The resentful and the indignant

vol. 15, n. 1 (2016) • Ethic@ - Revista Internacional de Filosofia Moral

Autor: David Botting

Resumo:

In “Freedom and Resentment” P.F. Strawson distinguishes between the participant reactive attitudes like resentment and the moral reactive attitudes like indignation described by Strawson as their “vicarious analogues,” where we are not the injured party and it is not our own personal relationships at stake. Through naturalistic description of the participant reactive attitudes a set of conditions for moral responsibility can be discovered that, moreover, are held to be immune to any external review or to require external justification. Except for pathological cases Strawson deems to amount to solipsism, these participant attitudes and their vicarious analogues are deemed to go together and the same arguments to apply equally to each: resentment and indignation are supposed to have the same conditions for being appropriately held or withheld. I find it to be not obvious that these conditions must be the same, but even if they are, the case for immunity that Strawson presents initially for the participant reactive attitudes does not transfer as unproblematically as he seems to assume to the moral reactive attitudes. The aim of this paper is not to analyse Strawson’s arguments, but more simply to identify a number of ways in which we may be resentful without being (or being prone to be in the relevantly similar circumstance) indignant, and indignant without being resentful.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5007/1677-2954.2016v15n1p36

Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ethic/article/view/1677-2954.2016v15n1p36/32303

Palavras-Chave: Resentment,Indignation,Reactive attitudes

Ethic@ - Revista Internacional de Filosofia Moral


ethic@ - An international Journal for Moral Phylosophy - uma publicação do Núcleo de Ética e Filosofia Política da UFSC, tem como objetivo principal publicar trabalhos inéditos (artigos, resenhas, entrevistas, traduções), com excelência e vanguarda na área de Filosofia Moral Moderna e Contemporânea.