Strawson, Moral Responsibility, and the “Order of Explanation”: An Intervention

Abstract

Some have seen P. F. Strawson’s “Freedom and Resentment” as suggesting a point about the “order of explanation” concerning moral responsibility: it is not that it is appropriate to hold agents responsible because they are morally responsible, rather, it is … something else. I argue that extant developments of “the reversal” face a dilemma: in order to make the proposals plausibly antilibertarian, they must be made to be implausible on other grounds. I conclude by suggesting a way of clarifying the intended thesis: an analogy with the concept of funniness. The result: there is no clear path to compatibilism from “the reversal.”