Toward a Theory of the Reactive Attitudes
Elisa Hurley and Coleen Macnamara
RoME Congress 2009
Boulder, CO, August 9, 2009
Since their introduction in Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” nearly five decades ago, the reactive attitudes have come to hold a prominent place in moral philosophy. To take just the most recent example, reactive attitudes feature centrally in Stephen Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint, an ambitious attempt to give an account of morality as irreducibly second-personal, as a matter, most fundamentally, of mutual accountability. Reactive attitudes also take center stage in debates about moral agency, where many—notably R. Jay Wallace, Angela Smith, and John Fischer and Mark Ravizza—hold that moral responsibility is closely aligned with being the proper target of reactive attitudes.
It is unanimously accepted that reactive attitudes are ways of holding people responsible for their conduct, understood as a matter of moral appraisal that goes beyond mere judgments about their blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, but serves to actually praise or blame them for that conduct. Paradigm examples include resentment, indignation, disapprobation, and guilt, on the blame side, and gratitude, approbation and self-congratulation, on side of praise. Whether or not it is made explicit, this is the conception of the reactive attitudes that is common across the range of moral projects to which the reactive attitudes are central.
But there remains a serious, and striking, gap in discussions of the reactive attitudes and their moral significance: nobody actually argues for the claim that reactive attitudes are ways of holding responsible, or makes good on how this could be so. This is surprising, because it seems to us that such a claim cries out for explanation and justification. After all, it amounts to saying that, when we resent another for her disregard, or approve of another’s act of kindness, we are holding her responsible for her conduct even if we bite our tongues and do not express our resentment or ever get around to expressing our approval. While it is obvious that our unexpressed reactive attitudes presuppose that we take their objects to be responsible—we don’t, after all, resent or approve of others for conduct they are not responsible for—this is quite different from claiming that in having such attitudes, we hold them responsible. When I hold another responsible, I do more than attribute responsibility to her, which is a matter of taking something to be true of her; rather, I do something to her—I seem to be engaging her in some way, interacting with her. But how can something unexpressed (i.e., an emotion or attitude I’m having) do anything to a person? Everyone proceeds as if reactive attitudes do this thing called holding responsible, but no one explains why or how this could be.
What we want to do in this paper is to begin solve this puzzle. We can’t of course give a full theory of how reactive attitudes hold responsible here (although this is the aim of our larger project), but we can make a start by thinking about the point just highlighted: holding someone responsible seems, minimally, to be a matter of doing something to her. So, in this paper we want to make progress on the question of how an unexpressed reactive attitude can do anything to anyone, as a first step toward understanding how such an attitude could hold responsible. We ultimately suggest that one reason why current accounts have failed to capture how reactive attitudes constitute doings-to is that they have failed to take seriously the fact that the reactive attitudes are first and foremost emotions. Our proposed account of reactive attitudes makes clear the philosophical pay-off of taking this fact seriously.
I.
Let’s start by taking a look at what the literature on reactive attitudes has to say. When discussing the reactive attitudes, many theorists focus on what they are reactions or responses to. Peter Strawson, for example, suggests that the “reactive attitudes are essentially natural human reactions to the good or ill will or indifference of others towards us, as displayed in their attitudes and actions” (1974, 10). According to R. J. Wallace, the reactive attitudes are responses not to others’ displays of good or ill will, but rather to others’ conduct that violates some demand or obligation (1994, Ch. 2). And in his most recent book Moral Dimensions, Tim Scanlon suggests that the reactive attitudes are reactions to relationship-impairing (or, if we expand his view to include positive reactive attitudes, relationship-enhancing) conduct. Scanlon’s view is worth taking a moment to discuss, using one of his examples. Suppose I learn that my friend Joe was at a party last week, where, when he overheard some mutual acquaintances making cruel jokes at my expense, he not only failed to come my defense, but contributed a few barbs of his own, in the process revealing embarrassing facts about me that I had shared with him in confidence. According to Scanlon, Joe’s behavior is relationship impairing: it violates the norms of friendship and thereby impairs our relationship. I can, according to Scanlon, respond to Joe’s relationship-impairing conduct in a number of ways, but one of the ways I might do so is by resenting him (2008, 129-30).
We take issue with these views on two fronts. For one thing, we don’t think any of them adequately captures what the reactive attitudes are reactions to. Start with Scanlon’s view that reactive emotions are responses to relationship-impairing conduct. The problem with this view is that one party’s normatively significant conduct does not impair a relationship. To see what we mean, let’s return to the Joe. According to Scanlon, Joe’s conduct at the party, in virtue of its violating the norms of friendship, is relationship impairing. But this doesn’t seem right. Imagine that I never learn what Joe did at the party, or that I learn of it but ignore it, deciding I am not going to let it bother me or change things between us. If events unfold in either of these ways, then it seems there is no sense in which our relationship is impaired. To be sure, Joe’s conduct poses a threat to our relationship. His conduct gets the ball of impairment rolling, we might say. But if I decide not to catch that ball, if, that is, I do not take up his norm-violating conduct in the proper way, then no impairment in our friendship occurs.
What we’re getting at is that there is always a gap between what one party in a relationship does in violation of the norms governing that relationship, and that relationship’s thereby being impaired. When one participant in the relationship acts in norm-transgressing ways, it is an open question what the other participant is going to do with that fact, whether she is going to take it seriously or not, whether she is going to let it affect her regard for the actor, her orientation towards him. To be sure, one party’s normatively significant conduct may on its own have some prima facie significance for the relationship, but until that potential significance is taken up by the other party, the relationship itself stands unimpaired. In this way, we think of the normatively significant conduct people undertake within relationships as being like speech acts: it must be taken up in order to “succeed,” in this case, succeed at impairing the relationship.
If we are right that conduct that violates the norms of a relationship cannot by itself impair a relationship, then Scanlon’s account of what the reactive attitudes are responses to is flawed. When I resent Joe for his nasty conduct, my reaction is not to his relationship-impairing conduct, for his conduct viewed in isolation is not relationship impairing.
Wallace’s view runs into a different kind of problem. Recall that on his picture the reactive attitudes are reactions to another’s conduct that violates a demand or obligation. Leaving aside for now the fact that Wallace just rules out the possibility of there being positive reactive attitudes (a move he acknowledges and embraces, we think mistakenly), we think his formulation of what reactive attitudes are responses to is still too narrow. Moral theorists often distinguish between the deontic realm—the realm of obligation and prohibition, and right and wrong—and the evaluative realm—the realm of the good and bad, the virtuous and vicious. We think Wallace is wrong to limit the reactive attitudes to responses to specifically deontic violations. It seems to us that we have what are clearly reactive attitudes toward others’ good and bad behavior, their displays of virtue and vice. When I feel approval of my sister for volunteering at a soup kitchen, for example, I am, it seems, reacting to her conduct’s moral significance, but not because it meets (or even exceeds) some moral obligation; rather, I am responding to it under an evaluative guise. I react to her conduct as compassionate and generous, that is, as displaying virtue. To insist that such a response therefore does not belong in the class of reactive attitudes seems arbitrary to us.
The account espoused by Strawson, namely that the reactive attitudes are reactions to the good or ill will displayed by others’ conduct, is also too narrow. While we think this picture might capture well what is going on with what he calls “personal” reactive attitudes, such as resentment and gratitude (where it seems clear we are responding to the good or ill will shown by another toward us), we think often and in other cases we are responding not to displays of good or ill will, but rather to violations of moral norms that we care about. Take, for example, a common response we might have to a stranger’s littering; if I see her throw her empty candy wrapper out the window of her car, I am indignant because she is littering, and not because she is showing me ill will. She may very well be showing disregard or disrespect for moral norms that I and others in the moral community care about, but it seems a stretch to say that she is showing disregard for me. Nevertheless, it once again strikes us as arbitrary to rule out the anger I feel toward her here as a case of indignation.
Our point is not that Strawson’s and Wallace’s views of what reactive attitudes are reactions to are wrong; it is just that we think each conception is too narrow to capture the full range of the reactive attitudes. And so we would like to propose something broader as the subject matter of reactive attitudes. On our view, reactive attitudes are responses to normatively significant conduct. Normatively significant conduct will of course include deontically significant conduct (conduct that meets or violates demands and obligations) and evaluatively significant conduct (conduct that can be characterized as good or bad, virtuous or vicious); it will also include conduct characterizable by both thin and thick normative terms, that is, conduct that is right and wrong, but also conduct that is selfish, dishonest, untrustworthy, and disrespectful, as well as self-less, generous, and compassionate—in other words, all the sorts of conduct that display good or ill will.
But notice that, even if we are right about what reactive attitudes are reactions to, this characterization of them cannot be the whole story about reactive attitudes. This brings us to the second shortcoming of the views we’ve canvassed here: an account of what the reactive attitudes are responses to does not get us all the way to understanding them as doings to, and therefore will always be incomplete as an account of the reactive attitudes. We need more, and for that, we must turn elsewhere.
II.
Fortunately we also find in the literature two characterizations of the reactive attitudes that go beyond describing what they are reactions to. First there is a picture originating with Gary Watson and taken up by Stephen Darwall, among others, according to which the reactive attitudes are forms of moral communication or, as it is often put, moral address. Second, there is Pamela Heironymi’s alternative, found in her “The Force and Fairness of Blame”; there she suggests that reactive attitudes are responses that constitute changes in relationship. The idea is, when I feel resentment in response to your normatively significant conduct, my doing so impairs our relationship in some way, and when I feel gratitude in response to other normatively significant conduct on your part, my doing so constitutes an enhancement in our relationship. We will take a look at both of these views.
Let’s start with the moral address camp, taking a closer look at what people mean when they say that reactive attitudes are forms of moral communication or address. Often what people mean is that reactive attitudes are paradigmatically expressed in forms of moral address. A close reading of Watson’s view in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil” reveals that this is precisely what he means. Consider what he says: “The reactive attitudes are incipient forms of communication, though not in the sense that resentment et al. are usually communicated; very often, in fact, they are not. Rather, the most appropriate and direct expression of resentment is to address the other with a complaint and a demand” (1993, 127, emphasis added).
Other theorists, however, seem to want to say something more than this. According to Darwall, the reactive attitudes themselves, prior to or independent of their expression, are forms of moral address; more specifically, he argues, they address “demands, claims, and requests” (2007, 114, fn 6.; see also 2006, 9). There are two things Darwall might mean by this claim. On the one hand, he might mean that reactive attitudes rest on and reflect demands. Consider what he says about gratitude:
Gratitude is like forgiveness in being parasitic on legitimate claims or expectations. We are appropriately grateful when people benefit us or act as we wish when we lack any relevant claim or expectation of them. Responsible agents feel gratitude, moreover in response to an action . . .. (2006, 71).