Picture someone who raised you. They are older now, and for a while something has been going wrong — names slipping, whole afternoons lost, the same question asked four times in an hour, each time as though for the first. On a good day they are almost themselves. This is not a good day.
And on this day they say something to you that is genuinely cruel. Not confused — cruel. It is aimed exactly where it will hurt, at the one tender place only someone who has known you your whole life could find. Perhaps it is about your weight, or your divorce, or the child you never had. And for half a second, before you can stop it, the old reaction rises: the hurt with an accusation inside it. How dare you. You know exactly what that does to me. You chose the one thing that would land.
And then, just as quickly, it drops. Because you remember what you are sitting across from. The part of them that used to take aim — that knew you, and could have chosen to be kind or chosen to wound — that part is mostly gone. What is left said a cruel thing without anyone, in the full sense, standing behind it and meaning to hurt you. And the anger is not suppressed. You do not grit your teeth and forgive them. It simply has nothing to fix on. And you find yourself doing something else entirely — lowering your voice, changing the subject, steering them towards the window and the birdfeeder, the way you would handle a situation rather than answer a person. You are managing them now. You are not resenting them. Somewhere in that half-second the cruel remark stopped being an insult and became a symptom.
Stay with that, because something has happened, and setting it out will take a while. You did not decide they could have done otherwise, and you did not decide they could not. You never reached the metaphysics at all. You simply stopped blaming them — completely, at once — and you did it by changing what kind of thing they were to you. A moment earlier they were a someone, a person who could wound you. Now they are a something, a situation you tend. The same body in the same chair; two entirely different ways of seeing it. And your blame lived entirely in the difference between the two.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the fifth of eight episodes on choice and blame. Last time we built the third and last of our three answers to the deep question — the libertarian, who said that yes, you really are the author of what you do; the future was open, and you reached into it and closed it. And then we watched the very openness he needed turn back on him, threatening to make even your finest choice a matter of chance rather than something you author. Here is where we stand. Three answers — the determinist; the compatibilist, who says you are free if the choice is properly yours; and the libertarian, who says the future was genuinely open — each given its best case, each left wounded, and not one able to defeat the other two. We walked up to the question a whole moral life seems to rest on, and we could not settle it.
Tonight someone approaches that same question and does the one thing none of the first three thought to do. He does not try to answer it. Rather than push against the impasse, he turns it around — and asks a question none of the first three raised: why did we ever assume that settling the metaphysics was the only route to knowing what to do with our blame? His name is Peter Strawson, and this is the point at which the whole argument changes direction.
Let me be exact about the question we have been trying to answer.
For four episodes we have been working at a single question: could anyone, ever, really have done otherwise? And we have brought everything to bear on it. We built the causal chain — every choice produced by the one before it — and asked whether being caused means being unfree. We built the willing addict, and the inner mechanism that would have responded to reason. We built the self who begins a new chain, and the divided will in the open moment. Three serious answers, each made as strong as its ablest defender makes it, and not one of them settled the matter. The question is still standing. The metaphysics will not resolve.
And there is something worth noticing about why we were working at it — something so obvious it is easy to miss. We were working at it because we assumed something. We assumed that the answer to that question was the thing that would tell us what to do with our blame. Settle whether he could have done otherwise, and then you will know whether your anger at the man at the table is justified or unjust. The believer expects the answer to come back yes, he is free, so blame is warranted. The person out to debunk expects it to come back no, it is all just atoms, so blame must be set down. Opposite expectations — and underneath them the very same assumption: that the practical question, what do I do with my blame, waits on the answer to the metaphysical one. That a whole moral life is suspended until the metaphysics reports back.
In 1962 a philosopher at Oxford, Peter Strawson, delivered a lecture to the British Academy called "Freedom and Resentment." It is widely regarded as the most influential thing written on this problem in the last hundred years. What makes it important is that Strawson looks at everyone straining to answer this question — and he does not offer a better way to answer it. He asks why we are all so certain we have to answer it at all.
He sets it out like this. Look, he says, at the two camps who have been arguing about free will — they are the same two we have already met. On one side are those who say determinism is no threat: you can still be free and responsible in a determined world. Strawson calls them the optimists. That is our compatibilist — the willing addict, the mechanism that listens to reason. On the other side are those who say that if determinism is true then it is over: real responsibility is impossible, and we would have to give it up. Strawson calls them the pessimists. That is our hard sceptic, and something of our libertarian too. The optimist says the practice survives because determinism is not really a threat. The pessimist says the practice dies because determinism is a fatal threat. And Strawson says: both of you are making the same mistake, and it is a large one. Both of you assume that the practice of holding people responsible — blaming them, resenting them, being grateful to them — rests on the metaphysics. The optimist thinks the metaphysics supports it. The pessimist thinks the metaphysics could bring it down. And Strawson asks the question neither side thought to ask — and this is why we are here tonight — what if the practice does not rest on the metaphysics at all? What if holding people responsible has its own basis, something it stands on that was never the answer to could he have done otherwise — and the whole dispute has been an argument about whether the metaphysics supports something that never depended on it?
That is the claim. And the moment you hear it, you want to object, and you should, because it can sound like a trick — as though he is about to wave the hard question away: never mind whether anyone is really free, just carry on blaming, it all works out. That would be a cheat, so we have to proceed carefully. To see whether the practice really does have its own basis, we have to do one thing first. We have to stop discussing the theory of responsibility and look closely at the thing itself — at what holding someone responsible actually is, beneath the philosophy. And the surprising part, the thing Strawson saw that no one before him quite had, is that you already looked at it tonight. You looked at it in the first two minutes, sitting across from the person who raised you. You simply did not know that was what you were seeing.
So return to the chair — the person who raised you, and the cruel remark.
When the hurt rose in you, in that half-second before it fell, what was it made of? Not a theory. You did not run a quick calculation about the metaphysics of dementia and conclude that blame was warranted. The hurt came first, whole and immediate, with the small accusation already folded inside it: you knew what that would do, and you aimed it anyway. That feeling — the hurt that carries an accusation, the resentment that says you owed me better than that — is what Strawson gives a name to. He calls it a reactive attitude. And his claim is that attitudes like this one are not an optional extra we add to human life once we have checked whether free will is real. They are part of what it is to treat another person as a person.
Consider how many of them there are, once you begin naming them. Resentment, when someone wrongs you. Gratitude, when someone goes out of their way for you. Indignation, when you watch someone wrong a third person — that heated feeling, on someone else's behalf, that is not even about you. Hurt feelings. The warmth of being forgiven. Love, and the particular injuries only love is open to. Each of these is a way of being available to another person — of letting what they do land on you as something that matters, something with a claim in it, something you can be wronged by or grateful for. Strawson's term for the whole family of them is the reactive attitudes, and his large, simple observation is this: to hold someone responsible just is to be open to these feelings towards them. That is not a consequence of holding them responsible, nor the theory behind it. It is the thing itself. Blame, taken all the way down, is not a verdict you hand down. It is resentment — the reactive attitude with the accusation folded inside.
Now, that family of feeling is one way of being with a person, and tonight you felt what it is to drop out of it. When the hurt fell and you began steering them towards the birdfeeder, you moved into the other stance, the one Strawson sets against it. He calls it the objective attitude. It is what remains when the reactive attitudes switch off. In the objective stance you no longer see a someone who wronged you; you see a something to be handled. You do not resent the person; you manage the situation. You ask what is wrong with them, what they are likely to do next, how to steer them, how to keep everyone safe — the sort of questions you would ask about the weather. No one is furious at a storm for ruining the wedding; you track it, you plan around it, you take cover. That is the objective attitude. And the reason the cruel remark stopped wounding you the instant you remembered the illness is that you moved, without deciding to, out of the reactive stance and into the objective one. The wound needs a someone on the other end of it, and you had replaced the someone with a something.
And here is the observation that turns this from a mere distinction into something that changes the whole question. Strawson points to when we take the objective attitude towards a person. We do take it — but look at the cases. The very young child, who is not yet a full agent. The person in the grip of serious mental illness, who is not himself. The one whose action we have decided was so distorted by something — terror, compulsion, a tumour pressing on the part of the brain that chooses — that the ordinary demand does not apply. We step back into the objective stance at the margins, in the exceptional case. And we step back into it only ever temporarily, and always for a reason about that particular person. What we never do — what Strawson says we cannot do, not really, not as a way of living — is take the objective attitude towards everyone, all the time, as a matter of principle. Try it as a thought. Decide, from now on, that no one is ever truly responsible for anything — that every person who wrongs you or delights you or breaks your heart is, like the storm, a system running off its prior causes, a something to be managed and never a someone to be resented or thanked. Decide to regard your partner, your child, your closest friend that way. Permanently.
You can say the words. You cannot live inside them. Strawson's claim — and it is a claim about human beings, not about physics — is that we are not psychologically able to keep up the objective attitude towards the people we are actually bound to. The reactive attitudes are not a position we argued our way into and could argue our way back out of. They are the condition of being in a relationship with anyone at all. Stop resenting, stop being grateful, stop being hurt, towards everyone, for good, and you have not become enlightened. You have stopped having relationships. You have moved every person you know into that chair, and turned the whole of humanity into someone with dementia — a world of symptoms to be managed. And whatever that is, it is not a life among people.
Keep resentment in mind in particular, because we return to it, and hard — not in these eight episodes, but later in this series, when we stop asking whether to blame at all and start asking what to do with the blame once it is already there: when we come to shame, and to anger, and to the strange thing we call forgiveness. The feeling you had for that half-second across the table will turn out to be fundamental, and not only here. But that is a long way off. For now the point is simpler. Holding someone responsible is the reactive attitudes; the reactive attitudes are part of what it is to treat anyone as a person; and we cannot give them up wholesale without giving up persons wholesale. Which means — and we can finally say it — they do not appear to be waiting on anything. They were never the conclusion of an argument. So what becomes of the question we could not answer?
So what becomes of the question we could not answer.
Two consequences follow from what we have just seen, and they point in opposite directions. Both matter; miss either one and you carry away the wrong lesson.
Here is the first. For four episodes that question has carried a threat with it — because you worked out, right at the start, that your entire moral life, every instance of blame, every grudge, the accusations you rehearse at two in the morning, seems to rest on a single claim: they could have done otherwise. And then you spent three hard episodes discovering that you cannot establish that claim. The most capable people who ever lived cannot. So the worry was a reasonable one: if I cannot establish the claim, the whole practice of blame is unwarranted. If no one is really, ultimately free, then all my blaming has been a mistake, a cruelty, something I am obliged to put down. That is the pessimist's worry, and most of us have some version of it.
Strawson's argument takes it away. Look again at what you actually found across the table tonight. Your resentment towards the person who raised you did not wait for a proof. It rose on its own, at once, before any metaphysics — and it fell just as quickly, not because you had settled whether they could have done otherwise, but because you stopped seeing them as a someone at all. The reactive attitudes were never reading off a verdict about ultimate freedom. They were never the conclusion of the argument we could not finish. They rest on their own basis — being in a relationship with a person — and that basis was never the thing in dispute. Which means the deep question and the daily practice are not one thing. They are two. And you can leave the deep one open — unsettled, perhaps for good — and the daily one does not collapse. You do not have to settle the metaphysics in order to go on loving people and holding them to account. You never did. The thing you were so certain your whole moral life rested on turns out to belong to an altogether separate question.
That is the relief, and it is real, and it is the first reason this paper changed everything. So take it for yourself — not my example, but yours. Bring to mind someone you genuinely resent right now, someone who wronged you and whom you have not forgiven. Now see what is actually holding that resentment up. It did not first ask you to prove they could have done otherwise; it arrived before you had proved anything. And if I could show you tonight, beyond doubt, that they could not have done otherwise — that it was all caused, all the way down — ask yourself honestly whether the resentment would simply disappear, or whether it would still be there in the morning, exactly as strong, because it was never living on the metaphysics in the first place.
Do not answer too quickly. Just find where the resentment actually rests.
Now, the second consequence. This is the point at which it would be easy to mislead you, so I will go slowly and plainly. It would be very easy here to breathe out and say: thank goodness — blame is natural, it is built in, it does not need the metaphysics, so I can stop worrying; my anger at the man at the table is fine. That is the wrong thing to take away, and it is not what Strawson said, and if you leave with it you have taken the comfort and missed the claim.
Look hard at what Strawson actually gave you. He showed that holding people responsible is natural — unchosen, deep, bound up with relationship, something we cannot give up wholesale. He did not show that it is justified. Those are two different words, and everything still ahead of us turns on the difference between them. Natural means you cannot help it. Justified means it is right. And human history is full of practices that were natural — deep, unchosen, all but universal, things people genuinely could not imagine living without — and that were also cruelty, were wrong, and were given up, painfully and late. "It is natural, it is how human beings are, you cannot ask people to stop" is one of the oldest defences there is, and it has been offered for some of the worst things we have ever done. So the fact that resentment is built into us, that we cannot take the objective attitude towards everyone, tells us the practice is unavoidable. It does not tell us the practice is fair.
There are philosophers whose entire point this is — we will hear one of them out fully next time — and the sharpest of them puts it plainly: Strawson has described the practice beautifully and justified it not at all. Naturalness is not a justification. A reactive attitude can be as automatic as a flinch and still be responding to something that is not real.
So take the measure of what Strawson actually did, because it is stranger and larger than "blame is fine." He did not answer the question you walked in with. You walked in asking is my blame fair — and you thought that question waited on the answer to could he have done otherwise. Strawson separated the two. He showed that whether your blame is natural has nothing to do with the metaphysics, and that whether your blame is justified is a different question again — one the metaphysics was never going to answer either. He did not get you past the question you could not answer. He showed you it was the wrong question to be asking — the question you actually need to answer is a different one, one that was there all along, and no one has answered it yet. Including him. Especially him.
So where has tonight left you? Let me put it plainly, because it is a strange place, and it is easy to seize the wrong half of it.
You came in with one question that had two very different questions fused inside it: is he free — and, tied to that, so what do I do with my anger? You had treated those two as a single question your whole life, the second unable to move until the first was settled. And the first three episodes were you working at the first of them: trying to settle whether he is free, so that the second could finally be taken up. Tonight the two came apart. Not because anyone finally answered the deep question — no one did; it stands where we left it. They came apart because Strawson showed that they were never one question to begin with. Whether anyone is ultimately free is a question about the universe, and it may never be resolved. What you do when a friend betrays you is a question about something human beings do to one another, and it has its own basis; it was never waiting on the universe to report back. You can leave the first suspended for good. The second is still right there in your hands, every day, and no less pressing.
It is relief and exposure in the same breath. The relief you already have: you can stop straining at the metaphysics. The exposure is the part to carry out with you. For four episodes the unanswerable question was also a way to avoid this one. As long as the real question was is he free — a question no one can answer — you had a reason to postpone your blame and wait: I cannot know whether it is fair, because I cannot know whether he is free, so the question is on hold. Strawson has taken that away. He showed that whether your blame is fair was never hostage to the metaphysics — which means you can no longer postpone it on those grounds. That evasion is gone. The question of what your blame is for, and whether it is justified, now stands in the open, and it is yours, and no one — not Strawson, not I — has answered it. He did not end the search. He only turned you away from the one question you had mistaken for the only way forward.
We are past the middle of the series now, and the question has changed shape. It is no longer could he have done otherwise, but what is my blame even for, and could it ever be fair — and we are no longer permitted to answer, well, who can say, it all depends on free will. It does not depend on free will. Strawson saw to that.
So next time we take up the one voice in this whole argument that takes that exposure seriously and follows it all the way. Tonight one critic put the point quietly: natural is not justified. Next time he pushes it hard — and then follows it further than any of the first three answers was willing to go, to a conclusion about your blame you will want to call cold, or heartless, or worse. It is the answer in this argument you will be most anxious to dismiss. So we will do the hard thing: build his case at its most convincing, until you feel its full force — and only then ask whether the thing you wanted to call heartless is heartless at all.
Tonight, carry one thing out with you. When the resentment rises — at someone you love who has let you down, or at yourself, in the dark, going over the case against yourself — notice it early, while it is still fresh. It did not ask the metaphysics for permission to exist, and it will not accept the metaphysics as an answer. It is doing something, that feeling, to them and to you. You still do not know whether what it is doing is fair. That used to be a question you could leave with the metaphysics. It is not anymore. It came home with you tonight, and it is yours to work on, whether or not anyone ever could have done otherwise.
That is where we are. The two questions have come apart, the evasion is gone, and the harder question is finally in the open.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.