Anton Emilsson

P. F. Strawson's 1962 essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’ has been enormously influential for the contemporary responsibility discussion. It nevertheless remains contested how the essay is to be understood, and what the central argument is, if there even is any such. In her recent book Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals (2020), Pamela Hieronymi argues that what is, in fact, the central argument of the essay has been mistakenly disregarded or wrongly dismissed. At the heart of this argument is Strawson's claim that ‘it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self-contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition’. Strawson, it seems, takes himself to catch his opponent in a self-contradiction. This paper considers this argument: ‘the central argument’ of the essay. I argue, first, that the prime motivation for Hieronymi's reading of the argument is interpretatively problematic; second, that Hieronymi's reading implausibly commits Strawson himself to a self-contradiction, in light of a (recently published) private letter of Strawson. Strikingly, the second interpretative problem also undermines Russell's influential dismissal of ‘the central argument’. Thus, the question remains: Why does Strawson charge his opponent with incoherence or self-contradiction? Hieronymi is right that we should be puzzled by this, but neither her new reading nor Russell's old dismissal can explain this.

At the heart of P. F. Strawson’s naturalistic approach to responsibility sits the Inescapability Claim. The main argument of this article is that the established interpretation of this claim is mistaken. According to, what I will call, the Standard Reading, it is the empirical claim that it is psychologically impossible for us to abandon our responsibility practices. Although widespread, this reading lacks interpretative basis, is in conflict with other features of Strawson’s approach, and is—most strikingly—explicitly rejected by Strawson himself. In its place, I propose that we understand Strawson’s Inescapability Claim as the metaphysical claim that the concept of responsibility is among those ineliminable concepts that form the fundamental core of any conceivable conceptual scheme. The responsibility skeptic’s doubt is “idle, unreal, a pretense”, not because their doubt is psychologically inefficacious, but because it treads beyond the bounds of sense; their doubt is, in a particular sense, inconceivable or unintelligible.