Plenary Session 2

Chair: Tim De Mey(Erasmus University)

The Integrity of the Manifest: Extending P.F. Strawson’s Anti-Revisionism

Filip Buekens
Hoger instituut voor Wijsbegeerte
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Leuven, Belgium
Department of Philosophy
Tilburg University
Tilburg, the Netherlands

Arnold Burms
Hoger instituut voor Wijsbegeerte
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Leuven, Belgium

Peter Strawson’s celebrated paper ‘Freedom and Resentment’ is often read as reconciling freedom and determinism by closely looking at what actually goes on when we hold persons responsible for what they do. His approach is based on a descriptive account of actual human moral psychology and not on a conceptual analysis of freedom. A key premise in that work was the idea that, as Strawson rather tersely put it, ‘abnormality cannot be the universal condition’: the place where our investigations should begin are the attitudes, intentions and beliefs directed at others and the great extent to which personal feelings and reactions depend on them – ‘the complicated web of attitudes and feelings which form moral life as we know it’ (Strawson 1962:2008, p. 34). Rejecting an approach based on conceptual analysis of (the concept of) freedom, Strawson argued that most of or moral interactions – holding others responsible, blaming oneself or others for what one did or omitted, the beliefs on which those reactions are based and our assessment of reactions of others -- cannot be but mostly apt or correct. We recognize mistakes and errors for which agents can be excused on a background of uncontested correct or apt reactions, and we are willing to abandon the manifest moral scheme only if the agent is ‘abnormal or premature’, hence not a ‘normal adult’ whom we can reasonably expect to show concern for others (ibid., p. . Confrontations with deluded persons or agents displaying deviant or pathological behaviour require us to temporarily abandon this manifest scheme and to take on an ‘objective view’, but – this was a key point for the indispensability of the legitimacy of the system of reactive attitudes – a sustained objectivity of inter-personal attitudes... does not seem to be something of which human beings would be capable.’ (ibid., p. 27). What Strawson observed here (and in other work) was an asymmetry between the manifest (self-) image and a more objective image of ourselves.

In our paper, we propose to strengthen and refine Strawson’s line of thought into a more sophisticated argument to the effect that the ensuing manifest self-image (in part, but not only, constituted by Strawson’s reactive attitudes) is a globally correct self-image (hence the integrity of the manifest), which can be defended against various local and global revisionist arguments derived from the study of the enabling conditions of ingredients of that image (some of our preferred examples will focus on the study of distal causes of attitudes in evolutionary psychology). While local proposals for revising or improving patterns of attitudes and rejecting allegedly false beliefs about ourselves sometimes make sense (although needs for local improvement were often already recognized from within the manifest image itself and did not require extensive study of its social or evolutionary enabling conditions), proposals for global revisionism are, we argue, self-destructive in that they would deny the validity of the manifest scheme  the  enabling conditions of which can be studied only under the assumption that the  manifest scheme of things is to a large extent adequate.

(edited abstract)