Oxford, 1919–2006

P. F. Strawson

Resentment, gratitude, indignation and love are not conclusions we reached by deciding that people have free will. They are part of what it is to live among other people, and no theory about determinism could make us give them up.

The view

Peter Strawson was one of the leading Oxford philosophers of the twentieth century, best known for work on logic, language and metaphysics. In 1962 he gave a British Academy lecture, "Freedom and Resentment", that changed the free will debate more than any other single paper. His son, Galen Strawson, became one of the debate's leading sceptics; see his page.

Strawson pointed out that both sides of the old argument shared a mistake. Pessimists said that if determinism is true, blame is never justified. Optimists replied that blame is justified by its good effects, as a way of shaping behaviour. Both treated our practices of praise and blame as if they were a policy that needs a justification from outside. Strawson said they are nothing of the kind. They express what he called reactive attitudes: the natural human responses to the good or ill will that other people show us.

The argument

If someone treads on my hand by accident, I may feel pain but not resentment. If they do it out of contempt, I resent it, and the resentment is a response to their attitude towards me. After Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment" (1962)

Strawson then asked what makes us suspend these attitudes. Two kinds of consideration do it. Some excuse a particular act: "he didn't mean to", "she was pushed", "they didn't know". These show that the act did not express ill will after all. Others exempt the agent altogether: "he's only a child", "she wasn't herself", "he's seriously ill". These lead us to take what Strawson called the objective attitude, treating someone as a person to be managed, treated or cured rather than as a participant in a relationship. Sort the cases below.

Now the key step. Neither kind of consideration has anything to do with determinism. Excuses work by showing there was no ill will; exemptions work by showing that the person is not, for now, a normal participant. The general truth of determinism, if it is a truth, would show neither of these things about anyone. So it could not rationally lead us to give up the reactive attitudes across the board, and even if it could, we would have no way of doing it. The framework of these attitudes is part of human life. It neither needs nor permits an external justification.

Where he meets Dennett

Dennett took a great deal from Strawson. Both start from the practice of holding people responsible, not from metaphysics. Both think the practice is broadly in good order, and that the threat from determinism was always an illusion born of asking the wrong question. Dennett's moral agents' club is, in part, Strawson's community of participants with the rules written down.

Where they part

Strawson is often read as saying that our attitudes are simply given, part of human nature and beyond criticism. Dennett wanted more: an account of why creatures like us came to have such attitudes, and why they are worth having. His answer was evolutionary and social. Reactive attitudes are the emotional machinery of a system of trust and cooperation, and they can be criticised and refined when they misfire. Strawson tells us we cannot step outside the practice; Dennett tries to explain, from outside as well as inside, what the practice is for.

See every view compared →

Further reading

• P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment", Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), reprinted in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (Methuen, 1974; Routledge, 2008).
• Michael McKenna and Paul Russell (eds), Free Will and Reactive Attitudes (Ashgate, 2008): essays on Strawson's paper.
• Moral responsibility, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.