Resentment, gratitude and indignation are not conclusions anyone reached from a theory, and Peter Strawson's 1962 lecture argued that this fact settles more of the free will problem than any argument about determinism.
The previous lesson left a threat: our characters have causes we did not choose, and a regress argument says no character could have been chosen. If that undermines responsibility, everything built on responsibility goes with it. This lesson takes the most influential response in the modern literature, which is to ask what our responsibility practices actually consist of before asking whether determinism undermines them.
Strawson's framing
"Freedom and Resentment", delivered to the British Academy in 1962, opens by dividing the field into two camps that Strawson thinks are both mistaken.
The pessimist holds that moral responsibility requires a kind of freedom that determinism would rule out, and worries that we may not have it. The optimist is the old-fashioned compatibilist who says that responsibility is justified because blame and punishment are useful: they modify behaviour, and that is what entitles us to them.
Strawson thinks the optimist has left something out, and that the pessimist is right to feel the omission. Nobody resents an injury because resentment is socially efficacious. The optimist's story describes a regulation system, not the thing that actually goes on between people, and its coldness is what keeps the pessimist unsatisfied. But the pessimist's remedy, a metaphysical freedom that would license desert, is a demand for something the optimist rightly cannot supply.
His alternative is to look at the phenomenon itself.
The reactive attitudes
What we actually do, constantly and without theorising, is respond to the quality of other people's wills towards us. Someone treads on your hand: whether they did it carelessly, deliberately, or while being pushed changes your response completely, and the change is immediate and not a calculation.
Strawson calls these responses the reactive attitudes. Resentment and gratitude are the personal ones, felt from the standpoint of someone affected. Moral indignation and approval are the vicarious ones, felt on behalf of others. Guilt, shame and remorse are the self-directed ones. Love and hurt feelings belong on the list too, which is a mark of how wide the family is.
Holding someone responsible, on this account, is not a judgement that gets expressed in an attitude. It is the attitude. To regard someone as answerable simply is to be liable to these responses towards them, and this stance, which Strawson calls the participant stance, is the ordinary condition of being in a relationship with another person.
The alternative is the objective stance. We can look at a person as an object of policy, something to be managed, treated, avoided or trained, rather than as a party to a relationship. We do this with small children, with people in the grip of psychosis, and occasionally with anyone when a relationship becomes too much to bear. Strawson's key observation is that the objective stance is available, is sometimes appropriate, and cannot be adopted wholesale for everyone all the time, because doing so would end interpersonal life rather than reform it.
Example. A colleague snaps at you in a meeting. Describe the same episode from the participant stance and from the objective stance, and say what changes.
From the participant stance you are hurt or annoyed, you take the remark as expressing something about his attitude towards you, and the natural next moves are to protest, to demand an explanation, or to wait for an apology. From the objective stance you note that he has been sleeping badly since his father's illness, that people under strain snap, and that the remark carries no information about his regard for you; the natural next moves are patience, a quiet word with someone else, or simply avoiding him this week. What changes is not the facts but whether he is being treated as a party to a relationship or as a system with known failure modes. Notice that the objective stance here is not cold, and it is not a denial of his agency in general: it is local, temporary, and often the kindest available response, which is exactly Strawson's point about its role in ordinary life.
Now you. If the objective stance is always available, why does Strawson think determinism could not move us to adopt it universally?
Answer
Because the local uses of it are parasitic on the general practice, and because he doubts the transition is psychologically possible for beings like us. Adopting it towards a strained colleague works precisely as a temporary suspension against a background of ordinary participation; there is no obvious sense to be made of suspending everything at once, since there would be nothing left to suspend it from. He also makes a narrower claim that is easier to defend: the reasons we actually give for adopting the stance in particular cases, incapacity, immaturity, illness, are all local facts about that person, and a universal thesis about causation supplies no such fact about anyone in particular. Whether that answers the pessimist, who is offering a global reason rather than a local one, is exactly what the objections below dispute.
Excuses and exemptions
The best part of the lecture is the taxonomy, because it shows what our practices are actually sensitive to.
Some pleas work by showing that the quality of will was not what it appeared. "He didn't realise", "he was pushed", "he had no way of knowing", "it was an accident": these are excuses. They do not remove the person from the community of the responsible. They say that in this instance the injury did not express ill will, and the natural response is to withdraw the resentment while continuing to regard the person as a full participant.
Other pleas work differently. "He is only three", "he is schizophrenic", "he was under hypnosis": these are exemptions. They invite us to see the agent as not a fit subject for the reactive attitudes at all, at least for a period or in a domain, and the appropriate response is the objective stance.
Now the argument. Look at the list of things that actually excuse and exempt, and notice what is not on it. No ordinary excuse takes the form "his action was determined by prior causes". The excusing conditions are ignorance, accident, coercion, compulsion and incapacity, each of which is a specific local fact about how this act came about or about what this agent can do. Determinism is not one of them, and if it were true it would be true of every action, including the ones we excuse and the ones we do not, so it could not draw the distinctions our practice draws.
The pessimist replies that determinism is not one excuse among others; it is a global reason to move everyone to the objective stance. Strawson's answer to that is the one people find either liberating or infuriating. The commitment to ordinary interpersonal relationships is too thoroughgoing and deeply rooted for a general theoretical conviction to overturn it. We could not do it, and the question whether it would be rational to do it does not arise in the way the pessimist thinks, because the rationality of the whole framework is not something assessable from outside it: what could be produced as an external justification that would be more secure than the practice it was justifying?
Example. Sort these pleas into excuses and exemptions: (a) "I didn't see you standing there." (b) "She has advanced Alzheimer's disease." (c) "He was acting under a credible threat to his family." (d) "He is six years old."
(a) and (c) are excuses. In each the agent remains a full member of the moral community, and the plea works by showing that this particular act did not express the ill will it appeared to: the first denies knowledge, the second denies that the act expressed the agent's own attitude towards you rather than a response to a threat. (b) and (d) are exemptions. Neither says anything about the particular act; both say that this agent is not, for now or at all, a fit target of resentment and indignation, and both invite the objective stance. The test that separates them is whether the plea generalises across the agent's whole conduct or applies to one act.
Now you. A defence lawyer argues that her client's violent upbringing means he should not be blamed. Is she offering an excuse, an exemption, or something the Strawsonian framework has trouble accommodating?
Answer
It is presented as an exemption, but it does not fit the pattern of the exemptions the practice recognises, and that is exactly why it is contested in real courtrooms. A standard exemption points to an incapacity the agent has now: the six-year-old cannot appreciate what he did, the psychotic defendant cannot track reality. A violent upbringing is a claim about causal history, and the man in the dock may be perfectly able to understand what he did and to respond to reasons. What the plea really appeals to is the sourcehood intuition of the manipulation argument: that a character installed by a process he did not choose is not his to answer for. A Strawsonian must either fold that into an existing exemption, by arguing that such histories produce genuine incapacities, which is sometimes true and empirically checkable, or resist it. This is the sharpest practical test of the whole framework, and it is unresolved.
What the argument does and does not establish
Strawson's lecture is the most cited paper in this literature, and it repays scepticism as well as admiration.
Its strongest achievement is descriptive. It shows that responsibility practices are not built on a metaphysical premise about causation, and that the theoretical dispute has been misdescribing what it is about. Anyone who says that discovering determinism would require us to stop blaming has to explain why no actual excuse in any actual practice has that form.
The first serious objection is that unrevisability is not truth. Suppose the reactive attitudes really cannot be given up. It does not follow that they are appropriate, any more than the unavoidability of an optical illusion makes the illusion accurate. Galen Strawson and Derk Pereboom both press this: the attitudes have a content, they present the target as deserving the response, and that content can be false even if the attitude is inescapable.
The second objection is that the practice is more revisable than the lecture allows. We have in fact revised it, repeatedly and in the direction the pessimist predicts. Children, the insane, the addicted, the coerced and the neurologically damaged have been progressively moved out of the scope of full blame over two centuries, usually as understanding of their condition improved. That is precisely the pattern you would expect if learning the causes of behaviour did tend to dissolve blame, and it suggests the boundary between participant and objective stances is negotiated rather than fixed.
The third is that Strawson's optimist and pessimist do not exhaust the field. A modern hard incompatibilist does not propose to view everyone objectively. Pereboom's position keeps love, gratitude, and moral protest while giving up resentment and indignation, on the ground that only the latter presuppose desert, and argues that a life so organised is not colder but somewhat better. Whether the attitudes can be separated in that way is an empirical question about human psychology as much as a philosophical one.
Three things "responsible" means
The literature after Strawson has done something useful with his framework: it has separated the senses of the word, which had been running together for centuries.
Attributability is the weakest. An act is attributable to you when it expresses your evaluative judgements, your cares and commitments, so that it tells us who you are. A cruel remark is attributable to the person who makes it, and that is why it damages our view of them, quite apart from any sanction.
Answerability is stronger. You are answerable for an act when it is appropriate to ask you to justify it, and when your reasons for doing it are a fit topic of demand. Asking a colleague why they did something, and expecting an account, is holding them answerable.
Accountability is strongest, and it is the one that matters most here. You are accountable when it is appropriate to impose sanctions and to direct the harsher reactive attitudes at you: resentment, indignation, blame with teeth. Gary Watson introduced the distinction between the first and the third in 1996, and David Shoemaker separated all three.
The distinction matters because the sceptical arguments do not bite equally. Attributability seems safe: a determined agent's actions still express their evaluative outlook, and nothing in the manipulation argument suggests otherwise. Answerability is largely safe too, since a reasons-responsive agent can give an account of their reasons whatever their history. What the arguments threaten is accountability in its strongest form, and specifically what Pereboom calls basic desert: the claim that an agent deserves blame or punishment just because of what they have done, and not because of any good the blaming or punishing will do.
That is the real currency of the dispute. Everything in this course has been circling it, and the practical question of what follows if it goes is the next lesson.
Example. A colleague makes a cutting remark in a meeting. Apply the three notions.
The remark is attributable to him: it expresses his judgement of the person, and it tells you something true about him even if he later apologises. He is answerable for it: it is entirely in order to ask him afterwards why he said it, and to expect a justification or an admission that there is none. Whether he is accountable, in the sense of deserving a sanction or a hostile response, is a further question that depends on more: whether he knew what he was doing, what his circumstances were, and, according to some, on the history that made him the sort of person who says such things. The three come apart cleanly here, and noticing that is the practical benefit of the distinction: a sceptic about desert who says "nobody is ever responsible for anything" is denying much more than they need to.
Now you. Pereboom holds that we should give up resentment and indignation but keep moral protest, and that this is possible without ending human relationships. What is the strongest objection?
Answer
That the separation is psychologically unavailable. Resentment is not a decorative addition to the recognition that you have been wronged; on Strawson's account it is the form that recognition takes in a creature like us, and a protest with all the resentment removed may not be a protest so much as a report. There is a weaker version of the objection worth distinguishing: even if a few people can manage it, a whole society cannot, so the proposal is a counsel for the exceptional. Pereboom's reply is that the attitudes he keeps are the ones that do the work, that resentment causes a great deal of avoidable harm, and that people in close relationships already find their resentment softening when they understand where the other person's behaviour came from, which is evidence that the transition is possible. Note that this exchange is now an empirical dispute about human beings, not a metaphysical one, which is a sign that the argument has reached its productive stage.
Where this leaves the practice
Strawson's contribution is best taken as a relocation rather than a refutation. He moved the question from "does determinism make blame unjustified?" to "what are our practices sensitive to, and could that sensitivity survive the discovery?" That is a better question, and it can be pursued with evidence.
He did not show that basic desert is safe. He showed that a great deal of what we call holding people responsible does not require it: attribution of character, demands for justification, the whole texture of relationships that make ill will matter. What remains in dispute is the hardest and most consequential part of the practice, the part where we impose suffering on people because they deserve it.
That is not an abstract remainder. It is the criminal law of every country, and the next lesson takes the argument there, where the claims are testable and the stakes are measured in years.