130 Strawsonian Compatibilism
action. In such a case, the wrongdoer’s attitude serves as a basis for the person
who is wronged or a third- party observer to react with an emotion suited to the
wrongdoer’s attitude of ill will. Strawson focused almost exclusively on negative
cases of this sort. He regimented these cases by calling one’s reactive anger
when it is directed toward someone who has wronged oneself resentment, and
one’s reactive anger to ill will directed toward someone who has wronged
another indignation. When an agent is herself the source of the ill will at which
reactive anger aims, he calls it guilt.
What roles do the reactive attitudes play in our psychology? Two are espe-
cially pertinent to Strawson’s understanding of moral responsibility. First,
reactive attitudes are central to the engaged participant stance we adopt toward
one another when we regard ourselves and others as members of a moral com-
munity, as fellow persons with whom we must get along and as beings who are
at least potential objects of our affections and concerns. Call this the interper-
sonal stance. When we authentically engage another as spouse, lover, friend,
enemy, coworker, party affiliate, adversary, colleague, or as a stranger whom we
assume engages others in similar ways, we adopt the interpersonal stance. Now
contrast this with a disinterested stance we can adopt as curious onlookers inter-
ested in the goings- on in the environment, whether they concern toasters, aard-
varks, or human beings. Call this the objective stance. From this disinterested
perspective, one is in a sense able to remove or distance oneself from the emo-
tional connections that animate the interpersonal stance. When one responds to
one’s spouse, for instance, due to her anger or her sorrow, one engages him or
her as an intimate whose emotions matter and are liable to affect one’s own emo-
tions in fitting ways. But when a therapist or a psychiatrist looks upon the very
same episode from the objective stance, the therapist might see it, coolly and in
disinterested fashion, as the upshot of certain causes resulting from earlier con-
ditioning or from alterations in brain chemistry. This stance is the one that is also
adopted in purely theoretical pursuits such as neuroscience or empirical
psychology.
Second, we are inescapably prone to the interpersonal stance and its attendant
reactive attitudes. It is not optional. This stance, and experiencing and being sus-
ceptible to being targeted by the reactive attitudes, is a feature of our human
nature. Like the therapist or psychiatrist, we do have recourse to the objective
attitude, even when engaged with those who are closest to us. And we can use
this, as Strawson notes, as a shelter from the “strains of involvement” (67).
However, while this does afford us the prospect of some distance from or even
suspension of the reactive attitudes, the objective stance is not one we are
capable of sustaining indefinitely. It would be in a certain way inhuman. Or at
any rate this is how Strawson understood the matter.
6.3. Strawson’s Theory of Moral Responsibility
Although Strawson never wrote explicitly in terms of a theory of moral responsib-
ility, it is clear from his 1962 essay that he endorsed one, even if only implicitly.