Class 5.2: The Participant Stance
Today we turn, in pursuit of trying to understand what makes conflicts “personal”, to what may be one of our most difficult readings of the semester, “Freedom and Resentment” by the philosopher Peter F. Strawson, which is commonly cited as one of the most important and influential philosophy articles published in the twentieth century.
Strawson’s article is not in the first instance about interpersonal conflict, let alone about what makes conflicts personal. On the face of it, it is about the relationship between free will and determinism. But Strawson tries to take a fresh angle on thinking about the intractable and difficult question of how free will is connected to determinism, by instead thinking about interpersonal relationships. This leads him to introduce a lot of new and important questions about how interpersonal relationships work and what is involved in relating to someone as a person. That is what we are interested in, and many readings later in the semester will draw on or advance these ideas - or just refer back to them.
Sir Peter Strawson
Sir P.F. Strawson
Peter Strawson was one of the landmark figures of English-speaking philosophy in Britain in the 1950’s through the 1980’s. Most of his work and contributions have nothing to do with relationships or moral philosophy, and he once said that he did not feel like he had very much to say about these things. But he was knighted for his service to philosophy. When he delivered the lecture that we are reading for today’s class, he was in his early forties. The lecture took place within a few hours and just a mile and a half down the road from where Brian Epstein, a young British entrepreneur, was convincing George Martin of Parlophone Records to sign the young group of guitarists out of Liverpool who he had been representing for the past few months. So if you took just the right walk that day, you could have been there for the Beatles to be offered their first recording contract and then still caught Strawson’s seminal lecture.
Freedom and Resentment
Strawson’s goal in “Freedom and Resentment” is to try to resolve the impasse in the debate about free will, moral responsibility, and determinism, by tackling these questions from a different direction than they have normally been tackled. This technique - of trying to tackle a question obliquely, rather than head-on - or of looking or analogous or closely related questions where people have not already worked out what they think - is a valuable tool in philosophy to try to make progress on especially difficult questions where other people have gotten stuck. The idea is that if a century or two of people trying very similar things has not worked, we should be more optimistic about trying something different.
The indirect approach that Strawson takes in his article is to try to connect freedom and responsibility to the ordinary parts of interpersonal relationships. He wants to try to show us that if “pessimists” about free will and determinism are right, then we need to live in a world in which human relationships are impossible - not just a world in which we have ordinary human relationships but issue slightly less harsh prison sentences, or something like that.
Reactive Attitudes and the Participant Stance
Two of the most important pieces of new terminology introduced by Strawson in his article are “reactive attitudes” and the “objective” vs “participant” stance. Watch carefully for the first place where Strawson uses each of these words, and take notes on what each of these terms is supposed to mean. How are they related to one another?
Skip Section 5
As you do the reading, you may (and therefore should) skip section 5, roughly pages 199-205, or about the third quarter of the article. But do finish up by reading the closing sections of the paper after that.
