Strawsonian Compatibilism 129that free persons are distinct substances who have special causal powers to
initiate free actions. He accepted that if a person acts freely, she has the power to
be an uncaused mover and so has a power commonly attributed only to God
(Chisholm, 1964, in Watson, 1982: 32). Furthermore, Chisholm argued, if
persons are free in this way, it is in principle not possible to have a complete
science of man (33). It would not be surprising to think that a compatibilist
would describe such a view as obscure and panicky. But this is probably too
hasty. It seems that Strawson had in mind more generally any libertarian theory
attempting to make sense of “contra- causal” freedom (Strawson, 79), which was
at the time understood as a kind of free action that does not involve causation by
prior events or states, including motives and desires.^4
Next consider the normative burden. Strawson claimed that libertarians were
right to recoil at the impersonal one- eyed and forward- looking utilitarian
resources for justifying blame and punishment. But he charged that in doing so,
they mistakenly appealed to “an intuition of fittingness” that required an exercise
of libertarian freedom. What did Strawson mean by “an intuition of fittingness,”
and what normative work was this supposed to do? One relevant dispute in
Strawson’s day involved a competitor account to the utilitarian justification of
blame and punishment. This competitor was a form of retributivism. The retribu-
tivists Strawson had in mind held that blame or punishment was deserved when
a person was guilty of wrongdoing. Most importantly, the justification for this
judgment of desert was rooted in nothing other than a brute intuition of fitting-
ness: it is just fitting that one who is guilty of freely doing wrong is to be blamed
or punished.^5 Notice that, in stark contrast to the utilitarian justification, this
strategy is exclusively backward- looking. Blame and punishment’s warrant is
limited solely to its backward- looking relation to the wrong done by a free agent.
Strawson took it as his dialectical burden in opposition to these libertarian
incompatibilists to offer a more plausible account of the facts of our human
nature as free agents. He also proposed an account of the normative warrant of
our blaming and praising practices according to which there is no need for any
appeal to intuitions of fittingness and the metaphysical presuppositions about
free agency that might appear to go with them.
6.2. Strawson’s Assumptions about Moral Psychology
As we have noted, Strawson’s arguments for compatibilism are built upon his
conception of moral responsibility’s nature. This conception arises from assump-
tions about the moral psychology of normally functioning adult human beings.
Hence, it will be instructive to begin an examination of Strawson’s own views
with a brief sketch of these assumptions. The focal point for his view of our
moral psychology is the collection of what he called the reactive attitudes,
wherein he attended mainly to moral resentment, indignation, and guilt.
It is best to think of a reactive attitude as a distinctive kind of emotion, one
that is a reaction to an attitude of another or to an attitude of one’s own. A para-
digm case is an emotional reaction to an attitude of ill will revealed in immoral