The following is the script for my presentation at the Eastern APA on 01/11/2025. This is a revised version of an earlier presentation, edited to focus on a common foundation of Strawson’s exempted categories: the capacities criterion, which states that adult neurotypical human beings are exclusively or canonically morally responsible. The special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly on moral responsibility that I edited in 2024, titled Revolutionizing Responsibility, presents a series of challenges to the capacities criterion, some of which I outline here. 

Strawson’s Exceptions & the Capacities Criterion

In 1962, Strawson published one of the 20^th Century’s most influential philosophy papers on moral responsibility. That paper argued that holding someone morally responsible involves viewing the person as a proper target of the “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.” Extrapolating from these cases, we can infer that non-human animals would likewise 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 thereby contribute to the “moral community.” As Matthew Talbert explains in his entry in the Standard Encyclopaedia 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. (Talbert 2020, citing Strawson 1963).

Implicitly, these exemptions share a common foundation: the notion that moral responsibility requires capacities uniquely or canonically associated with neurotypical adult humans. It follows that non-neurotypical, non-adult, and non-human beings are exempt from the domain of responsibility. Following Stephanie Jenkins, I will call this assumption “the capacities criterion” (2024: 378). The capacities criterion, Jenkins explains, defines “animals and people with disabilities (especially… cognitive disabilities)” as “moral patients” and “non-contributing dependents” (ibid). This narrow definition of moral agency “guarantees an exclusionary ethic that is powerless to question its complicity with discourses of normalcy” (383). 

Not everyone agrees with the capacities criterion. Last year, I edited a special issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly that convened philosophers from a variety of marginalized subdisciplines to re-evaluate the concept of moral responsibility. These critiques pose a challenge to Strawson’s three exemptions, and the capacities criterion on which they rely. While not everyone will agree with these critiques, the fact that they are seldom discussed in philosophy is a harm in and of itself. By drawing attention to these standpoints, I aim to address an epistemic injustice in the profession and foster a more intersectional and inclusive debate.   

1. Neurological Disability/Neurodivergence

The first set of critiques challenges Strawson’s exclusion of neurodivergent people from the moral community. While not everyone defines neurodivergence as a disability, for simplicity I will focus on neurological differences that count as disabilities on the social model, i.e., that make the individual susceptible to ableist discrimination. I will call these “neurodivergent disabilities.” This category encompasses neurological variations that would fall under Strawson’s labels of “insane” and “mentally disordered.” In the special issue, philosophers working in the overlapping fields of critical disability theory, neurodiversity theory, and Mad studies raise some compelling objections to Strawson’s exclusion of this social category.

To begin, Jules Holroyd offers a helpful explanation of why Strawsonian “conventionalism” is ill-equipped to accommodate neurodivergent disabled standpoints (2024: 20). When Strawson shifted the debate from metaphysics to social theory, he proposed that moral responsibility should be understood as “practice-dependent,” meaning that its definition depends on the internal practices of a given culture or community (2024: 1). In Strawson’s exact words, the practice of responsibility “neither calls for, not permits, an external ‘rational’ justification.” 

Expanding on this proposal, Victoria McGeer (2019) 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 (Holroyd 2024: 13). 

What it means to be fashionable, in effect, is decided by “the teams of fashionistas coordinating the Paris fashion week” (Holroyd 2024: 14). David Shoemaker echoes this view, affirming that “there simply is no question as to [the responsibility system’s] correctness or incorrectness from an external standpoint” (2017: 482). This reflects the conventional Strawsonian wisdom that the definition of responsibility, and thus its proper extension and implementation, is essentially a matter of cultural consensus. Cultural insiders determine what it means to be responsible, and the standpoints of outsiders are deemed irrelevant.    

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 that a culture’s responsibility practices could be systematically erroneous or structurally unjust. On a related note, by discounting “external standpoints,” the practice-dependent view seems to restrict social change to incremental reform within the system – that is, piecemeal adjustments consistent with the dominant liberal tradition in the West. Indeed, McGeer, R. J. Wallace (1994), Michael McKenna (2012), and other “moderates” concur that revisions to the cultural definition of responsibility should be, in Manual Vargas’ terms, “conservative” (2004: 230) and “modestly revisionary” (228), not radical or revolutionary. The appeal to incremental change within the existing social order – which Charles Mills describes as a “domination contract” wherein cultural elites rule over cultural subordinates (2017: 36) – aligns with the liberal contractarian tradition that Strawson favoured: one denounced by the likes of Mills, Carole Pateman (1988), and Stacy Simplican (2016) as structurally racist, sexist, ableist, and altogether counter-revolutionary. This “liberal reformist” approach (Chapman 2024) clashes with the preferred political strategies of many critical disability theorists, Indigenous feminists, Marxists, and other revolutionaries who call for nothing short of a popular uprising against the ruling classes. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “justice delayed is justice denied”: incremental reform with an unjust system merely prolongs injustice and is an injustice in itself. 

Another issue with practice-dependent theories is that, even if they recognise a need for incremental “recalibrations” to the system, to use McGeer’s language (2019), they fail to explain how we should arbitrate between conflicting cultural practices. Should we see lakes and streams as responsible agents, as Indigenous environmental feminists do, or is this perspective too ‘external,’ and therefore irrelevant, to the Western paradigm? How should we even approach this dispute? If we defer to the culture consensus of the Imperial West (to which Strawson belonged), we risk dismissing Indigenous feminisms as, in Robin Dembroff’s terms, mere “ideology,” “activism,” or “delusion,” outside of the “space of reasons.” Holroyd argues that Strawsonians must bridge this epistemic gap by providing “tools for articulating and addressing… oppressive norms, structures, and institutions” in a culture’s responsibility system (2024: 20). The proposed revision includes a mandate to engage with marginalised cultures and address asymmetries of power between cultures.

While Strawson is silent on ableist oppression, he writes extensively about neurodivergent disability, which he treats as an impairment and limiting case of moral agency. Accordingly, Shelley Tremain notes that, “in Strawson…, the parameters of the moral domain are delineated and secured through the exclusion of disabled people” (2014: 5). Strawson’s stance on neurodivergent disability, in fact, replicates the de facto exclusion of disabled people from status-conferring institutions ranging from the family to the workforce to the education system. Disabled people, for instance, are “much less likely to be employed than those with no disability” (Bureau of Labor Statistic 2020), but much more likely to be incarcerated and involuntarily hospitalised (Prison Policy Initiative 2022), and thus removed from their communities. Neurodivergent disabled people are not, as Strawson imagined, exempt from their communities, but are forcibly exempted by ableist attitudes and policies. Strawson’s analysis misconstrues these systems of ableist exclusion as natural, apolitical phenomena rather than structural injustices enforced by ableist attitudes, laws, and policies.  

Strawson’s tacit embrace of the medical model has practical implications. In particular, it supports his contention that “insane” and “mentally disordered” people 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 inclusive members of the moral community. In other words, neurodivergent disabled people ought to be excluded from the moral community due to their tragic impairments. Their lives, furthermore, ought to be governed by a social contract designed by neurotypical/nondisabled cultural insiders – that is, fully responsible and functional adults – and this contract should provide some form of medical or legal intervention, not political solidarity or disability justice. This reductive medical perspective on neurodivergent disability matches the de facto cultural consensus that disability is an impairment that prevents people from being productive members of society. 

August Gorman agrees that Strawsonian conventionalism perpetuates neuronormative/ableist stereotypes by failing to engage with the neurodiversity model, which rejects the medicalization and individualization of neurodivergent disability. Gorman specifically critiques the Strawsonian assumption that non-neurotypical people are proper objects of sympathy and pity: “This dehumanizing pity is on full display in P.F. Strawson’s view, which is arguably the most widely adopted framework for thinking about the nature of moral responsibility” (2024: 11). While Strawson does not say that all neurodivergent people are mere moral patients, his focus on the tragic and “hopeless” cases of impaired agency reinforces the view of neurodivergent disability as impairment. At the same time, it positions “high-functioning” neurodivergent disabilities as exceptions or “superpowers” possessed by an elite few. Consistent with this, some people cite Elon Musk as proof that “some autistic people have extraordinary strengths and talents and can sometimes outperform non-autistic people on certain tasks,” especially in the fields of “science and tech” (Shah et al. 2022). This framing creates a dichotomy between the extraordinary, profitable forms of autism on the one hand, and the ordinary, tragic cases on the other. While this dualism may benefit cultural elites like Musk, it oppresses the millions of neurodivergent disabled people whose neurological variations are not culturally valued. This is another example of how the specter of disabled misery perpetuates the binary between the inspirational super-crip and the tragic sadcrip.  

Gorman adds that while neurotypical/nondisabled people may have good intentions, the unsolicited sympathy that they extend to neurodivergent disabled people is often received as patronizing and paternalistic. Most neurodivergent disabled people do not, in fact, want neurotypical/nondisabled saviours to pity, 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 version of compassionate allyship that merely intensifies oppression. It does so by positioning neurotypical/nondisabled allies as responsible “saviors” who bear the “burden” of healing tragic “cripples,” harkening back to the colonial narrative of the “white man’s burden” to “civilize the savages.” The history of the disability justice movement shows that disabled people are, in fact, capable of liberating ourselves, with or without nondisabled people’s help. While political solidarity is appreciated, unsolicited offers of help and healing have a sanctimonious tone, invoking religious images of messianic healing (St. Pierre 2024).

Virgil Murthy makes a similar point with respect to addiction (2024). 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 for non-addicts. Frankfurtians tend to speculate about whether addicts are voluntary delinquents or victims of uncontrollable impulses. Are they mad or bad? Do they deserve treatment or punishment? These armchair speculations, at best, ignore the structural injustices that addicts face on a daily basis, and at worst, lend credibility to oppressive practices like addict overincarceration and sterilization, which are part of a system of eugenic violence. Along the same lines, we can accuse conventional Strawsonians of promoting paternalistic and objectifying stereotypes of neurodivergent disability by using diagnostic categories as fodder for thought experiments and abstract cases studies, thereby overwriting neurodivergent people’s testimony. Instead of continuing to riff on Strawson’s armchair speculations about “schizophrenics” and “compulsives,” why not ask us about our agency? Are we hopeless or hopeful? Are we impaired or oppressed? Surely, we know best.

B. Non-human Animals

In his work on decolonial philosophy, Shyam Ranganathan contends that Western accounts of responsibility, including Strawson’s, are part of a colonial tradition of exclusion and epistemic injustice (2024). 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, to which South Asian thinkers can contribute nothing of value. This, in turn, negates a rich source of anti-colonial moral philosophy, including critiques of Western imperialism that hold the West responsible for systemic violence toward subjugated groups, including racialised humans, non-human animals, and living 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 “commonsense” 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 interconnected ecosystems like prairies, marshes, and rivers. They argue that the exclusion of non-human species from the responsibility system is a form of human supremacy rooted in colonialism – a system of domination that regards oppressed others, whether human or not, as “uncivilized,” lesser, and morally impaired. This exclusionary ethic justifies the use of “impaired agents” as slaves, commodities, and resources. But it is made to appear uncontroversial by an epistemology of domination that silences “external standpoints.”

Shelbi Meissner and Andrew Smith affirm this critique, arguing that Western philosophy marginalises Indigenous standpoints that espouse a more inclusive and less anthropocentric definition of responsibility (2024). 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” (2024: 14-19). Moral responsibility, as such, is a relational property distributed across networks of relationships that include, but extend far beyond, the human community – a community that is a minority population in the moral universe. Despite this minority status, human beings do by far the most damage to the moral ecology, undermining the ontological basis of responsibility itself, i.e., the kinship relationships of respect and reciprocity that make responsibility, and life itself, possible. Colonialism, then, is one of the greatest existential threats to responsibility, insofar as it constructs asymmetrical relationships through systemic violence, producing vast ecological destruction. How easy is it to be responsible when your house is on fire? This is the “moral community” built by centuries of colonization.  

Although not a contributor to the special issue, Kyle White offers more insight into how non-human organisms and ecosystems can be proper targets of the reactive attitudes and thus members of the moral community. Whyte explains how many Indigenous communities have an “emotional-laden relationship” to “features of the land (like rivers or mountains)” along with “natural interdependent collectives,” and this relationship is grounded in reciprocal responsibilities (2014: 602). For example, “a community may have a responsibility to care for salmon habitat; salmon, in turn, may provide food and support for other species” (2014: 603). If the community fulfils its responsibilities toward the salmon, they are entitled to an expectation of support in return. They may be grateful if this expectation is surpassed, or disappointed if it is frustrated. In this way, the reactive attitudes play a role in structuring and regulating relationships of reciprocal responsibilities between human and nonhuman persons. 

C. Children

The philosophical literature on children’s’ responsibility is, to my knowledge, relatively scarce. However, this does not mean that critiques of adult supremacy are any less valuable than critiques of human and neurotypical supremacy. On the contrary, these critiques are a crucial part of the concerted effort against exclusionary moral philosophies, which tend to view neurotypical human capacities as the only or primary basis for moral responsibility. Fortunately, critiques of colonialism and ableism contain tacit critiques of adult supremacy. 

Indigenous environmental feminisms, for example, imply, even if they do not explicitly state, that young children are moral agents. This follows from the claim that extended human and more-than-human kinship networks confer moral agency, and these networks include young children. Thus, young children, like fish and rivers, are moral persons with rights and responsibilities. It is reasonable to express gratitude, approval, disapprobation, and disappointment to young children, and to be amenable to the same attitudes in return.  

Like Indigenous feminists, critical disability theorists tend to reject the capacities view in favor of a relational model. Eva Fedder Kittay, for example, views interdependence, vulnerability, and emotional ties as the basis of moral personhood. Since we all depend on interpersonal relationships, we are all persons with inviolable rights and responsibilities. Kittay rejects neoliberal (individualistic) frameworks that define personhood as a property of autonomous, self-sufficient individuals, describing these models as “morally repugnant,” and comparable to “earlier exclusions based on sex, race, and physical ability” (2005: 100). Licia Carlson similarly argues that treating intellectual disability as a limiting or “marginal case” of personhood is an offensive form of “cognitive ableism” (2021: 74), and this argument can be extended to neurodivergent disability. The relational definition of personhood is meant to incorporate cognitively disabled people into the definition of personhood, but it can also be used to validate the personhood of children, who are a vulnerable and dependent social group.  

Children are an especially vulnerable group for political reasons. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, American children experience and witness more violence than adults (2020). 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” (Congressional Research Service 2015). 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 address their circumstances of ageist oppression. Instead, they must wait for adults to act on their behalf – a highly unlikely scenario, since adults are the main perpetrators of violence against children. 

Defining children as moral patients is odds with the mission of the National Youths Rights Movement (NYRM), which holds that young people are denied basic, inviolable rights due to ageist discrimination; “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” (NYRM). Denying that children are moral agents with rights and responsibilities conflicts with the Youth Rights Movement’s mission to empower and enfranchise young people. 

This does not mean that children do not deserve special protections. Like any oppressed group, youths are entitled to constitutional, legal, and social protections based on their situation of oppression. This is compatible with recognizing their rights and responsibilities.

Conclusion

In this presentation, I outlined and expanded on some recent interdisciplinary critiques of Strawson’s ‘commonsense’ exclusion of non-neurotypical people, non-human animals, and young children from the moral community. These critiques, if nothing else, challenge the intuitiveness and self-evidence of the capacities criterion, which is grounded in the pretheoretical intuitions of a specific standpoint – for Strawson, that of a privileged, white, cisgender, male professor at Oxford university in the mid-to-late 20^th century. To a modern audience, Strawson’s confident pronouncements about how we should treat “the insane” are likely to rankle, and his intuitions about non-human animals and children are becoming less commonsensical. Marginalised philosophers are leveraging their own commonsense to defend a more inclusive and intersectional model of responsibility. These critiques help us to not only understand the world of responsibility, but also, and more importantly, to change it.