, 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 responses 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 fr