134 Strawsonian Compatibilism
accept that determinism is true—the squelching of all blame—is something that
would be impossible for us to achieve, given our human nature. What they are
imagining is a straightforward practical impossibility.
6.4.3. The Practical Rationality Argument
Strawson argues that even if we were able to choose to suspend fully the reactive
attitudes and so extinguish our propensity to blame, we would then have to
choose whether to take this route on the basis of what it would be practically
rational to do. But choosing to withdraw entirely from the propensity to engage
with others by means of these emotions would amount to adopting the objective
stance. It would amount to choosing to view all of human kind, including our
intimate others, as mere objects—as parts of our natural surroundings that are
simply buffeted about by the happenstance of the natural world. As regards these
options—persisting in interacting with each other from the interpersonal per-
spective or instead adopting the objective perspective—Strawson argues that we
would have to make any such choice based upon the gains and losses to human
life (70). And to this extent, Strawson contends, the cold, impersonal world we
would be left with by opting for the exclusively objective stance would hands-
down be a far worse option than one in which we persist in caring about and
engaging as interpersonal equals with each other.
6.4.4. The Multiple Viewpoints Argument
The three preceding arguments are the ones perspicuously featured in Strawson’s
original 1962 essay. But there is reason to think that he was prepared to endorse
two others. The first might be formulated as a “multiple viewpoints” argument,
and in subsequent work (1985), Strawson developed it explicitly. This argument
is meant to explain away the appearance that determinism and more generally an
exclusively scientific account of the human condition is incompatible with
freedom and moral responsibility. The central idea is that from one viewpoint—
that of the interpersonal stance—certain features of the human condition are ren-
dered salient. But from another—the objective stance—those features are not
accessible. Instead, from this perspective, what is rendered salient are details
about the underlying causal machinery that explains how the spatio- temporal
order unfolds. One can mistakenly believe that the truths accessible from the one
perspective render false or unwarranted what seems apparent from the other. But
the viewpoints and the propositions pertinent to each are not incompatible.
Rather, they offer access to different but compatible collections of truths.^11 The
following analogy might prove useful: Our ordinary concept of solidity has it
that solid objects, such as the surface of a table, are those items that completely
occupy a spatial region. But from the vantage point of physics, paradigm exam-
ples of solid objects contain a considerable amount of unoccupied space within
and among the atoms composing them. While it might seem that a radical result
follows—that there are no solid objects—this is not in fact so. Rather, what we