Fittingness as a Pitiful Intellectualist Trinket?
Michael J. McKenna
Abstract
Abstract P. F. Strawson wrote disparagingly about libertarian’s appeal to an intuition of fittingness. He charged that it was inadequate in any justification of our blaming and punishing practices. So it could not be used to support libertarianism about free will. Nevertheless, Strawson needed some normative relation to do the justificatory work that he claimed libertarians and compatibilists could not. Drawing upon Joel Feinberg’s edifying use fittingness to analyse desert, and offering an independent account of fittingness, this chapter argues that Strawsonians need fittingness. Suppose they do. How are we to understand it? Feinberg suggested that desert is a species of fittingness. This chapter argues that indeed desert is a species of fittingness. But it also argues that, if so, the basal reasons for fitting (and deserved) angry blaming and punishing responses might include a strong freedom requirement. Hence, Strawsonians cannot get away from the free will problem as easily as Strawson suggested.