Reactive Attitudes and Volitional Necessity

1 Strawson’s Confidence-Inspiring Response to Skepticism

The varieties of philosophical skepticism purport to be pressing an intellectual challenge: what’s your justification for believing that there is an external world (or that there are other minds, etc.)? The relevant question is, of course, asked in a tone of voice which implies that a justification is needed and can’t be had. But skeptical worries also present a more personal challenge – or, at least, one that can be more disquieting. By raising doubts about whether the way things seem to us really does map onto the way things are, skeptical worries can lead us to doubt ourselves.

These two faces of skepticism – the challenge to our intellect, and the challenge to our self-confidence – are nicely captured by the ambiguity of one way to state the skeptical question: how can you be sure? From one perspective, this is a request for the reasons that reliably put you in contact with the truth; from another perspective, it’s an attempt to sow self-doubt.

The two challenges are not completely independent, of course. For example: if you manage to find justifying reasons, then that alone is likely to ease whatever anxiety was induced by the skeptical challenge in the first place. But the reverse is also true: if you can overcome your anxiety some other way and as a result regain your self-confidence, then that alone may be enough to blunt the force of the request for justifying reasons – not because you will have found some, but because you will have come to see the request itself as idle, a mere philosophical curiosity.

P. F. Strawson’s response to skepticism about moral responsibility is evidently of this latter variety, an attempt to help us regain our confidence in the face of skepticism-induced self-doubt.¹ He doesn’t try to find justifying reasons like the libertarian does, who in his anxiety-induced search finds nothing but “a pitiful intellectualist trinket…to wear as a charm against the recognition of his own humanity”.² Instead, Strawson insists that the presumption of reciprocity involved in attributions of moral responsibility is built into the ‘participant attitude’ (which is the lens through which we see others that leaves us susceptible to the moral emotions) and the participant attitude itself is part of the “scaffolding”³ of our practical lives, a “general framework of human life, not something that can come up for review as particular cases can come up for review within this framework”.⁴ According to Strawson, it is psychologically impossible for us, given the facts of human nature, to give up our commitment to the perspective from which we are susceptible to the moral emotions and hence, our commitment to the reality of moral responsibility.

Although it is now widely accepted that the moral emotions – or what Strawson called ‘the reactive attitudes’ – play an important role in our responsibility practices, the distinctive argumentative strategy of Strawson’s essay remains controversial (not least because it is notoriously difficult to say precisely what that strategy is). Perhaps the central worry is this: even if we were to agree with Strawson that it is psychologically impossible for us to give up our commitment to the participant attitude and the presumption of reciprocity that comes with it, couldn’t we still be wrong? Our psychological shortcomings don’t, after all, determine what’s true.

Strawson himself anticipated this objection, and he offered two seemingly different replies to it. The first reply is to reject the question as misguided: the relevant psychological framework represents “an original non-rational commitment which sets the bound within which, or the stage upon which, reason can effectively operate, and within which the question of the rationality or irrationality, justification or lack of justification, of this or that particular judgment or belief can come up”.⁵ From the perspective of this reply, it is an empty question whether we have good reasons to give up our commitment to the participant attitude in the face of the possible truth of determinism.

Strawson’s second reply is to reject the relevance of the question, even if it is admitted as intelligible. He says: “…it is useless to ask whether it would not be rational for us to do what it is not in our nature to (be able to) do”.⁶ Moreover, even if we were to answer it by saying that we would be more rational if we could get ourselves to give up our commitment to the participant attitude, it would still “not necessarily be rational to choose to be more purely rational than we are”.⁷

So, in response to the question of whether it would be rational to give up our commitment to the participant attitude, Strawson says, first, that the question can’t even intelligibly be raised, and second, that even if we do (against advice) raise it, answer it in the affirmative, and try to decide what to do about it, it probably wouldn’t be irrational of us to decide to hang onto our commitment to the participant attitude anyway. The question is, then, both idle and irrelevant.

Each of these replies is difficult, both to understand and to accept, especially for philosophers whose sympathies do not generally lie with Hume and Wittgenstein.⁸ In what follows I aim to approach the core argument of Strawson’s essay from a slightly different perspective, one that I hope will illuminate some of its obscurities. In particular, I want to suggest that we might better understand and appreciate the force of Strawson’s defense of the moral emotions if we draw some rather obvious connections between Strawson’s work and the work of Harry Frankfurt (both his later work on practical reasoning as well as his earlier work on Descartes’s Meditations). Specifically, I want to suggest that we might take Strawson to be arguing that our commitment to the participant attitude and the presumption of reciprocity that comes with it is a volitional necessity for us, in Frankfurt’s sense of the term.⁹ And precisely because it is, the question of whether it would be rational to give it up is idle and irrelevant.¹⁰

In order to understand how Frankfurt and (Frankfurt’s interpretation of) Descartes might help us better understand the argumentative strategy of Strawson’s essay, we should spend a bit of time with Frankfurt. I’ll first say a bit about what volitional necessities are supposed to be and what role they are alleged to play in our agency. Then, after applying the notion of volitional necessity to Strawson’s claim that the skeptical worry is idle, I’ll return to Frankfurt’s classic interpretation of Descartes’s Meditations, which will help us understand Strawson’s additional claim that the skeptical worry is irrelevant.

2 Volitional Structure

Over the past 40 years, Harry Frankfurt has painted a particularly compelling portrait of moral agency, one that promises to shed light on a wide range of topics in moral philosophy, including autonomy, love, practical reasoning, meaning in life, and even the very foundations of normativity. It’s controversial, of course – this is philosophy, after all – but it is undeniably insightful, and it resonates quite well with how many of us experience our own agency. At the center of the portrait is the simple idea that we are capable of stepping back from our desires to consider which among them should get our endorsement, and then taking a stand behind some of our desires rather than others.¹¹ Through identifying with some of our motivations and externalizing others, we play a role in creating our own moral identities. As Frankfurt puts it:

The fact that we have adopted and sanctioned them [i.e., certain of our attitudes, thoughts, and feelings] makes them intentional and legitimate. Their force is now our force. When they move us, we are therefore not passive. We are active, because we are being moved just by ourselves.¹²

In Frankfurt’s picture, more complex moral notions like freedom and love are just extensions of this basic picture, according to which we use our capacities for reflective self-organization to bring our vast array of desires into a certain kind of harmony. A person acts freely, for example, when their will – Frankfurt’s term for the structure of desires, some of them higher-order desires, that ultimately constitute a person’s moral identity – has a certain sort of synchronic coherence.¹³ Put too simply, a person acts freely so long as they don’t get in their own way.¹⁴

Love, on the other hand, and caring more generally, are configurations of the will that imply diachronic coherence, as well. These notions are also fundamentally constructed from the notion of a desire, but the construction is more complex:

When a person cares about something…he is willingly committed to his desire [for that thing]…he is therefore prepared to intervene, should that be necessary, in order to ensure that it continues. If the desire tends to fade or to falter, he is disposed to refresh it and to reinforce whatever degree of influence he wishes it to exert upon his attitudes and upon his behavior.¹⁵

Love, for Frankfurt, is “basically a configuration of the will, which is constituted by various more and less stable dispositions and constraints”.¹⁶ In particular, love is “a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it”.¹⁷ It is for us “a source of reasons”¹⁸ and at its deepest love “defines [one’s] shape as a person”.¹⁹

The question of what this means and how exactly it works takes us to heart of Frankfurt’s picture, and that is precisely where we need to go.

3 Volitional Necessities

At the heart of Frankfurt’s picture lies the notion of a volitional necessity, which, as the name suggests, is a certain type of constraint on one’s will. Since Frankfurt uses the term ‘will’ to refer to a particular structure or organization of a person’s desires, we can think of volitional necessities as the fixed nodes of that structure, or perhaps (to invoke a metaphor used above) the scaffolding that allows us to build up and break down (i.e., identify with or externalize) other elements of our volitional structure. In Frankfurt’s view, this scaffolding marks the boundaries of a person’s will, beyond which the person cannot bring himself to go. Actions that lie beyond these boundaries are simply unthinkable (which is the volitional equivalent of ‘inconceivable’).²⁰

But what are these boundaries made of? For Frankfurt, they are cares that we cannot help having. Notable among the things that we care about and cannot help caring about are the things that we love (which, remember, is just a “particular mode of caring”²¹). Because of its structural role (indeed, its structuring role), love is itself a source of reasons for us – in fact, the boundaries of our will define what considerations even count as reasons for us. They do this in part because they define who we are:

It is by these same configurations of the will [i.e., volitional necessities], moreover, that our individual identities are most fully expressed and defined. The necessities of a person’s will guide and limit his agency. They determine what he may be willing to do, what he cannot help doing, and what he cannot bring himself to do. They determine as well what he may be willing to accept as a reason for acting, what he cannot help considering to be a reason for acting, and what he cannot bring himself to count as a reason for acting. In these ways, they set the boundaries of his practical life; and thus they fix his shape as an active being.²²

And as he put it 16 years earlier: “It seems to me that discovering what we are is fundamentally…a matter of discovering what we must be”.²³

Volitional necessities are simultaneously self-imposed and also beyond one’s control.²⁴ The seeming paradox in this description is, however, no more paradoxical than is the Kantian view that “autonomy can be achieved only through obedience to the rational dictates of the moral law”.²⁵ To make sense of the Kantian claim involves taking seriously the notion that autonomous action is action in accordance with a law that one gives to oneself; to make sense of Frankfurt’s claim, then, we need to specify the sense in which those unavoidable cares can nevertheless be attributed to oneself. For Frankfurt, what distinguishes volitional necessities from other forms of necessity is precisely that an agent endorses the constraining power of the volitional necessity (indeed, its constraining power in part derives from his endorsement of it).²⁶ It is this that allows us to say that the necessities are self-imposed:

The lover does not passively submit to the grip of love. He is fully identified with and responsible for its necessities. There is no distance or discrepancy between what a lover is constrained to will and what he cannot help wanting to will. The necessities of love are imposed upon him, then, by himself. It is by his own will that he does what they require. That is why love is not coercive. The lover may be unable to resist the power it exerts, but it is his own power.²⁷

To be constrained by what I love, then, is to be constrained by myself.

Where do these necessities come from? According to Frankfurt, many of them “are solidly entrenched in our human nature from the start”,²⁸ presumably as a result of “the evolutionary pressures of natural selection”.²⁹ What that means, of course, is that it is possible to imagine a race of intelligent creatures whose wills are structured by completely different volitional necessities. Such creatures, however, would be so wholly other that we couldn’t help but see them as irrational – not because they would be transgressing the boundaries of reason, but simply because they would be able to bring themselves to transgress the boundaries of human nature. It would be “impossible to reason with [them] meaningfully concerning [their] ends”, because “their practical reasoning…builds upon a foundation that is in radical opposition to ours”.³⁰

4 The Participant Attitude and Volitional Necessity

This exposition of Frankfurt’s basic picture is sketchy, but serviceable. Recall that my ultimate goal is to offer an interpretation of Strawson’s claim that asking whether the truth of determinism would make it rational to give up our commitment to the participant attitude is both idle and irrelevant. Strawson’s claim depends on his view that our commitment to the participant attitude is “given with the fact of human society”,³¹ a claim that I now want to suggest is plausibly interpreted along Frankfurtian lines as the claim that our commitment to the participant attitude is one of the volitional necessities that give the human will the particular structure it has.

In his essay, Strawson begins by drawing attention to “how much we actually mind, how much it matters to us, whether the actions of other people…reflect attitudes toward us of goodwill, affection, or esteem on the one hand or contempt, indifference, or malevolence on the other”.³² This fact – the fact that we care very much about how others treat us – is central to Strawson’s argumentative strategy. As Gary Watson puts it:

First, we care deeply…about how people regard one another. Second, this concern manifests itself in a demand or expectation to be treated with regard and good will. Following Strawson, let’s call these the basic concern and the basic demand respectively. To be a responsible agent is to be someone whom it makes sense to subject to such a demand. Inter alia, that demand displays itself in various practical and sentimental reactions to the attitudes people take to one another (to their “quality of will”). Thus our social sentimental nature grounds the distinctive reasons that structure our personal relations, but that nature is itself rationally brute, since it provides the framework for rational scrutiny.³³

We care, and can’t help caring, about how people treat each other. Part of what it is to care about this is to be disposed to feel the moral emotions when people treat each other (and oneself) poorly, and to be disposed to feel the moral emotions is to demand that others treat other people with respect.³⁴ But to intelligibly make a demand like this presupposes that the target of the demand has the capacities to understand and respond to it – in short, presupposes that the target of the demand is a morally responsible agent. So, since we can’t help caring about how people treat each other, we likewise can’t help presupposing the reality of moral responsibility.

But as we saw above, Strawson wants to say more than merely that it’s psychologically impossible for us to shake our belief in moral responsibility. He also wants to say that it is idle and irrelevant to ask whether we ought to shake this belief. These further claims arise from taking seriously Strawson’s idea that our commitment to the participant attitude is “given with the fact of human society”, something that’s built into human nature from the start. What this means, for Strawson, is that “there is no such thing as the reasons for which we hold these beliefs.” He goes on: “We simply cannot help accepting them as defining the areas within which the questions come up of what beliefs we should rationally hold on such-and-such a matter”.³⁵ In this passage Strawson is talking generally about our nonskeptical beliefs in the reality of the external world and the existence of other minds, but he wants to say the same thing when it comes to our commitment to the perspective from which we are susceptible to the moral emotions:

…our general proneness to these attitudes and reactions is inextricably bound up with that involvement in personal and social interrelationships which begins with our lives, which develops and complicates itself in a great variety of ways throughout our lives and which is, one might say, a condition of our humanity. What we have, in our inescapable commitment to these attitudes and feelings, is a natural fact, something as deeply rooted in our natures as our existence as social beings.³⁶

So, it’s not just that we are psychologically incapable of giving up our commitment to the participant attitude. It’s also that this incapability is “a condition of our humanity”. To ask whether it might nonetheless be rational for us to give up this commitment is to ask whether it would be rational for us to cease being human, and that question is, despite the fact that we can put it into words, not a real question.

The very notion of rationality, of weighing up reasons for and against, presupposes a perspective from which something even counts as a reason in the first place, and what Strawson is saying is that our general commitment to the participant attitude is a central part of that perspective. Without it, nothing would count as a reason, and so it’s unintelligible to ask whether we have a reason to give it up. This is the sense in which the question is idle. Strawson approvingly quotes remark 471 of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.” To ask about the rationality of giving up our general commitment to the participant attitude is to try to begin before the beginning. That commitment is “an original non-rational commitment which sets the bound within which, or the stage upon which, reason can effectively operate”.³⁷

I trust that the parallels with Frankfurt are relatively clear by this point. At the heart of Frankfurt’s picture are those commitments of ours – those volitionally necessary loves or cares – that set the bounds within which our practical reasoning takes place. Volitional necessities “guide and limit” one’s agency, they “set the boundaries of [one’s] practical life; and thus they fix [one’s] shape as an active being”.³⁸ My suggestion in this paper, then, is the relatively straightforward suggestion that we understand the commitment Strawson emphasizes – the commitment to the presumption of reciprocity built into the moral emotions – as one of those volitional necessities that define our “shape as a person”.³⁹ Our commitment to seeing others as apt targets for the moral emotions isn’t a response “to an independent normative reality”.⁴⁰ Things are, rather, the other way around: the normativity at issue is “grounded…only in ourselves…in what we cannot help caring about and cannot help considering important”.⁴¹ For this reason, it makes no sense to ask whether we are getting it right when we respond to each other as morally responsible agents.

5 The Irrelevance of Pure Rationality

But recall that Strawson goes even further than this. Not only is it idle to ask whether it would be rational for us to give up our commitment to the participant attitude, the question is also irrelevant, even supposing we could intelligibly ask it, and even supposing it were answered in the affirmative. How should we understand this further claim? Here, too, I want to argue that we can see an affinity between Strawson and Frankfurt, though spelling it out will require us to look into Frankfurt’s early work on Descartes’s Meditations.

Back in 1970, Frankfurt published a commentary on Descartes’s Meditations that remains a classic work in Descartes scholarship,⁴² and contemporary moral philosophers might be forgiven for thinking that the ideas of that early book in the history of philosophy are independent of Frankfurt’s later work on freedom and love. But at various points in his later work Frankfurt himself suggests notable connections between his two seemingly disparate philosophical interests. For example, there is a well-known passage in his 1987 essay “Identification and Wholeheartedness” where he is attempting to explain how his notion of identification with lower-order desires can avoid a regress problem, and in a footnote appended to that passage, Frankfurt says: “My own treatment of these matters owes much to Descartes’s discussion of clear and distinct perception.”⁴³

And even more recently, in a footnote toward the end of the book collecting Frankfurt’s Tanner Lectures, we find Frankfurt saying this:

It is worth noticing that Descartes found it impossible to rely confidently on theoretical reason without first acquiring – through his argument that God could not have made him so defective as to be misled by the clear and distinct perceptions that he could not help accepting – a firm confidence in the necessities of his own cognitive nature. My argument about the ground of practical normativity is, I believe, significantly analogous to his argument about the ground of theoretical reason.⁴⁴

And, to take just one more example, in the preface to Frankfurt’s 1999 collection of essays, Frankfurt makes the connection even more explicit:

For all his insistence upon the primacy of reason, Descartes – at least as I understand him – identifies success in inquiry as a matter of encountering irresistible constraints upon the will…Descartes’s theory of knowledge is grounded in his recognition that we simply cannot help believing what we clearly and distinctly perceive. For him, the mode of necessity that is most fundamental to the enterprise of reason is not logical but volitional – a necessitation of the will.⁴⁵

In Frankfurt’s view, “Descartes was moved to philosophize less by ignorance than by anxiety, less by lack of knowledge than by a lack of self-confidence”.⁴⁶ The success of Descartes’s project, then, came when Descartes discovered propositions on which he could thoroughly rely. And the sense in which Descartes could rely on them is precisely that they are clearly and distinctly perceived, and “we simply cannot help believing what we clearly and distinctly perceive”. Volitional necessity, then, lies at the heart of Descartes’s project.

Since this isn’t a paper about Descartes, or even about Frankfurt’s interpretation of Descartes, we don’t need to go into any more detail. Instead, I want to note a structural similarity between this interpretation of Descartes, on the one hand, and the argumentative strategy of Strawson’s essay, on the other. Recall that the main objection to Strawson’s argumentative strategy can be put like this: just because we are psychologically unable to rid ourselves of the presumption that others are morally responsible doesn’t mean that we’re right. In Section 3 above, I made two suggestions for how we could help Strawson respond to this: first, don’t read our commitment to the participant attitude as a mere psychological necessity, but instead as a volitional necessity; and second, when we read it that way, it’s easy to see how Strawson can reject the intelligibility of the objection and say, instead, that there’s just no such thing as whether we’ve gotten it right.

But now suppose that there is such a thing as getting it right, and suppose that despite our inability to give up our commitment to the participant attitude, no one is, in fact, morally responsible. Even in this case, Strawson seems to want to say that the question of whether it would be rational to give up our commitment to the participant attitude is irrelevant. And it is in the attempt to understand this further claim that I think Frankfurt’s interpretation of Descartes can help, since a similar objection can be raised against Descartes’s project.

At the very end of his book on Descartes, Frankfurt discusses this potential objection to what Descartes has established:

I have attempted to show that Descartes’s reasoning in the Meditations is designed not so much to prove that what is clearly and distinctly perceived is true, as to establish that there are no reasonable grounds for doubting this. It might be objected that this interpretation entails that Descartes leaves the main question still open. For why may it not be the case that what we clearly and distinctly perceive is sometimes false even if we can have no reasonable grounds for supposing so?⁴⁷

Note the similarity here to the objection Strawson is considering: isn’t unshakeable confidence in p nevertheless compatible with the falsity of p? Descartes’s answer is the same as Strawson’s, namely: maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Frankfurt quotes Descartes at this point:

What is it to us if someone should perhaps imagine that the very thing of whose truth we have been so firmly persuaded appears false to God or to an angel and that as a consequence it is false speaking absolutely? What do we care about this absolute falsity, since we by no means believe in it or even have the least suspicion of it? For we are supposing a persuasion so firm that it can in no way be removed—a persuasion, therefore, that is exactly the same as the most perfect certainty.⁴⁸

Here Descartes appears to be conceding that there may be some “absolute” perspective from which the things that he clearly and distinctly perceives are nevertheless false, despite his not being able to withhold his assent from them. But precisely because these are things to which he must assent, it is irrelevant even to point out that they may be “absolutely” false. Descartes is not, after all, attempting to establish that certain propositions are true, but only that “there are no reasonable grounds for doubting” that they are.⁴⁹ Descartes views skepticism not as a challenge to his intellect, but as a challenge to his self-confidence. And once the latter is firmly re-established, “that is all the truth he cares to demand”.⁵⁰ To demand more would perhaps open one up to the charge of trying to begin before the beginning (to invoke the quote from Wittgenstein earlier) or perhaps of “over-intellectualizing the facts”.⁵¹

Although Strawson himself puts most of the weight of his argument on the claim that it is simply confused to ask whether it would be rational for us to give up our commitment to the participant attitude, he nevertheless does seem in various places to want to say that even if that question did make any sense, it would still have no purchase on us. My suggestion here is that perhaps we should take Strawson to be saying something similar to what Descartes says in response to the same line of thought. Perhaps there is some sense of ‘rational’ according to which we would be more rational if we abandoned our commitment to the participant attitude. But that sense of ‘rational’ is utterly irrelevant. Here’s how Strawson puts it in a cryptic footnote:

Quite apart from the issue of determinism might it not be said that we should be nearer to being purely rational creatures in proportion as our relation to others was in fact dominated by the objective attitude [i.e., one devoid of a commitment to the participant attitude]? I think this might be said; only it would have to be added, once more, that if such a choice were possible, it would not necessarily be rational to choose to be more purely rational than we are.⁵²

I don’t claim to know exactly what Strawson is saying in this footnote, but here’s a suggestion that I quite like that lines up nicely with our Frankfurtian interpretation of Strawson’s argumentative strategy. Recall that for Frankfurt, whereas we ordinarily think of irrationality in terms of transgressing the bounds of what’s conceivable (which is delineated by logic), there is also a type of irrationality that amounts to transgressing the bounds of what’s thinkable (which is delineated by love, or some other volitional necessity). When Strawson claims that it would not necessarily be rational for us to choose to be more purely rational than we are, we might see him as invoking these two notions of rationality. Sure there may be no logical error in abandoning our commitment to the participant attitude, but to do so would be inhuman – Frankfurt’s word for someone whose will is structured by completely different volitional necessities than those that structure the human will. And the extent to which it is inhuman is precisely the extent to which it is irrelevant to ask whether we ought nevertheless to do that.

6 Regaining Our Confidence

Strawson’s discussion of moral responsibility was clearly influenced by Hume – he says so explicitly in a footnote to “Freedom and Resentment” and in his later treatment in Skepticism and Naturalism – and Frankfurt’s way of thinking about practical reasoning is also broadly Humean, so perhaps it’s not all that surprising to find affinities between Strawson and Frankfurt. Nevertheless, they have not (to my knowledge) been explored, and that’s what I have attempted to do in this essay. In particular, I have emphasized the similarity between the role that Strawson thinks the commitment to the participant attitude plays in the normative structure of our lives and the role that Frankfurt thinks volitional necessities play in the normative structure of our lives. Indeed, I think it’s plausible, if a bit anachronistic, to interpret Strawson as saying that the commitment to the participant attitude is one of the volitional necessities that constitute the framework within which our normative competence is exercised.

Interpreting Strawson in this way helps to clarify his overall argumentative strategy, and his response to what is perhaps the most common objection to that strategy. The strategy is one that emphasizes the inescapability of the participant attitude – the lens through which we see each other as apt targets for the moral emotions, as morally responsible agents – but the sort of inescapability at issue here is of a very particular sort. It’s inescapable in exactly the same sense in which none of us is able to escape being human, and so the skeptical project is an ultimately unintelligible attempt to “begin before the beginning”. Volitional necessities, in Frankfurt’s sense, are precisely those sorts of inescapable structures from which our shared moral life arises in the first place. Just as it doesn’t make sense to ask for the reasons that justify your loving your children, it also doesn’t make sense to ask for the reasons that justify our commitment to seeing others as capable of reciprocity and as apt targets for the reactive emotions. As Wittgenstein says in the Investigations: “My attitude towards him is an attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul”.⁵³

Perhaps, though, there is some possible perspective according to which we are all simply making a mistake when we attribute moral responsibility to our fellow human beings, even if that perspective is inaccessible to us. Perhaps, as Strawson says, it is the perspective of the moral saint, or perhaps it is God’s perspective.⁵⁴ Even so, as Descartes emphasizes in response to a similar line of thought, such a perspective can, and should, have no purchase on us. Humans “may content themselves with certainty about phenomena and leave the noumenon to God”.⁵⁵

And in general, to pursue the inquiry into an absolute, inhuman perspective is to misunderstand the force of the skeptical worries. Skeptical worries shake our self-confidence, and remembering that we are human may just be our best defense. With that in mind, I’ll close with one final quote from Frankfurt:

If we are to resolve our difficulties and hesitations in settling upon a way to live, what we need most fundamentally is not reasons or proofs. It is clarity and confidence. Coping with our troubled and restless uncertainty about how to live does not require us to discover what way of living can be justified by definitive argument. Rather, it requires us simply to understand what it is that we ourselves really care about, and to be decisively and robustly confident in caring about it.⁵⁶