144 Strawsonian Compatibilism
Russell, Paul. 1995. Freedom and Moral Sentiment. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wallace, R. Jay. 1994. Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Here are two collections of essays devoted just to Strawson’s “Freedom and
Resentment:”
McKenna, Michael, and Paul Russell, eds., 2008. Free Will and Reactive Attitudes: Per-
spectives on P.F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.” Aldershot: Ashgate Press.
Shoemaker, David, and Neal A. Tognazzini, eds., 2014, Oxford Studies in Agency and
Responsibility, 2: “Freedom and Resentment” at 50. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Notes
1 All references to Strawson’s essay will be to the Watson (1982) reprint.
2 For a discussion of Strawson’s essay in its historical context, see the introduction to
McKenna and Russell (2008: 1–17).
3 Strawson refers explicitly to the compatibilist P.H. Nowell- Smith’s work here (1948,
1954). Nowell- Smith refers in his arguments to the libertarian C.A. Campbell, who in
turn targets the compatibilist arguments of R.E. Hobart. These were, in essence, the
classical compatibilists and incompatibilists we discussed in Chapter 3.
4 More precisely, Strawson probably had in mind the libertarian view of C.A. Campbell
(1951). What is the textual evidence for this? Strawson cited Nowell- Smith’s (1954)
argument against libertarians, and Nowell- Smith’s focus was Campbell. There is
textual evidence to suggest that Campbell had in mind something like agent causation
in developing his libertarian theory, but it is by no means explicit. What Campbell did
clearly seem to have in mind is an ability friendly to the Kantian thesis that a person
can act contrary to the determinations of her own motivations and do what is morally
right.
5 Here again, the textual evidence that this was Strawson’s target is shown by Straw-
son’s citation of Nowell- Smith (1948). In this essay, Nowell- Smith argues against
retributivists, and in doing so explicitly discusses their efforts to ground retributivism
in intuitions of fittingness (e.g., 1948: 54).
6 In our introductory remarks in this chapter, we sketched an intrapersonal theory to
help contrast it with Strawson’s. Recall, on this view, there are independent truths,
perhaps accessible by God, that our practices could get completely wrong. The sort of
intrapersonal theory we sketched there is sometimes referred to as a ledger theory,
since being responsible for something is like its being true that there is a (positive or
negative) mark in a ledger that records one’s morally appraisable acts. For the devel-
opment of such a view, see Haji (1998) or Zimmerman (1988).
7 Here we leave it unsettled how best to interpret Strawson. Most take him to have com-
mitted to a dispositional view according to which blameworthiness is a function of
what (typically) disposes others to a blaming response (e.g., see the introduction to
Fischer and Ravizza (1993: 18–19) and Wallace (1994)). And some who have inter-
preted him this way advise instead a normative reading according to which blame-
worthiness is a function of what renders a blaming response appropriate (ibid.).
However, we believe Strawson’s essay can also be read this way and that the text is