FOUNDING MODERN FREE-WILL DEBATES

STRAWSON, P.F.

Freedom and Resentment. Annual Philosophical Lecture, Henriette Hertz Trust, British Academy, 1962.

London, Oxford University Press, 1962. 8vo. In the original printed wrappers. Offprint from "The Proceedings of the British Academy", Volume XLVIII. Minor wear to extremities, internally with light marginal annotations in pencil, otherwise fine. Pp. (2), 187-211.

First printing, in the scarce offprint, of Strawson's famous landmark essay, in which he argues that free-will issues are crucially about the conditions required to hold persons responsible for their actions and that responsibility is "constituted by persons adopting certain "reactive attitudes" towards themselves and others". The essay is now regarded a classic and "the seminal essay of modern free-will debates". (Kane The Oxford Handbook of Free Will, P. 15).

"In his landmark essay, 'Freedom and Resentment,' P. F. Strawson (1962) sets out to adjudicate the dispute between those compatibilists who hold a consequentialist view of responsibility and those incompatibilists who hold the merit-based view. Both are wrong, Strawson believes, because they distort the concept of moral responsibility by sharing the prevailing assumption sketched above - the assumption that holding persons responsible rests upon a theoretical judgment of their being responsible. According to Strawson, the attitudes expressed in holding persons morally responsible are varieties of a wide range of attitudes deriving from our participation in personal relationships, e.g., resentment, indignation, hurt feelings, anger, gratitude, reciprocal love, and forgiveness." (SEP).

Order-nr.: 47734