Strawsonian Compatibilism 127in the face of determinism. Libertarians are pessimistic about it. It is for this
reason that, to defend the legitimacy of freedom and responsibility, libertarians
often develop metaphysical theses that in some way insulate these concepts from
a scientific world view that could subsume them. Skeptics, in this conception,
see no hope and, accepting that determinism or something like it is true, reject
the thesis that any one acts freely or is morally responsible.
Strawson charged his philosophical contemporaries—compatibilists and lib-
ertarians, as well as hard determinists—with a failure to appreciate properly the
facts relevant to understanding moral responsibility’s nature. And he proposed to
offer a “reconciliation” between them by focusing on the relevant facts and then
setting out a set of arguments for compatibilism that were informed by them. To
understand his charge that both sides were misguided, it will be helpful to con-
sider the theses and arguments on each side that Strawson took to be inadequate.
In each case, his opinion of their failures was expressed with biting jabs. Com-
patibilists, Strawson complained, argued for their thesis with a “one- eyed utili-
tarianism” (1982: 79), suggesting that they were blind to or ignorant of other
considerations that thus distorted their theorizing. Libertarians, instead, opted for
an “obscure and panicky metaphysics” (80) and only were able to offer, as he
put it, “an intuition of fittingness—a pitiful intellectualist trinket for a philo-
sopher to wear as a charm against the recognition of his humanity” (79). Well,
what were these theses and arguments about which Strawson wrote with such
derision?
Consider first Strawson’s compatibilist contemporaries.^3 Strawson’s main
focus was on the classical compatibilists’ attention to “the efficacy of the prac-
tices of punishment, and of moral condemnation and approval, in regulating
behaviour in socially desirable ways” (60). Such efficacy is consistent with the
truth of determinism, and the freedom presupposed by this efficacy is just the
freedom from being impeded or encumbered from acting as one wants. When
one’s behavior is the product of being impeded by being coerced, or of being
encumbered by innocent ignorance or mistake, there is no efficacy to regulating
behavior by way of the pertinent social sanctions. So, in short, blame is justified
when there is social utility in applying it, and there is only social utility in apply-
ing it when an agent acts freely in the simple compatibilist sense of “acts
freely”—that is, when she is doing what she wants unimpeded and unencum-
bered, from her own intentions and for her own reasons (60–1).
We note here three points about these two classical compatibilist theses:
First, as regards their account of freedom, as we remarked above (Section
3.1), this account of freedom faces difficulties in distinguishing cases in which a
person’s own wants and desires or other motivational factors are sources of her
lack of freedom, as is the case with phobias or compulsive disorders. It will be
instructive to consider later on in the chapter whether Strawson’s proposal is
better able to avoid this problem.
Second, attending exclusively to the efficacy of our blaming and praising
practices in terms of social utility overlooks the importance of our engaging in
these activities when we are actually involved in our interpersonal lives. It was