Strawsonian Compatibilism 125maliciously, maybe from mild contempt, or instead as an upshot of mundane
indifference. For you, this might be a matter of recalling a real- life case, or
instead it might be imaginary. Suppose, for instance, your grandmother is
cheated at a checkout counter and manipulated into paying more for a product,
perhaps because she is regarded as stupid, foolish, or provincial by the sales
person, or maybe because of the color of her skin. Now consider how you would
feel, what emotions would be invoked in you, and consider, furthermore, how
you would and also how you should be inclined to respond to the person who
did this wrong thing. Ask yourself what effect it would have had, and more
importantly should have had, on you were you to have come to accept the theor-
etical judgment that no one has free will and no one is morally responsible.
Would you have, and should you have, altered the way you thought, felt, and
acted toward this wrongdoer? Someone rips off your grandma in a checkout line
because she is black and unwelcome in their store, and you should now not
blame them or think them responsible because no one has free will? Should you
withhold any expression of anger? Should you now not scold and denounce
them? What Strawson is asking the philosophical community to internalize fully
when engaging in theorizing about free will and moral responsibility is what
actual role these concepts really play in our lives.
There is a way to theorize about moral responsibility that treats the preceding
considerations as either irrelevant or of secondary importance. On this altern-
ative approach, the conditions for being and for holding morally responsible are
one thing. And true and false judgments or propositions about them can be
assessed irrespective of the role they play in our interpersonal and emotional
lives. Our actual responses to them, being secondary, can be understood insofar
as they reliably track (or not) the independent truth of the propositions regarding
whether a person (or any person) is morally responsible for what she does.
Perhaps a simple model would be appropriate to illustrate this competitor
view. So consider this: Imagine that whether any person is free with respect to
and morally responsible for what she has done is a fact that is entirely inde-
pendent of our practice of holding morally responsible. But God would also
know, with certainty, exactly what any person would deserve for her praise-
worthy or blameworthy acts. In this respect, God is a perfect arbiter. Our moral
responsibility practices and our emotions, whatever they are, could then be
entirely off track and disengaged from the truth of the matter, or they could in
some way be accurately capturing roughly the independent truth that God would
have precisely correct. Whatever the case, given this model, our interpersonal
practices are theoretically of secondary importance to understanding the nature
of the phenomena. To the extent that we can assess them, our assessment would
in the first instance be a matter of their either answering or failing to answer to
whatever the independent facts are. Moreover, we could come to discover, at
least in principle, that our practices and related emotions are incongruous with
these facts (say because no one is really morally responsible) and what we would
have reason to do is revise our practices and our emotional proclivities as best
we can to live in accord with the truth as we discover it to be. In short, there is