ses to each other’s attractiveness or wit, but the relationship is only a surface one unless they have reactions to each other’s love or trust. As enemies, you and I may dislike each other’s faces or voices, but the enmity hardly goes deep if I have no attitude to your visible contempt, or you are indifferent to my gloating when you lose your job.
Relationships become less shallow as we develop attitude spirals. Some attitudes are centrally response to the attitudes of others. At this level are gratitude, resentment, indignation, vengefulness, blame and forgiveness. These attitudes need not be in response to attitudes to ourselves: we may be indignant on someone else’s behalf, or blame a person for malevolence towards other people in general.
The emphasis on attitudes, rather than actions, as the objects of blame, gratitude and so on may be thought exaggerated. Perhaps I may be grateful to someone, not for their attitude, but for their help or for their gift? It is true that sometimes these responses seem to be more to actions than to attitudes. Your neighbour burns your house down. Your resentment may persist even after you find out that, instead of malice towards you, he had a schizophrenic delusion and thought he was burning all the evil out of the world. But this is hardly a central case of resentment, and perhaps not a clear case of it at all. For the most part, what in actions makes us grateful or resentful is the attitude that shines through them. These attitudes to attitudes are part of the core of human relationships, and to exclude someone from these responses is to exclude them from part of that core.
B. Personality Disorders and the Reactive Attitudes.
Schizophrenia and dementia often involve distortions of personality and character that had developed before the onset of these disorders. So there is scope for the contrast between the real person and the distorting effects of the illness. Personality disorders characteristically emerge early. Whether they result from treatment in early childhood, of from genes, or from things that happened in the womb or at birth, or from some combination of these, personality disorders emerge too early to allow the development of an alternative personality. There is no alternative “real” person, remembered by friends and family but now submerged by the disorder. The person’s real personality is the misshapen one. The lack of concern for others, or the malevolence and hostility, are the real attitudes of the person.
Does this mean that the reactive attitudes are in order as responses to people with personality disorder?
What counts against this is the thought that personality disorder is still a piece of bad luck. If it is caused by having particular genes, or by what happened in the womb, or at birth, none of this was under the person’s control. If it is caused by parental rejection, cruelty, or abuse, none of this was the person’s own fault. Such people are themselves victims. Given that treatment, any of us might have turned out the same. So blame and resentment seem unfair.
Yet, on the other hand, exclusion from the reactive attitudes is exclusion from part of the core of human relationships. Perhaps this exclusion too is unfair. And perhaps it is only by participating in relationships, including the spirals of reactive attitudes, that there is any chance of transcending the original, misshapen personality.
The reactive attitudes themselves are not totally under our control. We cannot just switch them on and off at will to bring about the best consequences. But we do have a degree of choice about how far we do or do not inhibit them. To the extent that we have such choices, a complex response (to, say, aggressive violence stemming from personality disorder) seems called for. The ideal seems to be both to retain the reactive attitudes to the person’s own horrible attitudes to his victims, and yet to remember that he is a victim too, someone whose whole nature has been shaped badly by causes largely outside his control. This dual response is not easy, as I found when intervi