om 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 interviewing such people.
But the dual response is necessary if we are to do justice to the complexity of the case. It is probably right that we cannot entirely or largely abandon the reactive attitudes, and that life would be impoverished if we could and did. But there is also a determinist thought that should make us a bit uncomfortable with either Aristotelian or Strawsonian commonsense. It is about those of us who do not have personality disorders. Although we shape our own characters by our voluntary actions, there is likely to be some causal explanation of how we come to choose some actions rather than others. And these causal explanations may well often go back ultimately to factors beyond our control: to genes, to what happened in the womb or at birth, or to what happened in our early childhood. As with those with personality disorders, our characteristics are certainly ours, yet are not entirely of our own making. In the long run, the dual response we develop to those with personality disorders may turn out to be what is appropriate for everyone else as well.