 It is not an illness. The excuses that defend someone’s character from criticism all fail. There is no conflict in which a set of higher-order desires or deeper values are defeated. There is no alternative “real” self obscured or distorted by a medical condition. We are confronted by someone whose real self, or character, is itself misshapen. If blame is a negative evaluation of character on the basis of actions, it is hard to see how Mr. H can escape it.
And yet, as with my interviewees, this seems not to be quite the whole story. When interviewing patients, I deliberately do not know what offences they have committed, although sometimes they tell me and afterwards I find out. As I hear in the interview about their childhood of pain, rejection and humiliation, it is natural to see them as themselves victims, to glimpse their life from the inside and to feel sympathy. Sometimes, going back from the hospital after hearing about the terrible things they have done, I struggle to get the two perspectives into one coherent picture. It is hard to reconcile the emotional response to what they have suffered with the emotional response to what they have done.
With some of the interviewees, as with Mr. H, part of the complex emotional response is linked to some secular version of the thought that, there but for the grace of God go I. This is not to endorse some form of environmental determinism. Many people have had childhoods comparable to those of the interviewees without committing crimes on their scale. Many people had childhoods comparable to that of Mr. H without committing genocide or starting world wars. The causal story must also involve things other than child abuse. But, because we do not know exactly what other factors –genetic, environmental or other- play a role, we cannot be confident that we would have responded to that kind of upbringing differently from the interviewees or differently from Mr. H. Of course we all hope that, given that terrible childhood, we would still not have been like Hitler. And no doubt 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