128 Strawsonian Compatibilism
this that Strawson found especially objectionable about this style of compatibil-
ist argumentation—it’s what in Strawson’s estimation made their argument a
form of one- eyed utilitarianism. Tending exclusively to this dimension of the
facts, Strawson protested, suggests to the libertarian adversaries that as compati-
bilists see it, the significance of blaming is just a matter of social utility. But this
really does seem to get things wrong. How so? Recall the case in which a loved
one was wronged. Were you to confront the wrongdoer, it would be odd to think
that your grounds for blaming him would be that it would be socially beneficial.
Your moral anger—your resentment or indignation—oughtn’t to be conceptual-
ized as a mere social tool for altering the wrongdoer’s conduct. Rather, your
emotional response would be, Strawson argued, a vehicle of your sincere expres-
sion of your anger and moral disapproval. The moral psychology Strawson
invokes, and the theory of moral responsibility he builds upon it, constitutes a
proposal that aims to avoid this problem.
Third, and related to the second, a standard criticism in Strawson’s time of
utilitarian justifications of blame and punishment, praise and reward, is that they
are justified solely or mainly in terms of forward- looking considerations. The
trouble with using only such resources to justify these practices is that they can
yield the wrong results: Sometimes there will be no social utility at all in blaming
a genuinely morally responsible wrongdoer (maybe she is just about to drop
dead). Other times it would be of greater utility to blame an innocent person
rather than the guilty party for some wrongdoing. Strawson, however, seemed not
to be animated so much by this concern. Indeed, he granted to his optimist oppo-
nents the relevance of the social utility of a system of rewards and punishments.
What, as Strawson saw it, seems to be missing in an exclusively utilitarian set of
resources for justifying blame and punishment is a backward- looking constraint
that links the blame to the blameworthy person, showing how it is that the blame
is rendered a fitting response to objectionable conduct. A familiar approach in
Strawson’s time accounted for this in terms of the wrongdoer’s genuinely deserv-
ing to be the one who is blamed or punished. While Strawson did note the relev-
ance of desert in our responsibility practices, he did not emphasize it. It was,
rather, his appeal to considerations of moral psychology that were meant to
account for this relation to fittingness (we’ll turn to this topic momentarily).
Now consider Strawson’s libertarian incompatibilist contemporaries. The
burden the classical incompatibilist shouldered was two- fold. One was norm-
ative. It was to offer a justification for blaming and punishing. The other was
metaphysical. It was to provide an account of free agency that does not involve a
causal (causally deterministic) relation between agent and action. Moreover, the
sort of metaphysical solution needed to be one amenable to the normative
burden—that fact of an agent’s possessing and acting from the relevant sort of
libertarian freedom must be able to aid in justifying blame and punishment.
Consider first the metaphysical burden. It is natural to associate the libertarian
metaphysical view Strawson described as obscure and panicky with the agent-
causal view advanced by philosophers like Roderick Chisholm (1964).
Chisholm’s defense of libertarianism (as discussed in Section 3.4) postulated