Tamler Sommers

David Shoemaker’s Responsibility from the Margins is chock full of valuable insights on the nature of our responsibility, and it has more in common with P.F. Strawson’s approach in “Freedom and Resentment” than the accounts of most philosophers who call themselves Strawsonians. On one central issue of interpretation, however, Shoemaker gets Strawson wrong. Like many interpreters, Shoemaker sees Strawson as defending a “quality of will” theory of responsibility. This idea fundamentally misunderstands Strawson’s aims in “Freedom and Resentment.” Strawson does not defend a theory of any kind in that essay. On the contrary, Strawson tries to caution his fellow philosophers away from the theorizing impulse. The urge to develop comprehensive theories, he argued, inevitably leads philosophers away from the natural facts about responsibility and the related emotions. So, Strawson offers an alternative way of understanding responsibility, one that takes the facts into account “in all their bearings.” This interpretive disagreement is instructive, I’ll argue, because it illuminates several weaknesses in Shoemaker’s own “tripartite” theory of responsibility. Where his account goes astray can be remedied in large part by embracing the spirit of Strawson’s approach in full.

Experimental philosophy has received a great deal of attention in scholarly journals and the popular media. Often the topic of these articles is precisely what I claim is a non-issue – the value of experimental philosophy as a movement. And here I am writing about this same topic yet again. But I am not going to provide another argument for an obvious position. Instead, I’m writing this as an obituary – an obituary for the so-called controversy about experimental philosophy, and an attempt to diagnose how it lived as long as it did.

This chapter reviews and then criticizes the dominant approach that experimental philosophers have adopted in their studies on free will and moral responsibility. Section “Experimental Philosophy and Free Will” reviews the experimental literature and the shared approach: probing for intuitions about the so-called compatibility question, whether free will is compatible with causal determinism. Section “The Intervention” argues that this experimental focus on the compatibility question is fundamentally misguided. The critique develops in the form of a dialogue: a staged “intervention” for an experimental philosopher who works on free will. The chapter concludes with some thoughts about how the literature can move in a more fruitful direction.