On ‘the Central Argument’ of ‘Freedom and Resentment’: Hieronymi, Russell, and Strawson

ABSTRACT P. F. Strawson's 1962 essay ‘Freedom and Resentment’ has been enormously influential for the contemporary responsibility discussion. It nevertheless remains contested how the essay is to be understood, and what the central argument is, if there even is any such. In her recent book Freedom, Resentment, and the Metaphysics of Morals (2020), Pamela Hieronymi argues that what is, in fact, the central argument of the essay has been mistakenly disregarded or wrongly dismissed. At the heart of this argument is Strawson's claim that ‘it cannot be a consequence of any thesis which is not itself self‐contradictory that abnormality is the universal condition’. Strawson, it seems, takes himself to catch his opponent in a self‐contradiction. This paper considers this argument: ‘the central argument’ of the essay. I argue, first, that the prime motivation for Hieronymi's reading of the argument is interpretatively problematic; second, that Hieronymi's reading implausibly commits Strawson himself to a self‐contradiction, in light of a (recently published) private letter of Strawson. Strikingly, the second interpretative problem also undermines Russell's influential dismissal of ‘the central argument’. Thus, the question remains: Why does Strawson charge his opponent with incoherence or self‐contradiction? Hieronymi is right that we should be puzzled by this, but neither her new reading nor Russell's old dismissal can explain this.