The free will debate matters because of what hangs on it: praise and blame, gratitude and resentment, reward and punishment. This level looks at how philosophers have thought about responsibility in practice.

Strawson and the reactive attitudes

In a 1962 essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” P.F. Strawson changed the shape of the debate. Instead of first settling the metaphysics of determinism, he turned attention to our actual practices of holding people responsible. At the center of these practices are what he called reactive attitudes: feelings like resentment and gratitude toward others' attitudes to us, along with indignation, forgiveness, love and hurt feelings. If someone steps on your hand deliberately, you feel resentment; if by accident, you do not, even though the pain is the same. What we react to is the good or ill will shown toward us.

Strawson distinguished two ways the attitudes are softened, now usually called excuses and exemptions. Excuses show that the person did not act with ill will: “he was pushed,” “she didn't know.” Exemptions show that the person is not, at least for now, a full participant in moral relationships: a young child, someone in the grip of severe mental illness. Toward such people we take what he called the objective attitude: we may manage, treat or protect them, but we do not resent them in the ordinary way.

Strawson argued that the truth of determinism would not turn everyone into an exemption. Our reactive attitudes are woven into human relationships; giving them up wholesale is neither possible nor something a theory could justify.

Moral luck

In 1976 Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel explored the problem of moral luck: cases when factors beyond our control affect how we are judged. Imagine two drivers, equally careless, each glancing at a phone at a crosswalk. A child runs out in front of one of them, who kills the child; the other drives home without incident. We blame the first driver far more, though the difference between them was luck. This is resultant luck: only one careless driver happens to hit a child.

Nagel noted other kinds. Circumstantial luck concerns the situations we face: someone living under a brutal regime is tested in ways a person elsewhere never is. Constitutive luck concerns the temperament and character we were born with or raised into. If we are responsible only for what we control, luck seems to shrink responsibility to almost nothing. If we are responsible anyway, we must accept that moral judgment is partly unfair.

Implications for punishment

Theories of punishment divide roughly in two. For a retributivist, punishment is justified because the offender deserves it; desert depends on genuine responsibility. For a consequentialist, punishment is justified by its effects: deterring crime, protecting the public and rehabilitating offenders.

Philosophers who doubt that anyone has the kind of free will needed for basic desert, such as Derk Pereboom, have proposed a quarantine model. Just as a society may quarantine a carrier of a dangerous disease without blaming them, it may restrict dangerous people only as needed for safety, without blame, while stressing prevention and rehabilitation. Critics worry that this could justify detaining people before they act, or treat them as hazards rather than as agents who can answer for what they do. Many legal systems blend these approaches, and they already recognize degrees of responsibility through rules about intent, age and mental capacity.

Worked example: the broken vase

Consider four ways a vase can end up broken in a family's living room, and how the reactive attitudes respond.

1. Theo, aged three, knocks it over while running. His parents are sad but do not resent him. He is exempt: not yet a full participant in moral relationships. They take a more objective attitude and teach him to walk carefully indoors.
2. A guest is jostled by someone else and falls against the shelf. Here there is an excuse: no ill will, not even carelessness. Resentment would be out of place.
3. An older cousin, angry after an argument, smashes the vase deliberately. Resentment and indignation are natural responses, because the act expressed ill will. The family expects an apology and repair.
4. Two teenagers both toss a ball indoors, against the rules. One throw happens to hit the vase. They were equally careless, but the one whose ball struck it is blamed more. This is resultant moral luck.

Now consider what the family should do about case four. A retributivist would say each teenager deserves the same response, since their fault was the same. A consequentialist would ask what response best prevents future breakage: perhaps both lose ball privileges for a week, and both help pay for the vase.

The quarantine model has an echo here too: the parents may move the remaining vases out of reach, not as blame, but as sensible protection. Notice how ordinary family life already mixes these ideas, as legal systems do.