Can Moral Responsibility Be Grounded Free-Will-Debate Freely? Examining the Reactive Attitudes Approach

Moral responsibility is one of the most philosophical subjects with practical significance. Based on this practical significance, P. F. Strawson argued that we can, and we should, ground our theory of moral responsibility on the reactive attitudes like blame and praise free-will-debate freely. In this paper, we study Strawsonian approaches that are known as reactive attitudes approach. For this, we propose “history challenges” for this approach. Then we argue that this approach can be successful against these challenges only by grounding a limited notion of moral responsibility on a limited list of reactive attitudes as Scanlon did. We argue that although Scanlon’s theory is not intuitive, it has the virtue of self-consistence. We also show that there are two levels of responsibility that Scanlon’s “two forms of responsibility” better describes it than the popular Attributability-Accountability distinction. We also show the significance of this limited, but successful, case of reactive attitudes approach.