It is not that we hold people responsible because they are responsible; rather, expressing our concerns and demands about our treatment of one another constitutes the practice from which the idea of responsibility derives.
In Strawson’s view, there is no such independent notion of responsibility that explains the propriety of the reactive attitudes. The explanatory priority is the other way around: It is not that we hold people responsible because they are responsible; rather, the idea (our idea) that we are responsible is to be understood by the practice, which itself is not a matter of holding some propositions to be true, but of expressing our concerns and demands about our treatment of one another. (Watson 1987 [2004: 222]; emphasis in original; see Bennett 1980 for a related, non-cognitivist interpretation ...