ABSTRACT
It is hard to overstate the significance of P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment.” Delivered to the British Academy in 1962, it has massively impacted a wide range of philosophical areas during the past 60 years, from metaphysics to moral psychology to fundamental moral philosophy. Philip Pettit calls it “perhaps the most influential philosophical paper of the twentieth century,” and the essay’s influence has continued apace in the twenty-first. One of its greatest contributions is its identification and exploration of a distinctive set of attitudes—what Strawson called “reactive attitudes”—that play a hugely significant but, before Strawson, largely unappreciated role in human life. Strawson’s interest in these attitudes was their involvement in mediating relationship. Reactive attitudes are all held, Strawson showed, from a “participant’s” perspective in which the person holding the attitude implicitly relates to others and themselves, “second personally.”
This chapter’s aim is to lay out the ways in which deontic and nondeontic reactive attitudes exemplify a common second-personal, reciprocating structure, but also to get clear about their fundamental differences. In seeing what these different species of reactive attitudes have in common, we will be able to grasp what it is that makes something a reactive attitude in general (something that Strawson himself does not do). But we shall also be concerned with the fundamental differences between deontic and nondeontic attitudes. What is revealed is that there are two fundamental sources of ethical motivation: respect and love, which respectively concern what will be called the “attitudes of the will” and the “attitudes of the heart.”
