Bennett W. Helm

Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” usefully connected the concepts of freedom and responsibility with the reactive attitudes, but there has been some controversy concerning both the nature of that connection and what the reactive attitudes are. I shall argue—tentatively and speculatively—that we can best understand the reactive attitudes by seeing them as individually presupposing and jointly constituting both our respect for persons and the dignity to which that respect is responsive. Consequently, being both a proper subject and object of the reactive attitudes is to be a member of the normative community of fellow persons within which one both takes responsibility and is held responsible for what one does. This just is to be a responsible agent.

Rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental. Therefore it is important to understand the sort of rationality at issue here. It is often assumed that rationality just is instrumental rationality, but this leaves us with too thin a notion of desire: Desires centrally involve the notion of things mattering or being significant, for their objects must normally be worth pursuing to the subject. Such significance is simply unintelligible in terms of instrumental rationality. Consequently, understanding significance and its rational connections to desire and action is essential to understanding rationality as a constitutive ideal. In particular, it is a crucial step in vindicating the idea of animal thought. ;I argue that significance, as well as desire, must be understood in part in terms of the emotions. Many prominent theories of emotions illegitimately conceive of significance as conceptually prior to the capacity for having emotions, in that things can be significant to a creature that does not have any emotions at all. In contrast, I argue first that a creature must have the capacity for emotions in order to be a subject of significance because to be significant is in part to be a suitable object of emotions generally. Second, emotions are essentially feelings not because they "involve" bodily sensations but because they are a distinctive kind of awareness of the significance of the world to the subject; particular occurrent emotions therefore presuppose that things are already significant to the subject. Consequently, emotions and significance form a conceptual package, with neither being prior to the other: Significance and the emotions emerge together in a pattern of instrumental and non-instrumental rationality that can be articulated in terms of their interconnected explanatory roles. ;Being a subject of beliefs and desires therefore requires more than simply rationally mediated goal-directedness, as Dennett believes. Rather, it requires being open, through the emotions, to the significance of the world and to the reasons that significance provides for action. This conclusion is shown to have important ramifications for our understanding both of a minimal sense of agency and of what it is to be a person

Genuine agents are able to engage in activity because they find it worth pursuing—because they care about it. In this respect, they differ from what might be called “mere intentional systems”: systems like chess-playing computers that exhibit merely goal-directed behavior mediated by instrumental rationality, without caring. A parallel distinction can be made in the domain of social activity: plural agents must be distinguished from plural intentional systems in that plural agents have cares and engage in activity because of those cares. In this paper, I sketch an account of what it is for an individual to care about things in terms of her exhibiting a certain pattern of emotions. After extending this account to make sense of an individual's caring about other agents, I then show how a certain sort of emotional connectedness among a group of people can make intelligible the group's having cares and thereby constitute that group as a plural agent. Alternative accounts of social action, by ignoring the difference between mere intentional systems and genuine agents, and so by leaving out these emotional entanglements from their accounts of social action, thereby fail to capture a whole range of social phenomena involving plural agents.