The Moral Psychology of Guilt by Bradford Cokelet;Corey J. Maley;

Author:Bradford Cokelet;Corey J. Maley;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786609663
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

Chapter 9

One Reactive Attitude to Rule Them All

Nicholas Sars

People incapable of guilt usually do have a good time.

—Rust Cohle, HBO’s True Detective

P. F. Strawson famously gives pride of place to the reactive attitudes in his account of moral responsibility, though he says little about guilt or any other self-reactive attitudes. This inattention is curious, given that on his view lacking capacity for self-reactive attitudes is grounds for exemption from the moral community. Perhaps because of Strawson’s limited remarks regarding them, the self-reactive attitudes have not received much attention in commentaries on his view. In this paper, I will attempt to fill this lacuna by examining the role of the self-reactive attitudes within his approach to moral responsibility. I will focus in particular on reactive guilt to show that it plays a number of roles in our interpersonal lives, from reinforcing our important personal relationships to holding ourselves accountable with respect to our own personal ideals. A better understanding of these roles, I will argue, helps to clarify Strawson’s notion of reactive attitude and to strengthen his overall argument, in addition to revealing some interesting aspects of the way various self-reactive attitudes operate within our lives.

I begin in section 1 with an overview of Strawson’s approach that emphasizes the self-reactive attitudes and explains their status as exempting conditions. In section 2, I show that an emphasis on the communicative nature of the reactive attitudes helps to explain a variety of features implicit in Strawson’s discussion of the self-reactive attitudes. In section 3, I claim that a faithful reading of Strawson should make room for the contextual nature of the personal reactive attitudes, and I argue that this reading reveals a heretofore overlooked role the self-reactive attitudes can play in understanding Strawson’s view. In section 4, I compare guilt and shame as self-reactive attitudes and argue that guilt is better suited for holding ourselves accountable with respect to individual ideals. In section 5, I show that reactive guilt can help make sense of role-reversing arguments, the upshot being that a reactive sense of guilt is uniquely capable as a means of holding oneself to account based on standards ranging from the most individual to the most general. Finally, in section 6, I return to Strawson’s overall approach to responsibility and show that a better understanding of guilt as a reactive attitude can strengthen an overlooked aspect of his argument’s underlying structure.

1. Self-Reactive Attitudes among Others

The context of Strawson’s discussion in “Freedom and Resentment” is the traditional problem of free will and determinism. The problem dates (at least) to the Presocratics, and the two main sides in the modern debate have been entrenched since (at least) around the time of Hobbes. One side (the “compatibilists”) thinks freedom and moral responsibility are compatible with a deterministic world; the other side (the “incompatibilists”) thinks they are not. The second side can be further split into those (often called “libertarians”) who think we have freedom and moral responsibility in our world and those (often called “free will skeptics” or “hard determinists”) who think we do not.

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