationship may reflect merely contingent aspects of his culture. He also notes the potential for self-deception in our reactive responses. Nevertheless, he sharply qualifies these doubts by saying that “. . . it is an exaggerated horror, itself suspect, which would make us unable to acknowledge the facts . . .” (p. 25), facts which he thinks evidence the essentiality of responsibility- attribution to human society. The difficulty with such confidence is illustrated vividly by the social history of our moral and political life. That history repeatedly displays our capacity systematically to be rendered insensitive to grave reasons for revising central aspects of prevalent forms of human relationship. Consider how a variety of institutional arrangements, cultural tradit ions, and psychological mechanisms have operated for so long to blind us to our racism and sexism by taking hold in ordinary attitudes and patterns of interaction with women and people of color. Think of how those attitudes came to saturate our conception of natural human affairs, came to be regarded as features of anything that we could recognize as civilized human society. Recall that what is socially sanctioned as normal practice is also often shielded from informed, critical examination, as that protection serves to maintain the stability of “normalcy.”

Moral and political critique can only be successful if pervasive aspects of ordinary interpersonal dealings are opened up for critical scrutiny and the issue of their justification is faced with utmost earnestness. If our proneness to take reactive, responsibility-imputing attitudes is among the most familiar features of ordinary relationships, that gives us all the more reason why it should not be made immune to rational review.

Having rejected Strawson’s conclusion that there could not be reasons for wholesale revision of our practice of responsibility-attribution, we should reconsider Strawson’s premise that, if there were such reasons, human beings would be incapable of being moved to act in accordance with them. It is debatable that there can be reasons for us to act which could not motivate us in any possible circumstances. But since Strawson does not commit himself very far to a view of practical reasons, let us concede that there may be reasons of this sort. It is still implausible to think that no human being could be moved by rational reflection on reactive attitudes to prefer on balance that everyone be regarded objectively.11 Suppose, for example, that giving up our normal attitude toward others as responsible agents would in fact

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tend to make people far happier on the whole than they are when they are liable to be regarded reactively and to so regard others. And suppose that this considerable increase in happiness would tend to bring about a more peaceable and productive society. If we reasonably believed this to be the result of adopt ing the objective at t i tude for normal interactions, and we gave it full consideration, it is entirely likely that many of us would be moved in a rational manner to give up responsibility-attribution.

This suffices to show how implausible it is to think that we are motivationally incapable of rationally undertaking massive revision of our reactive attitudes. Of course, Strawson can point out-correctly-that we do not know this to be the result of thoroughgoing objectivity and that it is very unlikely that thoroughgoing objectivity would have this result. But that is beside the point at issue.

Strawson has not shown either that we could not rationally be moved to desert the practice of assigning responsibility or that there could not possibly be reasons to do so. Hence the implication of the traditional view that responsibility- attribution is susceptible of general rational criticism remains intact. And the traditional view is compatible with a n aspect of Strawson’s position that I have not challenged, namely, that theoretical considerations about human freedom are not by themselves sufficient grounds for assessing the rationality of treating normal adults as responsible agents.

We can now consider whether Bennett’s sympathetic development of Strawson’s approach might lend it more force against the traditional account. Examining Bennett’s view will also help us to discern constructive reasons for supporting that account.

111.

Two of the points Bennett advances in his substantial treatment of Strawson especially pertain to the present matter. First, Bennett proposes t h a t reactive at t i tudes a re nonpropositional. Having these attitudes does not involve accepting propositions about the responsibility of the persons who are targets of the attitudes. Bennett thinks of reactive attitudes as consisting mainly in feelings that express our emotional makeup, rather than in judgments about praise- or blameworthiness. While Bennett offers no direct argument for this, he tries to rescue it from easy refutation by showing how it could account for the tension between objective and reactive attitudes. According to Bennett, this tension need not

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arise in virtue of any cognitive clash between objectivity and reactivity. It is not necessary that appropriate adoption of the objective attitude involve recognizing facts about persons or their acts which disqualify them as suitable candidates for reactive response. Instead, taking the objective attitude can dispel nonpropositional reactive attitudes in virtue of an emotional or practical clash with them. (We shall consider below how such a clash could occur.)

Bennett’s second move complements the first. It takes the form of a challenge: if reactive attitudes were propositional after all, then what feature of persons would belong to the content of justified reactive attitudes? Bennett claims that no plausible candidate for such a feature has been put forward as of yet.12 In the absence of any forthcoming reply to this challenge, Bennett concludes that Strawson probably is correct to treat the rationality of reactive attitudes and, accordingly, the rationality of responsibility-attribution as purely practical matters.

Now Bennett’s position leaves it open for him to say that a person can be irrational for continuing to have strong reactive feelings toward agents whom the person has come to regard objectively. Even if reactive and objective attitudes cannot be susceptible of cognitive conflict, it may be the case that the tendency of objectivity to generate undesirable emotional disharmony in the presence of reactive feelings provides a person with reasons to squelch reactive attitudes toward agents whom the person now treats from an objective stance. Bennett can grant that thoroughgoing objectivity might afford reasons for abandoning practices of assigning moral responsibility. But this does not show that Bennett consistently could accept the traditional view of freedom’s importance. On that view, what we have reason to believe about the presence of free agency directly affects the rationality of holding reactive, responsibility-imputing attitudes. Bennett would not allow this, since he denies that the onset of the objective attitude has any necessary relation to theoretical assessments of agents’ freedom. Reasons for believing that people cannot act freely might happen to coincide with feelings comprising the objective attitude. But, for Bennett, those reasons could not in themselves affect the rationality of continuing to have reactive attitudes. Thus Bennett’s noncognitivism about the att i tudes which respectively prompt or inhibit assignments of responsibility implies a rejection of the traditional view about the importance of free agency. If, as I shall argue, some version of the traditional view has the resources to meet Bennett’s challenge

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to specify the cognitive content of reactive attitudes, then Bennett’s position founders.

My response to Bennett will take up, in turn, his interpretation of the opposition between reactive and objective attitudes and his challenge to find plausible propositional content for reactivity.

Actually, Bennett admits that he has no explanation of how a nonpropositional reactive attitude is dispelled by an objective investigation into a person’s structure or functioning (p. 29). Nevertheless, he suggests later that objective attitudes necessarily have a n explanatory connection to teleological inquiry that reactive attitudes cannot have (pp. 36-38). This hypothesis might leave Bennett with a promising account of the distinction between reactivity and objectivity and a way to explain why the onset of objective attitudes typically drives out reactive attitudes.

Objective attitudes, Bennett proposes, always generate teleological inquiries, these being inquiries directed at achieving practical ends that are believed to be either intrinsically desirable or means to some future intrinsically desirable ends (p. 37). It is an essential feature of reactive attitudes, Bennett contends, that they could not generate or explain teleological inquiries concerning the agents toward whom the att i tudes are directed. Should these characterizations be adequate, it would be reasonable to suppose that objective attitudes normally dispel reactive feelings because the onset of the former engages some practical interest that cannot be engaged by the latter. Bennett plainly allows that reactive attitudes sometimes coexist with teleological inquiry, and so with objectivity of attitude (p. 37). (This reflects Strawson’s thought that these attitudes do not always exclude each other, but are rather opposed to one another.) Yet coexistence would be psychologically atypical for creatures like us. Our not infrequent successes in teleological inquiry into objects as complex as human beings would not normally be possible unless our aims were single- mindedly practical. And, for Bennett, this teleological concentration typically precludes the nonpractical concerns of reactivity. Thus, for moderately successful teleological investigation to be a common human achievement, objective attitudes usually must squelch reactive feelings. Cases in which reactive and objective attitudes coexist would, on this reconstruction of Bennett ’s account, be ones in which both our practical and our reactive interests are distracted, half- hearted, and hence both are less likely to be satisfied.

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However, it is not true that the interests implied or supported by reactive attitudes normally must detract from the pursuit of practically oriented interests. In fact, reactive attitudes can prompt teleological inquiry. Suppose that Myrtle is a teacher and has a very irresponsible student, Maxine. Maxine regularly misses class; when she does show up, she is late and seems intent on throwing class discussion off course. Maxine’s assignments are done hastily and are never on time. She repeatedly breaks appointments to see her teacher. Moreover, let us suppose that Maxine is accountable and blameworthy for her bad behavior.

It is easily conceivable that Myrtle’s blaming the student supports a teleological inquiry into why Maxine acts so irresponsibly. Because Myrtle happens to care enough about Maxine to feel wronged by Maxine’s behavior and to let herself blame Maxine, Myrtle might set out to investigate Maxine’s past academic record, her home situation, and so forth in order to try to understand why she is such a poor student. The investigation is teleological because it is motivated by a practical interest in more effectively educating Maxine (something that is both inherently desirable and a means to future inherently desirable goods). Fully in line with Strawson’s description of the objective attitude (p. 12), the teacher may try to understand how the student works, what “makes her tick,” with a view to determining future policy accordingly. Nonetheless, it is Myrtle’s prior reactive involvement with Maxine, arising out of their conflict-ridden relationship, that generates and supports the inquiry.

Of course, if Myrtle would have undertaken this inquiry in the same way, with similar earnestness, regardless of whether or not she had any notable reactive feelings toward the student, then the example does not tell against Bennett’s view. But we can bring out the explanatory role of reactive blame either by supposing tha t Myrtle is normally a n irresponsible teacher, basically indifferent to whether or not most of her students learn anything, or by imagining that she is badly overworked, lacking the time that she would like to devote to all of the students having difficulty in her classes. Then it is plausibly because Myrtle happens to have some special personal concern for this student, which she normally would not have, that Maxine’s behavior engages Myrtle’s reactive attitudes as the misbehavior of other students would not. Myrtle’s involvement with Maxine leads her to blame Maxine and then to see if there is any way in which she might teach Maxine more effectively.

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This scenario is not unusual. Teleological inquiry commonly does not conflict with our relationships with other people. Motivation for teleological inquiry frequently would be lacking were it not for those relationships. Likewise, the quality of our relationships would suffer were we to refrain from teleological investigation of the people with whom we have close involvements.

This criticism of the attempt to understand the tension between objective and reactive attitudes in terms of their ability to generate teleological inquiry shows that Bennett has failed to support his thesis about the nonpropositional character of these attitudes. This means, in turn, that he has not established that the rational justification of reactivity and of the corresponding practice of assigning responsibility is purely practical. All that remains of Bennett’s critique of the traditional account is his challenge: what sort of freedom could bear systematically on our reasons for treating one another as responsible agents?

IV.

Perhaps we can meet the challenge by locating more precisely where Bennett’s criterion for distinguishing reactive from objective attitudes goes astray. As we have seen, Bennett tries to discover distinctive marks of reactivity in certain boundaries on the causal powers of reactive attitudes: unlike objective attitudes, reactive feelings cannot produce or engage practical interests in results. What appears to be wrong with this idea is that even the most intimate interpersonal relationships within which reactive attitudes arise are capable of engendering and of being enhanced by teleological inquiry.l3

We can characterize reactive attitudes more adequately by considering how the results of teleological inquiries supported by reactive attitudes would be put to use. Our teacher, Myrtle, who inquired into the student’s case with an interest in more effectively educating her, was, we supposed, regarding the student reactively. The reactivity of Myrtle’s attitude could not have been detected from the course of her inquiry alone. She could have had similar interests in effective education and pursued them along the same lines while regarding Maxine objectively, from the managerial standpoint that this blameless, unfortunate student could be gotten to do things right if only her psychological makeup were better understood and more fully exploited. What distinctively reveals the reactivity of the teacher’s perspective is how she would go

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about applying the results of her inquiry. An “objective” teacher would put her knowledge of the student to a manipulative use. She would try to restructure Maxine’s environment, exerting pressures on the right psychological levers to get better performance out of her. However, because Myrtle views Maxine reactively, holding her responsible for her past conduct, Myrtle will try to improve the student’s education by a different strategy. This is, in a broad sense, the strategy of rea~0ning.l~

An “objective” teacher might also make use of the student’s reasoning capabilities. They might be among the psychological features which can be utilized to bring about improvement in the student’s performance. But the “objective” teacher need not engage the student’s abilities to reason about her behavior and its significance. From an objective stance, reasoning will be preferred only insofar as it is the most efficient strategy for securing desirable results. By contrast, the reactive Myrtle will rely on reasoning without concern solely for its relative utility. Myrtle’s interest in Maxine’s reflective capability as a rational agent is a necessary element of the ways in which she would put the findings of her inquiry to use. It is a necessary condition of Myrtle’s regarding Maxine reactively that she would aim to foster Maxine’s education by enabling Maxine to reason more adequately about it.

Myrtle’s nonincidental interest in Maxine’s reasoning does not mean that Myrtle’s strategy will be predominantly discursive. What reasoning means here is that, drawing on the fruits of her teleological investigation, Myrtle will do what she can to get Maxine to think about what schooling can do for her life and for the other persons her life touches, to appreciate why she should act differently at school. The teacher will try to engage the student’s capacities as a rational agent to reflect on her conduct, to appreciate reasons for acting in various other ways, and to set out to act on a competent critical evaluation of the reasons she has. If the student is responsible for her conduct, then it is her exercise of these abilities, together with her persistence, intelligence, and her teacher’s support, which will determine whether her teacher’s efforts to further her education have any real chance of success.

A promising response to Bennett’s challenge emerges once we describe the difference between reactive and objective attitudes in this way. Our stance toward persons is reactive only when it is a necessary feature of our attitude that we directly take account of their abilities to appreciate and to undertake to act upon reasons. It follows that reactivity is

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rationally affected by what we believe about those whom we regard reactively. We can regard people reactively only if we believe them to have sufficient powers of rational criticism and control. This suggests that we can adopt reactive attitudes only toward those whom we believe to be free agents.

Strawson could allow, as Bennett does not, that reactive attitudes carry propositional content regarding the capacities of the persons they target.15 Strawson suggests, for example, that perceiving someone to be excluded from ordinary adult relationships in virtue of psychological abnormality or being a child would make reactive response to the person inappropriate (see pp. 8, 11). Moreover, Strawson recognizes that reasoning is an important mark of reactive relations.16 However, because Strawson-together with Wolf a n d Bennett-maintains that systematic theoretical criticism of our practices of responsibility-attribution and reactive response would be incoherent, he can only grant the content of reactive attitudes potential justificatory significance in particular cases (in classes of cases that are “internal to” the whole framework of our attitudes). In section I1 we have seen that more room for rational scrutiny of our practices must be allowed. But once we take seriously the task of supplying a general rationale for responsibility, the foregoing discussion of the propositional content of reactivity shows why the traditional account of free agency’s importance should figure in t h a t rationale. Reflection on the content a n d appropriateness of reactive, as opposed to objective, attitudes reveals that what we have good reasons to believe about free agency can also serve as reasons bearing on the justifiability of attributing responsibility. This affords a n answer to Bennett’s challenge. The freedom pertinent to the justification of responsibility is the freedom displayed in agents’ abilities to consider, to appreciate, and to set out to act on reasons.

V. The related attacks that Wolf, Strawson, and Bennett have

made on the traditional account of free action’s moral importance can be seen as stemming from their common response to a dilemma. On the one hand, if the rationale for practices of responsibility-attribution depends partly on theoretical claims about human freedom, then it seems that, for all we know, those practices could turn out to be unjustifiable. If skepticism about free agency cannot easily be dismissed, then this horn of the dilemma threatens to leave us being skeptical about responsibility as well.

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The other prong of the dilemma suggests that responsibility has no theoretical justification a t all. We do not have reasons to hold people responsible tha t are grounded in some independent fact about their being responsible. l 7 Instead, the rationale for responsibility must be purely practical, centering on the desirability of the likely results of holding people responsible. The threat here is that if people are not in fact responsible agents, then it would be terribly unfair to treat them as such, regardless of the potential benefits of doing

The risk of a skepticism that undercuts responsibility troubles Wolf, Strawson, and Bennett enough that they opt to wrestle with the dilemma’s second horn. In their own ways, each proposes that disentangling our practices of responsibility-attribution from metaphysical problems about freedom does not force a crude consequentialism upon us. The upshot of the present discussion is that the best response to the dilemma is not to try to escape its first horn by abandoning the traditional view that responsibility-attribution is liable to rational review in light of analysis of the character of our freedom. A better response should admit that what we can know about free agency does enter into the rationale for responsibility, and then proceed to face head-on whatever cases can be made for skepticism about free agency. Thus, what the dilemma appears to call for is not, as the writers discussed here propose, a radical shift in our view of the relation between freedom and responsibility, but rather a radical break with those traditional conceptions of the metaphysics of free action that tend to keep the prospects for skepticism alive. While it is beyond our present task to explain how skepticism about free action can be dispelled, at least we have found reason to reaffirm the moral importance of our freedom.18

so.

NOTES

“The Importance of Free Will,” Mind, 90 (July 1981), pp. 386-405. Subsequent references to Wolf‘s views are to this essay.

2 “Accountability,” in Zak van Straaten, ed., Philosophical Subjects, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 14-47. Subsequent references to Bennett are to this essay.

Reprinted in Freedom and Resentment (London: Methuen, 1974), pp. 1- 25. The essay originally appeared in Proceedings of the British Academy, 48 (1962), pp. 1-25. References to Strawson will be to this reprinted version unless noted otherwise.

4 I discuss the distinction between reactive and objective attitudes in sections I11 and IV below. Until then, I try to follow Strawson’s account of the distinction.

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5 Actually, Wolf formulates her view in terms of free will. By presenting her argument as one concerning free action, I am not suggesting that the problems of free will and free action coincide. In the present context, however, the force of Wolf’s point is not diminished by expressing it in terms of free action.

6 At the conclusion of her paper (pp. 404-405). Wolf proposes an alternative view of the importance of freedom, namely, that freedom is necessary for any life that is not meaningless and absurd. I will not discuss this proposal here except to say that it is not clear that we can understand the pertinent sort of meaning independently of our reactive attitudes toward ourselves and others. In other words, it is not clear that Wolf’s proposal, when developed fully, would turn out to be a genuine alternative to the traditional account.

7 At this point, I think that I can fruitfully address one potential objection to my characterization of Strawson‘s view as being incompatible with the traditional account. Gary Watson has suggested to me that it may be incorrect to think that Strawson’s view necessarily clashes with the traditional account. If that account holds that reasons for attributing responsibility may be threatened should we have sufficient reasons for believing that we lack the sort of metaphysical power of freedom that is a t issue in debates about determinism, then Strawson clearly would reject the traditional account. Strawson is a compatibilist with respect to responsibility; he believes that the truth of determinism would (and should) be incapable of doing systematic damage to the network of attitudes out of which we hold one another responsible. (See, for instance, pp. 12-13.) But, as Watson has pointed out to me, if we take the traditional account only to hold that particular attributions of responsibility normally presuppose that the responsible persons actually have certain capacities that might plausibly fall under the description ‘powers of free action,’ then it is not at all clear that Strawson would disagree. In this case, showing that facts about particular persons can present reasons for withdrawing or defusing reactive responses to those persons would do nothing to establish that the traditional account is more adequate than Strawson’s view, for Strawson’s view could handle this without difficulty.

But the traditional account of freedom’s significance does not concern only those reasons that can support holding a certain person responsible on some particular occasion. The traditional account also addresses the broader matter of whether or not human free agency belongs among the general conditions of our justifiably engaging in the practice of holding persons responsible. Taken in this way, the traditional account plainly is something that Strawson aims to displace. For it represents that style of “overintellectualizing the facts as we know them” that Strawson believes to be the key mistake in the standard dialectic about responsibility (cf. p. 23). See also my comments at the conclusion of section IV below concerning the difference between Bennett’s and Strawson’s positions.

8 From Strawson’s reply to Ayer and Bennett in van Straaten, p. 265. Also see “Freedom and Resentment,” pp. 13,18,23.

9 He apparently believes that sets of interrelated attitudes that are motivated by natural human tendencies typically constitute frameworks of the sort which are immune to external rational review. “his reading is also supported by the analogy Strawson draws with induction (p. 23, fn. 1).

10 For example, see J. J. C. Smart, “Free-will, Praise and Blame,” Mind, 70 (July 1961), pp. 291-306. Smart argues that most actual praising and blaming are irrational because they involve judging, and not merely grading, people.

l1 “hat Strawson’s claim is universal, applying to every human being, is clear from his remarks on p. 11.

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The only answer that Bennett specifically examines is one he attributes to Christianity and Kant. This is the answer that reactive attitudes concern persons’ independence from empirical conditions. Bennett dismisses this as being logically incoherent. See pp. 26-28.

l3 It is true that, where relationships are intimate, the appropriateness of interests in results will partly depend on the character of the desired results. Seeking results that are incompatible with care for the other person will be inappropriate. But reactivity is not confined to intimacy. We may be indignant toward the passerby who wantonly tramps through our carefully tended garden, yet appropriately take an interest in results which are not at all constrained by care for the intruder. Certain reactive attitudes depend on our not thinking very much of other persons. Thus, the appropriateness of the practical concerns that reactivity can support does not appear to place any distinctive conditions on the substance of the desired results.

l4 Or what Lawrence Stern calls ‘dialogue.’ See “Freedom, Blame, and Moral Community,” Journal of Philosophy, 71 (February 1974), esp. pp. 73-76, 79- 81.

I5 This is why Bennett’s treatment of Strawson seems so problematic if taken as an exegesis of “Freedom and Resentment.”

l6 Strawson writes, “If your attitude towards someone is wholly objective, then though you may fight with him, you cannot quarrel with him, and though you may talk to him, even negotiate with him, you cannot reason with him. You can at most pretend to quarrel, or reason, with him” (p. 9).

l 7 This way of formulating the second side of the dilemma was suggested to me by Gary Watson’s crisp criticism of Daniel Dennett’s view of responsibility. See Wataon’s review of Dennett in the Journal of Philosophy, 83 (September 1986), pp. 517-522, esp. p. 521.

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer Stipend that supported my work on this paper. I also thank Gary Watson, an audience at Wesleyan University (especially Kent Bendall, Brian Fay, Ken Taylor, and Terry Winant), and an anonymous referee for this journal for their useful comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

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