Once More to the Limits of Evil
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Once More to the Limits of Evil Chad Van Schoelandt1 Received: 21 February 2019 / Accepted: 18 January 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020 “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Howard Beale, Network (1976)
P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” provides the fundamental insight that emotions constitute one mode through which we hold each other responsible. We can study responsibility through examining its corresponding emotions; examining such emotions reveals the corresponding form of responsibility. Central to this approach is resentment, along with the closely related emotions of indignation and guilt.1 Through examining these emotions and the conditions of their fittingness, we can discover the conditions of moral responsibility.2 For instance, Strawson examines the conditions that would exculpate someone from liability to fitting resentment to clarify what sorts of freedom are or are not needed for responsibility. He argues that we withhold resentment of an apparent wrongdoer when we discover that she was coerced, but we would not withhold resentment of her simply on the discovery that the universe is deterministic. Strawson thus attempts to show that, within our emotion-constituted practice, though responsibility requires some form of freedom, it is not a form of freedom that is affected by determinism. A number of theorists take up this Strawsonian method of understanding responsibility through resentment, though conceptions of resentment diverge. This paper focuses on two broad views in the Strawsonian tradition, namely an expressive view and a representation view of resentment. Ultimately, the paper argues for the 1
As is typical among Strawsonians, I treat resentment, indignation, and guilt as differing only in how the experiencer of the emotion relates to the emotion’s target. A victim resents the person who wronged her, the wrongdoer experiences guilt, and a third-party experiences indignation. While I focus on resentment, the more basic emotion of anger may be apt (Aristotle 2004, bk. II.2; Frye 1983: 85–86; Shoemaker 2015: ch. 3). 2 More precisely, we learn the conditions for one form of responsibility. A complete account of responsibility would take account of a broader range of emotions, such as shame and gratitude. Such an account would likely find that responsibility is multifaceted, with diverse means of holding responsible associated with different standards or qualities of will. On this, see Shoemaker (2013) and Watson (1996).
* Chad Van Schoelandt [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Tulane University, 105 Newcomb Hall, 1229 Broadway, New Orleans, LA 70118, USA
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superiority of the representation view. It has six sections. The first presents the expressive view, according to which reactive attitudes are communicative entities or forms of moral address.3 Were the expressive view correct, it would clarify the way we hold people responsible, showing that we are in a central way attempting to communicate with
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