oubt many of us would not. But certainty here is over-confidence. And this adds a disquieting perspective to our attitudes to Hitler and to other psychopaths.
4. The reactive attitudes.
So far, blame has been discussed as a matter of an objectionable action giving grounds for making a negative judgement about the character of the person responsible for it. The standard excuses, ignorance and compulsion, sever the link between action and character and so prevent criticisms of the one carrying over to the other.
The standard excuses apply, with complications, in many psychiatric cases. But in cases of the “misshapen real self”, such as many cases of personality disorders, the objectionable actions often do flow from the person’s character and the standard excuses fail. Someone with a misshapen real self has precisely the kind of character to which the negative judgements apply.
This version of blame, the making of negative judgements about someone’s character, may be a very detached, unemotional affair, in the manner of the recording angel. But there is an alternative to the recording angel approach. The alternative locates blame among people’s relationships and attitudes, which may be much less detached.
In his classic paper on Freedom and Resentment, P.F. Strawson argued that those who think that determinism is a threat to the survival of blame overlook the way blame is embedded in a complex network of “interpersonal reactive attitudes” such as gratitude and resentment. He argued that it cannot be separated from these other attitudes: that they stand or fall together. And, he argued, determinism could not be a sufficient reason for giving up this whole network of attitudes. For one thing, it would be psychologically impossible for us to give them up. For another, even if it were possible, it would not be rational to do so. These attitudes are at the core of human relationships and to give them up would greatly impoverish us. It would replace our present emotionally involved reactions to each other by the detached, objective attitude perhaps often appropriate in a psychiatrist responding to a patient or a social worker responding to a client.
One merit of this approach is that it makes issues about blame less abstract. Instead of asking which judgements about someone’s character are justified, it shifts the focus to our reactions to that person. But it is perhaps too hasty to see the reactive attitudes as an indivisible web, such that undermining blame turns all relationships into ones where the temperature never rises above clinical or professional detachment. Some attitudes are more easily dispensed with than others.
A. Attitude Spirals as Part of the Core of Human Relationships
Relationships are shaped, and sometimes constituted, by the attitudes people have to each other. Some attitudes pervade a whole relationship: liking and disliking, love and hatred, friendship and enmity. Although these attitudes are often responses to what the other person does, they may not be. I may deserve neither the dislike of one person nor the love of another, and yet have both.
Not all attitudes are so free-floating. Some are based on evaluation. Respect, admiration or contempt at least purport to reflect someone’s good or bad qualities. Other attitudes are responses to people’s good or bad fortune. If I break a leg while vainly trying to windsurf, I let myself in for your sympathy, amusement or schadenfreude. Other attitudes are reflexive: Jealousy, envy and condescension all compare the other person’s qualities or situation with one’s own.
All the attitudes mentioned so far are, in a minimal way, “interpersonal reactive attitudes”. Each of them may be, and some of them have to be, a reaction to what other people are like. But, without the addition of a certain complication, they are limited.
At the core of relationships is the interplay between attitudes to each other. We have attitude spirals. I have attitudes to your attitude to me, and you have attitudes to my attitudes to your attitudes, and so on. Lovers or friends may have respon