Abstract

My account begins with Strawson’s celebrated “Freedom and Resentment” lecture. Here by making the “reactive emotions” partly constitutive of holding someone responsible, Strawson offered a deep analysis of what was wrong with the forward-looking, behavior-affecting view of responsibility often espoused by determinists, while apparently avoiding the metaphysical baggage carried by libertarianism. Yet, for all the promise of such a view, there remained the question of what a carefully worked-out, Strawsonian conception of responsibility would actually look like. In this study I examine the thoughtful version of such a theory R. Jay Wallace offers in Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.