Toward a Theory of the Reactive Attitudes
Elisa Hurley and Coleen Macnamara
RoME Congress 2009
Boulder, CO, August 9, 2009
Since their introduction in Peter Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” nearly five
decades ago, the reactive attitudes have come to hold a prominent place in moral
philosophy. To take just the most recent example, reactive attitudes feature centrally in
Stephen Darwall’s The Second-Person Standpoint, an ambitious attempt to give an account of
morality as irreducibly second-personal, as a matter, most fundamentally, of mutual
accountability. Reactive attitudes also take center stage in debates about moral agency,
where many—notably R. Jay Wallace, Angela Smith, and John Fischer and Mark Ravizza—
hold that moral responsibility is closely aligned with being the proper target of reactive
attitudes.
It is unanimously accepted that reactive attitudes are ways of holding people responsible
for their conduct, understood as a matter of moral appraisal that goes beyond mere judgments
about their blameworthiness and praiseworthiness, but serves to actually praise or blame
them for that conduct. Paradigm examples include resentment, indignation, disapprobation,
and guilt, on the blame side, and gratitude, approbation and self-congratulation, on side of
praise. Whether or not it is made explicit, this is the conception of the reactive attitudes that
is common across the range of moral projects to which the reactive attitudes are central.
But there remains a serious, and striking, gap in discussions of the reactive attitudes
and their moral significance: nobody actually argues for the claim that reactive attitudes are
ways of holding responsible, or makes good on how this could be so. This is surprising,
because it seems to us that such a claim cries out for explanation and justification. After all,
it amounts to saying that, when we resent another for her disregard, or approve of another’s
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act of kindness, we are holding her responsible for her conduct even if we bite our tongues and
do not express our resentment or ever get around to expressing our approval. While it is obvious
that our unexpressed reactive attitudes presuppose that we take their objects to be
responsible—we don’t, after all, resent or approve of others for conduct they are not
responsible for—this is quite different from claiming that in having such attitudes, we hold
them responsible. When I hold another responsible, I do more than attribute responsibility to
her, which is a matter of taking something to be true of her; rather, I do something to her—I
seem to be engaging her in some way, interacting with her. But how can something
unexpressed (i.e., an emotion or attitude I’m having) do anything to a person? Everyone
proceeds as if reactive attitudes do this thing called holding responsible, but no one explains
why or how this could be.
What we want to do in this paper is to begin solve this puzzle. We can’t of course give
a full theory of how reactive attitudes hold responsible here (although this is the aim of our
larger project), but we can make a start by thinking about the point just highlighted: holding
someone responsible seems, minimally, to be a matter of doing something to her. So, in this
paper we want to make progress on the question of how an unexpressed reactive attitude
can do anything to anyone, as a first step toward understanding how such an attitude could
hold responsible. We ultimately suggest that one reason why current accounts have failed to
capture how reactive attitudes constitute doings-to is that they have failed to take seriously
the fact that the reactive attitudes are first and foremost emotions. Our proposed account of
reactive attitudes makes clear the philosophical pay-off of taking this fact seriously.
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I.
Let’s start by taking a look at what the literature on reactive attitudes has to say. When
discussing the reactive attitudes, many theorists focus on what they are reactions or
responses to. Peter Strawson, for example, suggests that the “reactive attitudes are
essentially natural human reactions to the good or ill will or indifference of others towards
us, as displayed in their attitudes and actions” (1974, 10). According to R. J. Wallace, the
reactive attitudes are responses not to others’ displays of good or ill will, but rather to others’
conduct that violates some demand or obligation (1994, Ch. 2). And in his most recent book
Moral Dimensions, Tim Scanlon suggests that the reactive attitudes are reactions to
relationship-impairing (or, if we expand his view to include positive reactive attitudes,
relationship-enhancing) conduct. Scanlon’s view is worth taking a moment to discuss, using
one of his examples. Suppose I learn that my friend Joe was at a party last week, where,
when he overheard some mutual acquaintances making cruel jokes at my expense, he not
only failed to come my defense, but contributed a few barbs of his own, in the process
revealing embarrassing facts about me that I had shared with him in confidence. According
to Scanlon, Joe’s behavior is relationship impairing: it violates the norms of friendship and
thereby impairs our relationship. I can, according to Scanlon, respond to Joe’s relationshipimpairing conduct in a number of ways, but one of the ways I might do so is by resenting him
(2008, 129-30).
We take issue with these views on two fronts. For one thing, we don’t think any of
them adequately captures what the reactive attitudes are reactions to. Start with Scanlon’s
view that reactive emotions are responses to relationship-impairing conduct. The problem
with this view is that one party’s normatively significant conduct does not impair a
relationship. To see what we mean, let’s return to the Joe. According to Scanlon, Joe’s conduct
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at the party, in virtue of its violating the norms of friendship, is relationship impairing. But
this doesn’t seem right. Imagine that I never learn what Joe did at the party, or that I learn of
it but ignore it, deciding I am not going to let it bother me or change things between us. If
events unfold in either of these ways, then it seems there is no sense in which our
relationship is impaired. To be sure, Joe’s conduct poses a threat to our relationship. His
conduct gets the ball of impairment rolling, we might say. But if I decide not to catch that
ball, if, that is, I do not take up his norm-violating conduct in the proper way, then no
impairment in our friendship occurs.
What we’re getting at is that there is always a gap between what one party in a
relationship does in violation of the norms governing that relationship, and that relationship’s
thereby being impaired. When one participant in the relationship acts in norm-transgressing
ways, it is an open question what the other participant is going to do with that fact, whether
she is going to take it seriously or not, whether she is going to let it affect her regard for the
actor, her orientation towards him. To be sure, one party’s normatively significant conduct
may on its own have some prima facie significance for the relationship, but until that potential
significance is taken up by the other party, the relationship itself stands unimpaired. In this
way, we think of the normatively significant conduct people undertake within relationships
as being like speech acts: it must be taken up in order to “succeed,” in this case, succeed at
impairing the relationship.
If we are right that conduct that violates the norms of a relationship cannot by itself
impair a relationship, then Scanlon’s account of what the reactive attitudes are responses to
is flawed. When I resent Joe for his nasty conduct, my reaction is not to his relationshipimpairing conduct, for his conduct viewed in isolation is not relationship impairing.
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Wallace’s view runs into a different kind of problem. Recall that on his picture the
reactive attitudes are reactions to another’s conduct that violates a demand or obligation.
Leaving aside for now the fact that Wallace just rules out the possibility of there being
positive reactive attitudes (a move he acknowledges and embraces, we think mistakenly), we
think his formulation of what reactive attitudes are responses to is still too narrow. Moral
theorists often distinguish between the deontic realm—the realm of obligation and
prohibition, and right and wrong—and the evaluative realm—the realm of the good and bad,
the virtuous and vicious. We think Wallace is wrong to limit the reactive attitudes to
responses to specifically deontic violations. It seems to us that we have what are clearly
reactive attitudes toward others’ good and bad behavior, their displays of virtue and vice.
When I feel approval of my sister for volunteering at a soup kitchen, for example, I am, it
seems, reacting to her conduct’s moral significance, but not because it meets (or even
exceeds) some moral obligation; rather, I am responding to it under an evaluative guise. I react
to her conduct as compassionate and generous, that is, as displaying virtue. To insist that
such a response therefore does not belong in the class of reactive attitudes seems arbitrary to
us.
The account espoused by Strawson, namely that the reactive attitudes are reactions to
the good or ill will displayed by others’ conduct, is also too narrow. While we think this
picture might capture well what is going on with what he calls “personal” reactive attitudes,
such as resentment and gratitude (where it seems clear we are responding to the good or ill
will shown by another toward us), we think often and in other cases we are responding not
to displays of good or ill will, but rather to violations of moral norms that we care about.
Take, for example, a common response we might have to a stranger’s littering; if I see her
throw her empty candy wrapper out the window of her car, I am indignant because she is
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littering, and not because she is showing me ill will. She may very well be showing
disregard or disrespect for moral norms that I and others in the moral community care
about, but it seems a stretch to say that she is showing disregard for me. Nevertheless, it
once again strikes us as arbitrary to rule out the anger I feel toward her here as a case of
indignation.
Our point is not that Strawson’s and Wallace’s views of what reactive attitudes are
reactions to are wrong; it is just that we think each conception is too narrow to capture the
full range of the reactive attitudes. And so we would like to propose something broader as
the subject matter of reactive attitudes. On our view, reactive attitudes are responses to
normatively significant conduct. Normatively significant conduct will of course include
deontically significant conduct (conduct that meets or violates demands and obligations) and
evaluatively significant conduct (conduct that can be characterized as good or bad, virtuous
or vicious); it will also include conduct characterizable by both thin and thick normative
terms, that is, conduct that is right and wrong, but also conduct that is selfish, dishonest,
untrustworthy, and disrespectful, as well as self-less, generous, and compassionate—in other
words, all the sorts of conduct that display good or ill will.
But notice that, even if we are right about what reactive attitudes are reactions to, this
characterization of them cannot be the whole story about reactive attitudes. This brings us to
the second shortcoming of the views we’ve canvassed here: an account of what the reactive
attitudes are responses to does not get us all the way to understanding them as doings to, and
therefore will always be incomplete as an account of the reactive attitudes. We need more,
and for that, we must turn elsewhere.
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II.
Fortunately we also find in the literature two characterizations of the reactive attitudes
that go beyond describing what they are reactions to. First there is a picture originating with
Gary Watson and taken up by Stephen Darwall, among others, according to which the
reactive attitudes are forms of moral communication or, as it is often put, moral address.
Second, there is Pamela Heironymi’s alternative, found in her “The Force and Fairness of
Blame”; there she suggests that reactive attitudes are responses that constitute changes in
relationship. The idea is, when I feel resentment in response to your normatively significant
conduct, my doing so impairs our relationship in some way, and when I feel gratitude in
response to other normatively significant conduct on your part, my doing so constitutes an
enhancement in our relationship. We will take a look at both of these views.
Let’s start with the moral address camp, taking a closer look at what people mean
when they say that reactive attitudes are forms of moral communication or address. Often
what people mean is that reactive attitudes are paradigmatically expressed in forms of moral
address. A close reading of Watson’s view in “Responsibility and the Limits of Evil” reveals
that this is precisely what he means. Consider what he says: “The reactive attitudes are
incipient forms of communication, though not in the sense that resentment et al. are usually
communicated; very often, in fact, they are not. Rather, the most appropriate and direct
expression of resentment is to address the other with a complaint and a demand” (1993, 127,
emphasis added).
Other theorists, however, seem to want to say something more than this. According to
Darwall, the reactive attitudes themselves, prior to or independent of their expression, are
forms of moral address; more specifically, he argues, they address “demands, claims, and
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requests” (2007, 114, fn 6.; see also 2006, 9). There are two things Darwall might mean by this
claim. On the one hand, he might mean that reactive attitudes rest on and reflect demands.
Consider what he says about gratitude:
Gratitude is like forgiveness in being parasitic on legitimate claims or expectations. We
are appropriately grateful when people benefit us or act as we wish when we lack any
relevant claim or expectation of them. Responsible agents feel gratitude, moreover in
response to an action . . .. (2006, 71).
On the other hand, he might mean that the reactive attitudes themselves actually do express
demands, that to experience a reactive attitude toward someone is to silently demand
something of or from her. To use one of his favorite examples, when I feel resentment
toward you for stepping on my foot, I am in so doing silently demanding that you get off of
it.
Are any of these pictures of moral address a plausible account of how the reactive
attitudes can be doings-to? We think not. Take Watson’s view that the reactive attitudes are
incipient forms of moral address (1993, 129) because they are paradigmatically expressed in
moral address. If this is all people mean when they say that the reactive attitudes are forms
of moral address, then they are not characterizing the reactive attitudes, qua attitudes, as
doings-to. The most they can be claiming is that when they are expressed—in speech, actions,
or gestures—they do something to another, that is, they morally address her. But what we
are after is an account of the reactive attitudes as doings-to independent of their actually
being addressed.
The first gloss on Darwall’s position—namely that reactive attitudes rest on and reflect,
or in his terms, are “parasitic on,” demands—faces a similar problem. To say that reactive
attitudes rest on and reflect prior demands makes no claim whatsoever about whether the
reactive attitudes themselves do anything, make demands or otherwise. What about the
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second gloss on Darwall’s position, the idea that to have a reactive attitude just is to silently
demand something of someone? Well, notice right off the bat that if this were right, it would
capture only some of the reactive attitudes. Even if we for the moment grant him that when I
feel resentment toward you for stepping on my foot I am in my head demanding that you
get off it, this sort of view doesn’t work for reactive attitudes like gratitude. When I feel
gratitude toward you for the kindness you have shown or a favor done, am I demanding
something of you? What would that be? Feeling gratitude toward someone just does not
seem to involve anything like addressing demands, claims, or requests to her.
But we don’t find this view plausible for cases like resentment, either. Consider what it
is like to feel resentment toward someone for stepping on your foot, say in his heedless rush
to get the best seat on the train. It just doesn’t seem right to us to think that what’s going on
here is that you are silently demanding, “hey, buddy, get the hell off my foot.” You might
do that, too, of course. But then you would be doing two things, not one. That is, to our mind
it is one thing to have a reactive attitude toward someone, and quite another to silently
demand something of him; these seem to be two distinct ways of responding to someone’s
normatively significant conduct.
Of course, to show that Darwall’s account of reactive attitudes is counterintuitive in
this way doesn’t show that it is wrong. But there is a third way in which we find this picture
of the reactive attitudes misguided. We think, prima facie, that an account of what the
(unexpressed) reactive attitudes do to another that honors the fact that they are emotions is
better than an account that captures reactive attitudes as doings-to at the expense of taking
their emotionality seriously. An account like Darwall’s, by turning to talk of the demands
that reactive attitudes address to others, seems to abandon any attempt to account for what
reactive attitudes are doing qua emotional states. But we think, and will try to show in the
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next section, that when we understand emotions properly, there is actually enormous
conceptual pay-off to taking seriously the emotional character of reactive attitudes.
III.
So, let’s turn to the Heironymi’s view, namely, that reactive attitudes constitute
changes in relationships between people. Does it fare any better than the moral address
camp? Can reactive attitudes constitute changes in relationships? The answer is, it depends;
it depends, specifically, on the picture of emotions one is working with. Let’s see why.
According to Hieronymi, our reactive attitudes are made up of two pieces: the first is a
cluster of judgments, the most central of which is the judgment that someone has shown
good or ill will toward us or toward another, and the second is an “affective
accompaniment,” a “certain unpleasant emotional disturbance, occasioned by the
judgment,” which may serve to show the importance to us of that judgment (2004, 121). On
her view, “to resent another. . . will be simply to judge that that person showed you
disregard and to experience this affect. To be indignant would be to judge that she showed
disregard for another and to experience a somewhat different accompanying affect” (2004,
120). This is to say that Hieronymi seems to adhere what we call a “component view” of
emotions: a picture of emotions as composite states involving a cognitive component like a
belief or judgment accompanied by a separate, nonintentional feeling component. But if this
is what emotions in general, and reactive attitudes in particular, are like, then they are not
the kinds of thing the having of which could constitute a change in one’s relationship with
someone. Let us explain.
As Hieronymi herself notes, to be in a relationship with another is a matter of standing
in relations of mutual regard with her (2004, 124). Relationships are constituted by forms of
interpersonal relating and regard which are in turn constituted by reciprocal patterns of
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attitude, intention, disposition and the like between the participants in the relationship.
Relationships between people are matters of their relating to one another, of being oriented
toward one another, in certain ways, namely, whatever ways are appropriate for
relationships of that sort. For there to be a change in a relationship, then, the orientation,
stance, or attitudes of the parties in that relationship toward each other—those reciprocal
forms of interpersonal regard that, after all, constitute the relationship—have to change in
some way. Changes in relationship require changes in the relations of mutual regard. In
other words, to talk about bringing about changes in relationship, we at the very least need
to be able to talk about changes in regard.
So if having reactive attitudes in response to another is going to constitute changes in
a relationship with her, then reactive attitudes must be forms of regard. But the reactive
attitudes cannot be forms of regard on Hieronymi’s account. After all, to have some sort of
regard for another is have an orientation or stance towards her—it is an attitude that is
intentionally directed toward her. If the reactive attitudes are understood as judgments plus
affective accompaniments, then they don’t have the right intentional structure to capture this
directedness toward. To be sure, my judgment about your having shown me good or ill will
is intentional; “aboutness” is one sort of intentionality, the sort that characterizes
propositional attitudes such as beliefs. But making a judgment or having a belief about
something is different from having an attitude directed toward someone or something. Nor
is adding a feeling to a judgment about going to get the sort of intentionality we’re after here.
For mere pleasant or unpleasant feelings have no intentionality at all. Simply adding them to
a judgment that someone has shown you ill will will not thereby add up to a form of regard.
In making a judgment about the quality of another’s will accompanied by affect, one is still
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in a state that is at most about her conduct, a matter merely of taking in information about the
world.
In short, then, the fact that Hieronymi assumes a component view of emotions, and
therefore of reactive emotions, prohibits her from saying that reactive attitudes are forms of
regard. And if she can’t say they are forms of regard, then she can’t say that having a
reactive attitude toward someone changes your regard for her, and so she can’t make good
on the claim that having reactive attitudes toward others constitutes changes in relationships
with them.1
But the component view of emotions is not the only available view. In fact, many now
agree, and one of us has argued elsewhere, that the component view is bankrupt: emotions,
as mental states, are not properly understood as simply aggregates of, on the one hand, a
feeling-less cognitive component such as a belief or judgment which is properly about the
world and has conceptual contents and, on the other, an affective extra (a psychic or bodily
feeling) which is itself nonintentioinal and nonconceptual. While a full treatment of the
argument and alternative picture is beyond the scope of this paper, the central point to note
is that when we experience an emotion in response to something, we do not simply have a
thought about that thing along with some discrete package of pleasant or unpleasant
feelings; rather, we have a qualitative experience about or directed toward that thing. When
I am excited about a friend’s coming to visit, I am not experiencing some positive feelings
along with the thought that my friend is coming, or even about the thought that her coming is
Though it will likely change our relations to another. There is a distinction, then, between a
relationship and a relation. A relation is merely an instantiation of a relational property, like “to the left
of.” We stand in many relations toward one another, and whether we have the property of standing
in X relation or Y relation to someone may change easily and often, depending on how we think of the
other. But a relationship is a richer entity than a mere relation; it involves a whole network of
reciprocal attitudes, intentions, dispositions, and feelings, and is partly constituted by the
interpretation of its members. Our thanks to Maggie Little for helping us to see and define this
distinction.
1
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a good thing. Rather, my whole attitude toward her coming is colored by my feeling; it is
charged in a particular way.
In other words, the affective quality of emotions is not properly understood as a matter
of their involving discrete feeling states accompanying thoughts, beliefs, or judgments;
rather, their affectivity is internal to their intentional directedness (Roberts 1988; Goldie 2000
and 2002; Stocker 1983 and 1987). The mistake of the component view, it’s been argued,
was to think that in order for emotions to be understood as both intentional and affective
states, they would have to be reducible into a separate cognitive (and hence intentional) and
affective components. The waters are now safe for thinking that emotions are more properly
understood as unified mental states in which affectivity and intentionality are all caught up
together (Oakley 1992).
Furthermore, when we take seriously the claim that emotions are not reducible to a set
of component mental states, then we can also examine their intentional structures in their
own terms, rather than having to look at the intentional structure (or lack thereof) of their
components. So what kind of intentional structure do emotions display? Well, on the one
hand, emotions are often about things, just as beliefs and judgments are. When Mary is sad
about the closing of her favorite restaurant, Kevin is amused by the joke his sister shared,
and Jill feels pride over her recent successes at work, each of their emotions is about
something. Furthermore, in each case, in having an emotion, the person is implicitly
construing the situation or object her emotion is about in a particular way, namely, in terms
distinctive to that emotion type: for sadness, in terms of loss; for amusement, in terms of the
humorous; and for pride, in terms of a feature of herself that reflects positively on her in
some way. This is just to make the familiar point that it is part of very logic of emotions that
they necessarily involve construing what they are about in terms circumscribed by each
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emotion type, and that it is in terms of these construals—known as their formal objects—that
emotions are identifiable and intelligible.
In fact, we have already introduced the formal objects of the reactive attitudes as a
class, namely, normatively significant conduct. That is, each reactive attitude will have as its
formal object conduct construed as normatively significant in the particular way fitting to that
reactive attitude type. What makes resentment different from indignation different from
gratitude is the specific type of normative significance each construes the conduct it’s
responding to as having. A full treatment of the formal objects of each is beyond the scope of
this discussion, but suffice it to say that resentment’s formal object will likely have
something to do with personal offense; indignation’s with disregard of another or of moral
norms, and gratitude’s with favors and kindnesses.
But where the intentionality of attitudes like beliefs is, arguably, exhausted by their
being “about” things, emotions’ intentionality is not. Emotions can also have what Ronald
de Sousa calls “targets” (1987, Ch. 5). The target of an emotion is the real object in the world
toward which it is directed.2 Most often, such targets are persons. If I am angry at you for
taking my sweater without asking, then my anger is about your taking my sweater
(construed as an offense). But my anger is intentional in the further sense that it is also
directed toward you. Your offensive conduct is the formal object of my anger, but you are its
target. We might say, then, that I am angry at you in virtue of your having taking my
sweater.
Of course, not all emotions have targets. Sadness, for instance, typically does not. Nor
will grief: my grief over the death of my mother is about the loss of someone very valuable to
This is importantly not reducible to the object of a propositional belief in which the emotion might be
grounded (de Sousa 1987, Ch. 5).
2
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me, but it is not directed toward my mother, or toward anything else. Hope is another
emotion that may never or rarely have a target; when we hope, it is usually for the coming
about of a state of affairs; there is nothing in the world to be its target. In hoping for a
promotion, for example, my hope is not directed at anyone or anything.
But many emotions do have targets, including not just anger, as discussed above, but
also contempt, love, hate, trust, and, at least quite often, jealousy. These are not just
emotions we feel in response to and about certain people and their behavior; these are
emotions we feel toward people. What more can we say about this notion of feeling toward
someone? Well, consider contempt: the contempt Margaret feels for her ex-husband Seth is
not just about Seth, it is, as Michelle Mason puts it, an affective stance toward him (2003, 239), a
form of regard that has a salient affective quality, namely, of pain in the presence of or aversion
to its object (2000, 241). My love for Chris is not, or not only, a feeling I have about him; to
feel love for him is to affectively orient myself toward him in a particular way; this time the
affective quality is positive and likely involves being drawn toward the object. To hate
someone is not just to think about or respond to her presence, her actions or her voice with
negative feelings; it is to affectively regard her in a way that is unfavorable, or negatively
flavored. So, to feel toward a target is to affectively orient oneself toward that person, to
adopt a favorable or unfavorable, positive or negatively flavored, affective stance toward
her. In other words, we think of any emotion that has a target as a positively or negatively
flavored affective orientation toward, or form of affective regard for, the person who is its
target.
It should be clear that reactive attitudes fall into the class of emotions that have targets.
Resentment, indignation, disapprobation, guilt, gratitude, approbation, and selfcongratulation are all directed toward persons in just this sense. Furthermore, the reactive
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attitudes form a distinctive subclass of emotions distinguished by their formal objects, viz.,
normatively significant conduct. We want to suggest, then, that reactive attitudes are
positive or negative affective orientations toward, or regard for, others in virtue of their
normatively significant conduct. Consider some examples. Suppose we are colleagues, and
I call your philosophical work “garbage.” We’re suggesting that your subsequent resentment
of me be understood as a matter of you taking up a modified affective orientation toward me
in response to what I’ve said. And your affective regard toward me has a negative flavor in
virtue of what you take the normative significance of my conduct toward you to be—a
display of rudeness and uncollegiality. On the positive side, when I learn that my neighbor
volunteers at a soup kitchen once a week and I feel approval, we understand this as a matter
of me taking up a new and favorable kind of affective regard for him in virtue what I take to
be the normative significance of what he’s doing, namely, showing a commitment to helping
those less fortunate.
Once again, then, our proposal is that to have a reactive attitude toward someone is to
positively or negatively affectively orient, or better, reorient yourself toward her, in virtue of
a piece of her normatively significant conduct. What we’ve essentially argued here, then, is
that if one eschews the component view of emotions, and therefore of reactive attitudes, and
adopts a picture of them as unified mental states with their own intentional structure, then
reactive attitudes are forms of regard. And if reactive emotions are forms of regard, they are
indeed capable of constituting a change in relationship.
IV.
In conclusion, we want to return to the question posed at the beginning of the paper—
namely, what do reactive attitudes do?—and offer a speculative answer. Our conjecture
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brings together three ideas from the above. First, the idea that our reactive attitudes
constitute changes in relationships. Second, the idea that to have a reactive attitude toward
someone is to positively or negatively affectively reorient yourself toward her, in virtue of a
piece of her normatively significant conduct. Third, a point we made in our discussion of
Scanlon, namely, that the normatively significant conduct of one party in a relationship must
be properly taken up by the other to constitute an impairment or an enhancement in the
relationship. Putting these three ideas together, we propose the following as a view of what
the reactive attitudes do: Reactive attitudes are forms of positive or negative affective regard
for others (or ourselves) that are ways of fully taking up their (or one’s own) normatively
significant conduct, and that thereby constitute impairments or enhancements in our
relationships with those others (or oneself).
To see more clearly what we are getting at, consider the following example involving
indignation. Suppose you witness your friend Chloe humiliating another person. As we
argued above, Chloe’s conduct, on its own, does nothing to impair her relationship with you.
To be sure her conduct gets the ball of impairment rolling; but if you decide not to catch that
ball, if, that is, you do not take up her norm-violating conduct in the proper way, then no
impairment in your friendship occurs. But suppose you do not ignore Chloe’s behavior or
let it slide, but rather you feel indignation toward her in response to what you’ve witnessed
her do. On the account we’ve given, this is to say that you negatively affectively reorient
yourself toward her in response to her conduct that you see as cruel. Your affective regard
for her changes for the worse; you are now oriented toward her in a new, less favorable way
than you were before the incident. To affectively reorient yourself to Chloe in this way, we
want to propose, is to catch the ball she staring rolling with her normatively significant
conduct, i.e., her cruelty. To feel indignant toward her (in virtue of her cruel conduct) is, on
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the view we’re proposing, to take up her normatively significant conduct in a way that
transforms her threat to the relationship into an actual impairment.
Now let’s take a case of gratitude. Suppose Mark and Sheila are colleagues in a
philosophy department. They are friendly, but by no means friends. Mark learns that
Sheila’s mother is in the hospital and offers to take over a class or two for her if she ever
wants to take the time to be with her mother. Once again, Mark’s making the offer, on its
own, does not in any way change Mark and Sheila’s relationship. And if Sheila just responds
to Mark’s offer with a quick and distracted “thanks,” before running off to her next meeting,
then there still doesn’t seem to be any sense in which Mark and Sheila’s relationship has
changed. Sheila’s acknowledging Mark’s offer in this cursory way does not amount to her
taking up his normatively significant conduct, because it doesn’t seem to engage at all with the
offer’s normative significance. But if Sheila responds to Mark’s offer with gratitude, where
on our account this is a matter of her having a positive affective reorientation toward Mark
in virtue of what she sees as a gracious and selfless favor, then it seems to us plausible to say
a) that she has now taken up his normatively significance conduct, and b) that their
relationships is therefore changed, this time for the better. Sheila’s new positive regard for
Mark transforms the promise of an enhancement in relationship into an actual enhancement.
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