Strawson's Theory Of Moral Responsibility And The Problem Of Rationality

‘Moral responsibility' is an important concept of philosophy. Traditionally, the philosophical discussions of moral responsibility center on the notion of free will. This is because, free will, which is an important concept in metaphysics, used to be taken as a necessary condition of moral responsibility. The problem of whether free will is compatible with determinism is extremely difficult to solve, which further leads to the skepticism of moral responsibility. In 1962, Peter Strawson published his groundbreaking article “Freedom and Resentment”, shedding new light on the debate on moral responsibility. According to Strawson, in ordinary moral practices, the ascription of moral responsibility is the expression of various reactive attitudes which are emotions related to our moral life. The expression of reactive attitudes is arguably a fundamental kind of activity in human society as well as the necessary condition for human to have normal interpersonal relationship. Thus, Strawson concludes that moral responsibility is irrelevant to metaphysical discussion of free will. More specifically, Strawson holds that no matter what metaphysical convictions are going to be taken, people will not change their activities associated with moral responsibility.Most philosophers agree that Strawson has provided an insightful picture about how humans actually ascribe moral responsibility. Some of them even agree with the idea that people's responsibility ascription activities cannot be shaken by metaphysical convictions. However, the problem of moral responsibility is not only a descriptive issue. It has a normative dimension as well. Opponents of Strawson hold that if there is no free will, then the ascription of moral responsibility is irrational. The reconsideration of the rationality of responsibility ascription may again involve free will and the related discussion in metaphysics which are ignored in Strawson's account of moral responsibility. In effect, Strawson's theory fails to justify the rationality of moral responsibility. In this thesis, I call it the rationality problem.The main goal of this thesis is to provide an approach to respond to the problem of rationality. The structure of this thesis is as follows: In the first part, I will introduce the background and then present Strawson's theory of moral responsibility. In the second part, I will put forward the problem of rationality. In the third part, I will review several responses to the problem from Strawson critically. In the fourth part, I will provide my own approach to address the problem. In particular, I will argue that the problem of rationality originates from the skepticism of moral responsibility. I will then defend the thesis that we don't have a single unified concept of free will because of the diversity of related intuition. Based on such a thesis, I then propose a contextualism of free will. I will argue that this contextualism of free will can be integrated to Strawson's theory and help Strawson to address the problem of rationality.