The following is my presentation for the 41^st meeting of the International Social Philosophy Conference. I will be contributing to a panel on blame, equity, and moral community, focusing on the work of P. F. Strawson. Strawson is famous for arguing that moral responsibility is a matter of being able to participate in a “moral community” structured by “reactive attitudes” such as resentment, gratitude, forgiveness, and hurt feelings. Who is a proper member of this community? He answers this question by identifying non-members: “schizophrenics,” “compulsives,” “young children,” and the list goes on. In my presentation, I call into question these “intuitive exclusions” using resources from marginalized philosophers. As a neurodivergent, disabled, anti-colonial youth-liberation activist, I am interested in denying and debunking the Western demarcation between neurotypical adults and the rest of us. 

You can find my slides here:

Strawsonian Responsibility: Three Critiques from the Margins

Strawson’s Exceptions

P. F. Strawson (1963) believed that holding someone morally responsible involves seeing the person as a proper target of “reactive attitudes,” such as gratitude, resentment, forgiveness, anger, and hurt feelings. While most people are susceptible to these attitudes, there are notable exceptions, including individuals with (in Strawson’s words) “compulsions,” “insanity,” “less extreme forms of psychological disorder,” and “young children”^[i] Extrapolating from these cases, we can assume that nonhuman animals, like cats and dogs, would also be exempt from the reactive attitudes. The standard justification for these exemptions is that these groups lack the capacity to participate in interpersonal relationships and thus to contribute to the “moral community.”^[ii] As Matthew Talbert explains in his entry in the Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy,

For Strawson, the most important group of exempt agents includes those who are, at least for a time, significantly impaired for normal interpersonal relationships. These agents may be children, or psychologically impaired like the “schizophrenic”; they may exhibit “purely compulsive behaviour”, or their minds may have “been systematically perverted” (P. Strawson 1962 [1993: 51]).^[iii]

To be sure, Strawson’s exemptions capture a commonsense way of thinking about who is and is not responsible, at least for the average Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) citizen. However, commonsense intuitions, as we know, reflect a particular cultural standpoint, and the commonsense intuitions of tenured academics like Strawson are no exception. In general, the “pretheoretical concepts and terms” that prevail in academic philosophy are, in Robin Dembroff’s words, those of the “culturally powerful,” not “the commonsense of the racialized, poor, queer, transgender, or disabled,” which are “considered philosophically irrelevant ‘ideology,’ ‘activism,’ or ‘delusion.”^[iv] As diverse philosophers increasingly migrate into the field of moral responsibility – the historical dominion of privileged white men – they call into question the intuitive plausibility of these exemptions. 

In a special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly that I edited, which convenes philosophers from diverse backgrounds to discuss moral responsibility, contributors challenge Strawson’s three exceptions to the reactive attitudes; namely, those applying to (a) non-neurotypical people, (b) young children, and (c) other-than-human animals. In this presentation, I will outline these arguments in my own words and explain why their marginalisation is harmful to academic philosophy and society in general. While not everyone will agree with these critiques of Strawson, the fact that they are rarely discussed is a harm in and of itself. Thus, I wish to promote these views to correct an epistemic injustice in the profession. 

1. Neurological Disability/Neurodivergence

In Jules Holroyd’s contribution to the special issue, they challenge Strawson’s conceptualization of responsibility as “practice-dependent,” meaning that its definition depends on the internal practices of a given culture. As Strawson put it, the practice of responsibility “neither calls for, not permits, an external ‘rational’ justification.”^[v] 

Expanding on this view, Victoria McGeer compares being responsible to being fashionable. As Holroyd describes this analogy,  

There are facts, at any particular time or in any particular context, about what is fashionable. Something or someone can have the property of being fashionable. But these facts, or possession of the property, are wholly determined by the norms of fashion and by the practices involved in it. There is no independent, objective property that fashion- related practices track.^[vi]

Shoemaker echoes this view, maintaining that “there simply is no question as to [the responsibility system’s] correctness or incorrectness from an external standpoint.”^[vii] This reflects the received Strawsonian wisdom that the definition of responsibility, and thus its proper extension and implementation, are essentially matters of cultural consensus. 

Having said this, Strawsonians acknowledge that we can be wrong about what it means to be responsible, but whether we’re wrong depends on whether our judgements track the cultural consensus. The practice-dependent view doesn’t seem to allow for the possibility that a culture’s responsibility practices are systematically flawed or structurally unjust. By discounting ‘external’ criticism, particularly critiques from vastly different cultural standpoints, practice-dependent views seem to restrict social change to incremental reform within the system – that is, piecemeal adjustments consistent with the dominant liberal tradition. Indeed, McGeer, R. J. Wallace, Michael McKenna and other ‘moderates’ concur that revisions to the cultural definition of responsibility should be “conservative” and “modestly revisionary,”^[viii] not radical or revolutionary. The appeal to incremental change within the existing social order – that is, a domination contract – aligns with the liberal contractarian tradition that Strawson favored, a tradition rejected by the likes of Charles Mills, Carole Pateman,^[ix] and Stacy Simplican^[x] as structurally racist, sexist, ableist, and counter-revolutionary. This liberal approach clashes with the preferred political strategies of Indigenous feminists, crip theorists, Marxists, and other revolutionaries who call for nothing short of social and economic upheaval. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “justice delayed is justice denied.” Incremental reform is a prolongation of oppression and an injustice in itself.

Another issue with practice-dependent theories is that, even if they recognise a need for modest and incremental “recalibrations” to the system (to use McGeer’s language), they don’t explain how we are supposed to arbitrate between conflicting cultural practices. Should we see lakes and streams as responsible agents, as Indigenous feminists do, or is this perspective too ‘external,’ and therefore irrelevant, to the Western cultural paradigm? How should we even approach this dispute? If we defer to the culture consensus of the Imperial West (to which Strawson belonged), then Indigenous feminisms are, as Debroff affirms, mere ‘ideology,’ ‘activism,’ or ‘delusion, not legitimate philosophical argument. Holroyd argues that Strawsonians must address this epistemic gap in the Strawsonian paradigm, and provide “tools for articulating and addressing” oppressive norms in a culture’s responsibility system. ^[xi] The proposed revision includes a mandate to engage with marginalised cultures and ameliorate asymmetries of power.  

Since Strawson’s view does not include such a mandate – indeed, it seems to license epistemic injustice – it can be seen as a form of ideal theory, a liberal contract approach that “abstracts away from actual injustices, and so lacks the resources to understand, much less address or provide remedy for, real world injustices.”^[xii]Ideal theories, whether intentionally or not, reproduce structural injustices by failing to acknowledge their existence. They misrepresent the “social ontology,” in Mills’ words, as relatively fair and equitable.^[xiii]   

Several contributors to the special issue argue that ideal-theoretic accounts of responsibility, including Strawson’s, promote ableist oppression. Holroyd, for one, points out that Western conventions around responsibility perpetuate ableist stereotypes. For example, it is culturally normative to see disabled people as either tragic figures who succumb to their impairments or heroic overcomers who triumph over their impairments to achieve able-bodied markers of success. These attitudes impose double-binds on disabled people, making them targets of either patronizing praise (if they are ‘supercrips’) or condescending pity (if they are ‘sadcrips’). Modest revisions to the reactive attitudes will not address these double-binds, which are an ingrained features of the social contract, not mere personal prejudices. While Strawson is silent on ableist oppression, he writes at length about disability, particularly neurodivergence, which he treats as an impairment and limitation on moral agency. Hence, Shelley Tremain observes that, “in Strawson…, the parameters of the moral domain are delineated and secured through the exclusion of disabled people.”^[xiv] Strawson’s stance on disability, in fact, replicates the de facto exclusion of disabled people from liberal institutions ranging from the family to the labor force to the education system.  Disabled people, for example, are “much less likely to be employed than those with no disability,”^[xv]but much more likely to be incarcerated and involuntarily hospitalised, and thereby removed from their communities.^[xvi] In Western contexts, disabled people are in fact exempted from the moral community and denied the right to exercise their agency by ableist practices. Strawson’s analysis treats these forms of ableist exclusion as natural, apolitical phenomena rather than ableist systems of oppression. In other words, he presumes that (neurological) disability is a harmful medical condition.

Strawson’s embrace of the medical model has practical implications. Specifically, it supports the contention that (some) non-neurotypical people (“compulsives,” “schizophrenics,” etc.) are proper objects of“treatment,” “management,” “training,” and “social policy,” as well as risks to be “avoided” and “taken precautionary account of,” as opposed to members of the moral community.^[xvii] In other words, non-neurotypical people ought to be excluded from the moral community due to their tragic impairments, and should be governed by a social contract designed by the nondisabled ‘moral community,’ a contract that designates disabled people as targets of incarceration or hospitalisation, punishment or charity, but not solidarity or social justice. This view, again, mirrors the de facto cultural consensus that disability is an impairment that prevents individuals from being productive members of society. Rather, non-neurotypical people are economic drains and social risks, burdens on responsible, tax-paying citizens.

This pejorative stance on disability was especially prevalent in Strawson’s time, when lobotomies, sterilisation, castration, ice baths, and other forms of torture were considered humane ‘treatments’ for ‘lunatics’ and ‘neurotics,’ who could contribute nothing of value to society. The ‘social policies’ that Strawson recommended were, in the 1960s, in fact eugenic policies that modern readers would find appallingly ableist. These policies intersected with cultural notions of Blackness, queerness, and poverty as disabling conditions, thereby rendering all oppressed people susceptible to segregation and institutionalised violence. Thus, it is impossible to separate ableist social policies from other forms of oppression; ableist responsibility practices are, to some extent, also colonial, patriarchal, and classist.     

August Gorman agrees that the Strawsonian view perpetuates ableist stereotypes by failing to engage with the neurodiversity model, which rejects the medicalization and individualization of disability. Gorman specifically critiques the Strawsonian assumption that non-neurotypical people are proper objects of sympathy and pity due to their tragic impairments. This medical lens depicts non-neurotypical folks as tragic figures and charity cases who are incapable of living normal lives. While Strawson does not say that all non-neurotypical people are moral patients deserving of treatment, training, and management, his focus on the tragic cases of ‘impaired agency’ reinforces the stigma around disability, and frames ‘high-functioning’ disabilities as exceptions to the rule, ‘superpowers’ possessed by an elite few. Nowhere do we find robust, complicated, true-to-life accounts of disabled people’s experiences in Strawson’s work. Instead, we find labels of mental illnesses that supposedly impair moral functioning.

Gorman adds that while nondisabled people may have good intentions, the unsolicited sympathy that they extend to disabled people is received as patronizing and paternalistic. Most disabled people do not, in fact, need nondisabled saviours to train and manage them. Indeed, one of the problems with the kind of ‘progressive liberalism’ that we find in Strawson is that it offers a kind of compassionate allyship that merely intensifies oppression. The history of the disability justice movement shows that disabled people are capable of liberating ourselves and will continue to do so with or without nondisabled people’s help. 

Virgil Murthy raises a similar point with respect to addiction. Murthy, an addict philosopher, argues that Frankfurtian accounts of responsibility perpetuate patronizing and objectifying stereotypes of addiction by treating addicts as theoretical case studies and objects of intellectual curiosity. Frankfurtians tend to speculate about whether addicts are voluntary delinquents or victims of uncontrollable impulses^[xviii]. Are they mad or bad? Do they deserve punishment or treatment? These armchair speculations do nothing to address the structural injustices that addicts encounter on a daily basis. On the contrary, they lend credibility to oppressive practices like addict overincarceration and eugenic sterilization, which are component parts of a eugenic culture. Along the same lines, we can accuse conventional Strawsonians of promoting paternalistic and objectifying stereotypes of disability by using disability as fodder for thought experiments and abstract cases studies, rather than recognising disabled people as sources of knowledge and victims of ableist oppression. Instead of continuing to riff on Strawson’s speculations about schizophrenics and compulsives, why not just ask non-neurotypical about their experiences?     

B. Other-than-human Animals

In his contribution to the special issue, Shyam Ranganathan contends that Western accounts of responsibility, including Strawson’s, are part of a colonial tradition of exclusion and epistemic injustice.^[xix] While Strawson is not solely to blame, it is notable that Strawsonians rarely engage with non-Western perspectives, including Ranganathan’s specialisation of South Asian philosophy. This omission perpetuates the myth that moral philosophy is a Western invention, and therefore South Asians thinkers cannot contribute to philosophical knowledge about responsibility. This, in turn, negates a rich source of anti-colonial philosophy, including texts that critique Western imperialism and hold the West responsible for systemic violence toward racialised others, non-human animals, and interconnected ecosystems.

Another upshot of the Western bias in moral philosophy is that it creates an illusion of consensus, making tendentious claims seem intuitive and self-evident. One example of this false consensus is the assumption that responsibility is a property of human beings exclusively. This Strawsonian exemption, however, is not widely held outside of the contemporary West. Many South Asian philosophers, including Ranganathan, believe that moral responsibility is shared by humans, non-human animals, and ecosystems like prairies, marshes, and rivers. These philosophers contend that the exclusion of non-human animals from the responsibility system is a form of human supremacy, which is itself an extension of colonialism, a system of domination that sees oppressed groups, whether human or not, as ‘uncivilised’ and morally impaired. This theoretical belief, in turn, justifies colonial hierarchies that treat ‘impaired’ others as objects of Eutocentric control, inferior subjects, slaves, and exploitable resources.

Shelbi Meissner and Andrew Smith affirm this critique, arguing that Western philosophy marginalises Indigenous standpoints that espouse a more inclusive and less anthropocentric notion of responsibility. According to Indigenous environmental feminisms, responsibility is a property of “extended more-than-human kinship relationships,” which encompass humans as well as “other-than-human beings, spiritual and abiotic entities, and landscapes.”^[xx] Moral responsibility, as such, is a relational property distributed across webs of relationships that include, but extend far beyond, human beings, who are in fact a minority population in this system. Despite this minority status, human beings do by far the most damage to this system, undermining the ecological basis of responsibility itself, i.e., kinship relationships of mutual respect and reciprocity. Indeed, colonialism is one of the greatest threats to responsibility insofar as it constructs ‘interpersonal relationships’ through colonial violence and capitalist exploitation. How easy is it to be responsible when your house is on fire? This is the ‘moral community’ built by colonisers.

C. Children/youths

While no one in the special issue directly addresses Strawson’s exclusion of young children from the moral community, it stands to reason that if rivers and fish have responsible agency, then so do children. On a kinship model, human children are part of the extended human and more-than-human kinship network that grounds and confers responsible agency. 

The neurodiversity model supports the same conclusion for slightly different reasons. It rejects the notion that adult neurotypical capacities are required for responsibility. People with schizophrenia, OCD, intellectual disabilities, and other neurodivergent variations are responsible agents because moral agency is not an individual property or capacity. Things like occupational functioning, social fluency, and IQ are not markers of responsibility, but are merely markers of social status and routes to social privilege.

This critique resonates with accounts of personhood from crip theory. Eva Feder Kittay, for instance, claims that the exclusion of “profoundly cognitively disabled” individuals from the definition of moral personhood, and by extension moral responsibility, is “as morally repugnant as earlier exclusions based on sex, race, and physical ability.”^[xxi]Similarly, Licia Carlson holds that treating intellectual disability as a limiting or “marginal case” of personhood is deeply ableist.^[xxii] Crip theorists tend to see moral personhood  as a function of relationality, dependency, and vulnerability, not intellectual or neurological ability. If this is correct, then young children, as a dependent and vulnerable group, are moral agents. 

The notion that personhood does not depend on cognitive functioning is gaining traction amongst medical professionals as well. In The Journal of Qualitative Health Research, Kelsey Chapman and colleagues affirm that “personhood is not related to functional or physical capabilities,” and “acknowledgement of personhood is critically important for people with disability, who have historically been denied basic human rights… through erasure of their role as decision-makers with authority over their own lives.”^[xxiii]  This claim seems to confirm that children, who have historically been (and still are) denied basic humans rights, should be acknowledged as moral persons, with the right to make decisions about how their lives will go.

Children, like disabled adults, are highly susceptible to violence and abuse due to their situation of vulnerability. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, American children experience and witness more violence than adults. Nonetheless, the U.S. refuses to sign the United Convention on the Rights of the Child, which would protect children from “physical or mental violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, at school or by a parent or legal guardian.” The U.S. reserves the right of adults to batter children, marry children, rape children in the context of marriage, and perpetuate other types of abuse that would be illegal if done to an adult. If children are mere moral patients, they can do nothing to advocate for themselves. They must wait for adults to act on their behalf.

Affirming that children are mere moral patients, I believe, is at odds with the Youths Rights Movement, which holds that young people are denied basic rights due to ageism. “These rights include the right to be full participants in our representative democracy through voting, the right to privacy, the right to be free from physical punishment, the right to make decisions about our own lives, the right to be outdoors, the right to prove ourselves, and the right to receive the same amount of respect as anyone else.” Ageism against youths “is a form of discrimination,” but “unlike discrimination based on race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, ability, or age (at least for older people), ageism against the young (sometimes called adultism) is both legal and common.” Denying that children are moral agents with rights and responsibilities is at odds with the Youth Rights Movement’s mission to empower young people.  

Conclusion

This presentation summarised and expanded on some of the critiques from the special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly that call into question the Strawsonian exclusion of non-neurotypical people, non-human animals, and children from the moral ecosystem of responsibility. These critiques, if nothing else, challenge the intuitiveness and self-evidence of these exemptions, which are grounded in the pretheoretical commitments and intuitions of a specific social milieu and specific standpoint – for Strawson, that of a privileged, white, male professor at Oxford university in the mid-to-late 20^th century. To a modern audience, Strawson’s language is likely to rankle, and his confident pronouncements about neurological disabilities are equally jarring. Marginalised philosophers are casting doubt on these intuitions, leveraging their own experiences to defend new, more inclusive models of responsibility. These critiques help us to not only understand the world of responsibility, but also, and more importantly, to change it. 

Thank you.

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^[i] P.F. Strawson, 1963, “Freedom and Resentment,” open-access source, unpaginated.

^[ii] Ibid.

^[iii] Matthew Talbert, “Moral Responsibility,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/moral-responsibility/>.

^[iv] Robin Dembroff, “Cisgender Commonsense and Philosophy’s Transgender Problem,” Transgender Studies Quarterly, 7(3), 399-406, 2020.

^[v] Strawson ibid.

^[vi] Jules Holroyd, “The Distortions of Oppressive Praise,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 10(1/2), 2024, 1-30, 2024, referencing Victoria McGeer, “Scaffolding Agency: A Proleptic Account of the Reactive Attitudes,” European Journal of Philosophy, 27(2), 301-323, 2019.

^[vii] D. Shoemaker. “Response-dependent Responsibility; or, a Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Blame,” Philosophical Review, 126(4), 481-527, 2017.

^[viii] Manuel Vargas. “Responsibility and the Aims of theory: Strawson and Revisionism,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 85(2), 218-241, 2004.

^[ix] Carole Pateman. “Sexual Contract,” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, 1-3, 2016.

^[x] Stacy C. Simplican. “The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship,” University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

^[xi] Holroyd ibid.

^[xii] Holroyd ibid, referencing Ciurria 2022, referencing Mills 2017. 

^[xiii] Charles W. Mills. “Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism.” Oxford University Press, 2017.

^[xiv] Tremain, “When Moral Responsibility Theory Met My Theory of Disability,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 10(1/2), 1-30, 2024. 

^[xv]  U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Persons with a Disability-Labor Force Characteristics-2023,” 2024.

^[xvi]  Prison Policy Initiative. “Disability,” 2022.

^[xvii] Strawson ibid.

^[xviii] Virgil Murthy. “Against Arguing about Addict Agency,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 10(1/2), 1-29, 2024.  

^[xix] Shyam Ranganathan. “Reason and Solidarity with Persons against White Supremacy and Irresponsibility: A South Asian Analysis,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 10(1/2), 1-31, 2024.

^[xx] Shelbi N. Meissner & Andrew F. Smith, “Climate Crisis as a Relational Crisis,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, 10(1/2), 1-30, 2024.

^[xxi] Eva F. Kittay. “At the Margins of Mora Personhood.” Ethics, 116(1), 100-131, 2005.

^[xxii] Licia Carlson. “Why Does Intellectual Disability Matter to Philosophy?: Toward a Transformative Pedagogy.” Philosophical Inquiry in Education, 28(2), 72-82, 2021.

^[xxiii] K. Chapman, A. Dixon, C. Ehrlich, & E. Kendall, “Dignity and the Importance of Acknowledgement of Personhood for People with Disability.” Qualitative Health Research, 34(1-2), 141-153, 2024.