In this entry we provide a critical review of recent work on the nature and ethics of blame, including issues of moral standing.

This paper argues that the moral value of unconditional forgiveness is more complicated and constrained than it is often taken to be. When we unconditionally forgive, we engage with someone in a way that doesn’t take seriously their perspective about the meanings and values at stake in our relations with them. Other things being equal, this is problematic; it is normatively condescending, belittling the place of the other person’s moral agency in our relations with them. This doesn’t mean that unconditional (...) forgiveness is always bad or impermissible. It does, though, complicate how we should think about its moral value. (shrink)

This chapter describes the attributionist approach to moral responsibility. Works by Pamela Hieronymi, T.M. Scanlon, Angela Smith, and Matthew Talbert are taken to representative of this approach. On the interpretation given here, attributionism is committed to the following: assessments of moral responsibility are, and ought to be, centrally concerned with the morally significant features of an agent’s orientation toward others that are attributable to her, and an agent is eligible for moral praise or blame solely on the basis of these (...) attributions. Attributionism is presented as rejecting the claim that agents are morally responsible only for what is under their voluntary control, as well as the claim that agents are responsible for wrongdoing only if they could have responded to the moral considerations that spoke against your behavior. These supposed conditions on moral responsibility are rejected for the same reason: agents may reveal features of their selves, in a way that is sufficient for moral responsibility, even in cases in which these conditions are not met. (shrink)

Can nonhuman animals and artificial intelligence (AI) entities be attributed moral agency? The general assumption in the philosophical literature is that moral agency applies exclusively to humans since they alone possess free will or capacities required for deliberate reflection. Consequently, only humans have been taken to be eligible for ascriptions of moral responsibility in terms of, for instance, blame or praise, moral criticism, or attributions of vice and virtue. Animals and machines may cause harm, but they cannot be appropriately ascribed (...) moral responsibility for their behavior. This thesis challenges the conventional paradigm by proposing an alternative approach where moral agency is conceived as the competence to participate in moral responsibility practices. By shifting focus from intra-individual to contextual and socially situated features, this practice-focused approach appears to make the attribution of moral agency to nonhuman animals and AI entities more plausible than commonly assumed. Moreover, considering the current and potential future prevalence of nonhuman animals and AI entities in everyday settings and social contexts, a potential extension of moral agency to such entities could very well transform our social, moral, and legal practices. Hence, this thesis proposes that the attribution or withholding of moral agency to different entities should be carefully evaluated, considering the potential normative implications. (shrink)

According to the practice-focused approach to moral agency, a participant stance towards an entity is warranted by the extent to which this entity qualifies as an apt target of ascriptions of moral responsibility, such as blame. Entities who are not eligible for such reactions are exempted from moral responsibility practices, and thus denied moral agency. I claim that many typically exempted cases may qualify as moral agents by being eligible for a distinct participant stance. When we participate in moral responsibility (...) practices, we are not only participating as potential targets of moral reactions, but also as sources of such address, i.e. as moral addressors. By consequence, there are entities towards which we seem to have reason to adopt an addressor participant stance, regardless of their eligibility as moral addressees. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency may also be of normative import. (shrink)

According to an influential view, ‘the amount of blame people deserve varies with the extent of their indifference’. That is, the more wrongdoers act from a lack of moral concern, the more they would be blameworthy. This paper argues for the exact opposite claim: the more wrongdoers act from indifference, the less they are blameworthy – that is, in a properly interpersonal way.

Various theorists have endorsed the “communication argument”: communicative capacities are necessary for morally responsible agency because blame aims at a distinctive kind of moral communication. I contend that existing versions of the argument, including those defended by Gary Watson and Coleen Macnamara, face a pluralist challenge: they do not seem to sit well with the plausible view that blame has multiple aims. I then examine three possible rejoinders to the challenge, suggesting that a context-specific, function-based approach constitutes the most promising (...) modification of the communication argument. (shrink)

Functionalist accounts of blame have been rising in popularity. Proponents of the approach claim that, by defining blame in terms of its function or functions, their account has the advantage of being able to accommodate a wide range of attitudes and activities as blame; but their opponents question the extensional and explanatory adequacy of such accounts. This paper contributes to this burgeoning literature by presenting new challenges to the existing functionalist accounts. The fundamental problem, I shall argue, lies in the (...) fact that they all focus on using functions to define blame as a type of practice, but this strategy fails to pick out a unique moral-psychological type and does not offer a complete set of extension-determining criteria for the concept of blame. This amounts to a serious theoretical disadvantage. I consider various responses to the challenges throughout the paper, concluding that the best reply available to the functionalist theorist involves using functions to directly define blame tokens. (shrink)

P.F. Strawson’s account of moral responsibility in “Freedom and Resentment” has been widely influential. In both that paper and in the contemporary literature, much attention has been paid to Strawson’s account of blame in terms of reactive attitudes like resentment and indignation. The Strawsonian view of praise in terms of gratitude has received comparatively little attention. Some, however, have noticed something puzzling about gratitude and accountability. We typically understand accountability in terms of moral demands and expectations. Yet gratitude does not (...) express or enforce moral demands or expectations. So, how is it a way to hold an agent accountable? In a more general manner, we might ask if there is even sense to be made of the idea that agents can be accountable—i.e., “on the hook”—in a positive way. In this paper, I clarify the relationship between gratitude and moral accountability. I suggest that accountability is a matter of engaging with others in a way that is basically concerned with their feelings and attitudes rather than solely a matter of moral demands. Expressions of gratitude are a paradigmatic form of this concerned engagement. I conclude by defending my view from the objection that it leads to an overly generous conception of holding accountable and suggest in reply that moral responsibility skeptics may not help themselves to as many moral emotions as they might have thought. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that if we assume with free will skeptics that people lack moral responsibility, or at least a central form of it, we may still maintain that people are ‘basically’ deserving of certain treatment in response to their behavior. I characterize basic-desert justifications for treatment negatively, as justifications that do not depend on consequentialist, contractualist, or relational considerations. Appealing to attributionist accounts of responsibility as well as the symbolic value of protest, I identify protest as a (...) response that may be basically deserved even in the absence of free will, on the grounds that it is a fitting response to the intrinsic features of agents and their actions. The position defended is not a standard form of semi-compatibilism as it allows that some responses to behavior—such as punishment—that would be basically deserved were people free are not basically deserved in the absence of free will. (shrink)

Much has been written about the fittingness, epistemic, and standing norms that govern blame. In this paper, we argue that there exists a norm of blame that has yet to receive philosophical discussion and without which an account of the ethics of blame will be incomplete: a norm proscribing comparatively arbitrary blame. By reflecting on the objectionableness of comparatively arbitrary blame, we stand to elucidate a substantive, and thus far overlooked, norm governing our attributions of responsibility. Accordingly, our aim in (...) this paper is to develop a comparative non-arbitrariness condition on blame that can enrich our understanding of the ethics of blame. (shrink)

One way of being responsible for an action is being praiseworthy for it. But what is the “praise” of which the praiseworthy agent is worthy? This paper provides a survey of answers to this question, i.e. a survey of possible accounts of praise’s nature. It then presents an overview of candidate norms governing our responses of praise. By attending to praise’s nature and appropriateness conditions, we stand to acquire a richer conception of what it is to be, and to regard (...) another as, a responsible agent. (shrink)

A neglected and non-trivial problem exists for a central cluster of Strawsonian accountability theories of moral responsibility, namely those that, following Gary Watson, understand the reactive attitudes to be implicit forms of moral address, particularly moral demand. The problem consists in the joint acceptance of two claims: (a) Accountability is a matter of agents holding one another to moral demands, and (b) accountability is a view of blame and praise. I label joint acceptance of these claims the Strawsonian’s demand dogma. (...) Symptomatic of a larger tendency among responsibility theorists to focus on blame to the neglect of its positive counterpart, the demand dogma saddles the Strawsonian with an impoverished and ultimately untenable view of praise. This is because moral demand occupies a dual role on the Strawsonian's view of blame, one that it is incapable of occupying for praise. For, demands figure not only in the contents of blame responses; demand typifies the form of these responses themselves. That is, reactive attitudes of blame, unlike those of praise, implicitly make demands of their targets. The force of this problem is highlighted by considering the inadequacy of various strategies for shoehorning “demand” into our conception of praise. If reactive attitudes generally are incipient forms of moral address, praise-manifesting attitudes must communicate something other than demand. Though primarily critical, this paper invites Strawsonian responsibility theorists to give renewed attention to the foundations of the proposal that the reactive attitudes are incipiently communicative, focusing this time on the form of address that lies at the heart of praise. (shrink)

‘Reasonable wrongdoers’ reasonably, but wrongly, take themselves to act permissibly. Many responsibility theorists assume that since we cannot reasonably expect these wrongdoers to behave differently, they are not blameworthy. These theorists impose a Reasonable Expectation Condition on blame. I argue that reasonable wrongdoers may be blameworthy. It is true that we often excuse reasonable wrongdoers, but sometimes this is because we do not regard their behavior as objectionable in a way that makes blame appropriate. As such, these cases do not (...) support the proposition that wrongdoers are excused just because they reasonably take themselves to act permissibly. For the relevant support, we should consider cases in which a reasonable wrongdoer’s behavior is unambiguously objectionable by our moral lights. But here again we fail to find decisive support for the Reasonable Expectation Condition since it is not obvious—independent of a prior commitment to this condition—that such wrongdoers are not blameworthy. After laying out the above argument, as well as offering a positive account of why reasonable wrongdoers are sometimes blameworthy, I turn to consider objections. The most important of these is that it is simply unfair to blame those who reasonably take themselves to behave unobjectionably and who cannot be expected to behave otherwise. (shrink)

The Water Margin is a great Chinese classical novel; Wu Song’s 武松 killing of his sister-in-law, Pan Jinlian 潘金蓮, is one of the most popular episodes of the novel. It depicts Wu as the hero and defender of traditional values, and Pan as the adulterous woman. In contemporary discussion, there has been a dearth of ethical analyses regarding Wu’s killing of Pan. How should we judge the moral status of his action? Does the killing signify Wu Song’s ethical achievement or (...) his ethical failure? What does the killing tell us about Wu’s character or his virtues? Does our appraisal of Wu’s action square with our modern belief regarding the treatment of women? I will examine these questions in the article. (shrink)

The Water Margin is one of the four great classical novels of China. It describes how people from different walks of life were driven to become outlaws as a result of poor governance and widespread corruption. These outlaws have been regarded by some commentators as heroes, despite the fact that they perform wanton killing, over retribution, and cannibalism. Liu Zaifu 劉再復 argues that the novel has contributed to the moral downfall of the Chinese people. In this essay, I put forward (...) various arguments in objection to Liu. I think Liu’s argument is unsound, partly because he fails to address the nature of the cultural confrontation between modern readers and The Water Margin. By conducting an evaluation of Liu, I also consider a range of issues concerning how we may understand The Water Margin, and how the novel may morally relate to us in modern society. (shrink)

Quality of Will (qw) theories of responsibility claim the target of someone’s blameworthiness for an action is their poor quality of will. There have been many “threats” to such a theory over the years, coming out of a literature interested in the metaphysical conditions of free will, threats having to do with moral luck, manipulation, and negligence. In this paper, I am more interested in surveying and thwarting two “new school” threats to qw theories, including taking responsibility for inadvertence, and (...) holding reasonable but ostensibly wrongful beliefs. Both of these aim to ground blameworthiness independently of quality of will. I show that none of these new school threats to qw theories succeed. (shrink)

Explores five fault lines in the fledgling field of responsibility theory, serious methodological disputes traceable to P.F. Strawson's "Freedom and Resentment.".

This essay attempts to provide and defend what may be the first actual argument in support of P. F. Strawson's merely stated vision of a response-dependent theory of moral responsibility. It does so by way of an extended analogy with the funny. In part 1, it makes the easier and less controversial case for response-dependence about the funny. In part 2, it shows the tight analogy between anger and amusement in developing the harder and more controversial case for response-dependence about (...) a kind of blameworthiness. It then defends the view from three serious skeptical challenges. (shrink)

It is notable that all of the leading theories of blame have to employ ungainly fixes to deflect one or more apparent counterexamples. What these theories share is a content‐based theory of blame's nature. Such approaches overlook or ignore blame's core unifying feature, namely, its function, which is to signal the blamer's commitment to a set of norms. In this paper, we present the problems with the extant theories and then explain what signaling is, how it functions in blame, why (...) appealing to it resolves the problems in other theories, what the signaling function implies for a wider range of gray‐area cases, and what the larger significance is of blame's core function for interpersonal interactions in a variety of (non‐moral) normative domains. (shrink)

In recent years, research on morality in organizational life has begun to examine how organizational conduct comes to be socially constructed as having failed to comply with a community’s accepted morals. Researchers in this stream of research, however, have paid little attention to identifying and theorizing the key actors involved in these social construction processes and the types of accounts they construct. In this paper, we explore a set of key structural and cultural dimensions of apparent noncompliance that enable us (...) to distinguish between four categories of actors who engage in constructing the label of moral failure: dominant insiders, watchdog organizations, professional members, and publics. The analysis further clarifies which category of actor is more likely to succeed in constructing the label of moral failure under which circumstances, and what accounts they are likely to use, namely scapegoating, prototyping, shaming, and protesting. (shrink)

Many philosophers think that a necessary condition on moral blameworthiness is that the wrongdoer can reasonably be expected to avoid the action for which she is blamed. Those who think so assume as a matter of course that the expectations at issue here are normative expectations that contrast with the non-normative or predictive expectations we form concerning the probable conduct of others, and they believe, or at least assume, that there is a clear-cut distinction between the two. In this paper (...) I put this widespread assumption under scrutiny and argue that it’s mistaken: although predictive and normative expectations are indeed distinct, there is no sharp separation between them. On the contrary, predictive expectations can have a substantial bearing on normative expectations in two related ways: they can recalibrate what is reasonable to expect of agents when responsibility attributions are at stake and they can help to uncover previously undetected excusing conditions. I illustrate my claims with the famous bystander effect from social psychology and show that it yields predictive expectations that affect normative expectations in these two ways. (shrink)

In this paper I sketch a socially situated account of responsible agency, the main tenet of which is that the powers that constitute responsible agency are themselves socially constituted. I explain in detail the constitution relation between responsibility-relevant powers and social context and provide detailed examples of how it is realized by focusing on what I call ‘expectations-generating social factors’ such as social practices, cultural scripts, social roles, socially available self-conceptions, and political and legal institutions. I then bring my account (...) to bear on the debate about the exculpatory potential of moral ignorance. I show that a prominent position in this debate – the position that denies that moral ignorance exculpates – is grounded on an individualistic and acontextualist conception of moral capacities, moral cognition, and blameworthiness, and that this conception leads those philosophers who endorse it to make a number of questionable claims regarding the ability of ordinary agents to overcome their moral ignorance and the culpability they bear for the latter. I conclude by indicating how my socially situated account addresses the issue of moral ignorance. (shrink)

In this article I discuss David Shoemaker’s recently published piece “Responsibility: The State of the Question. Fault Lines in the Foundations.” While agreeing with Shoemaker on many points, I argue for a more unified diagnosis of the seemingly intractable debates that plague (what I call) “responsibility studies.” I claim that, of the five fault lines Shoemaker identifies, the most basic one is about the role that the notion of deserved harm should play in the theory of moral responsibility. I argue (...) that the deep divide between those theorists who affirm and those who deny that moral responsibility is essentially about the justification of desert thus understood can be traced to the disagreement about whether the focus on the reactive attitudes by itself entails that moral responsibility has nothing to do with traditional questions about desert and free will. I then show that the seeming intractableness of the other four fault lines Shoemaker identifies is expectable and explicable in light of this more basic disagreement. After this diagnostic work, I conclude by suggesting a solution to the “morass” that has taken over responsibility studies: theorists working in the field should acknowledge that it has effectively bifurcated into two discrete subareas, which I suggest calling “retribution studies” and “interpersonal studies.” -/- . (shrink)

Non‐reflectivist real self views claim that people are morally responsible for all and only those bits of conduct that express their true values and cares, regardless of whether they have endorsed them or not. A phenomenon that is widely cited in support of these views is inverse akrasia, that is, cases in which a person is praiseworthy for having done the right thing for the right reasons despite her considered judgment that what she did was wrong. In this paper I (...) show that non‐reflectivist real self views are problematic by focusing on the related but neglected phenomenon of inverse enkrasia, which occurs when an agent commits wrongdoing by following a mistaken evaluative judgment that, unbeknownst to her, runs contrary to her true values and cares. Intuitively, inverse enkratics are blameworthy for their actions although the latter don't express their real selves; therefore, non‐reflectivist real self views are false. I assess the implications of this result for the viability of the quality of will paradigm and conclude that the latter survives unscathed to the problems besetting real self views. The lesson is that defenders of the quality of will paradigm should stop talking about real selves altogether. (shrink)

Ignorance usually excuses from responsibility, unless the person is culpable for the ignorance itself. Since a lot of wrongdoing occurs in ignorance, the question of what makes ignorance culpable is central for a theory of moral responsibility. In this article I examine a prominent answer, which I call the ‘volitionalist tracing account,’ and criticize it on the grounds that it relies on an overly restrictive conception of responsibility‐relevant control. I then propose an alternative, which I call the ‘capacitarian conception of (...) control,’ and on the basis of it I advance an account of culpable ignorance that avoids the skeptical upshots of the volitionalist proposal. If correct, my account establishes three important truths: agents can be directly in control of their ignorance, they can be directly responsible for more than actions and omissions, and their moral obligations extend beyond the performance of intentional actions and omissions. (shrink)

Reactive theories of responsibility see moral accountability as grounded on the capacity for feeling reactive-attitudes. I respond to a recent argument gaining ground in this tradition that excludes psychopaths from accountability. The argument relies on what Paul Russell has called the 'subjectivity requirement'. On this view, the capacity to feel and direct reactive-attitudes at oneself is a necessary condition for responsibility. I argue that even if moral attitudes like guilt are impossible for psychopaths to deploy, that psychopaths, especially the "successful" (...) and "secondary" subtypes of psychopathy, can satisfy the subjectivity requirement with regard to shame. I appeal to evidence that embarrassment and shame are grounded on the same affective process and data that psychopathic judgments about embarrassment are neurotypical. If I am right, then psychopaths ought to be open to shame-based forms of accountability including shame punishments. I conclude by considering why psychopaths rarely self-report shame. I argue that lacking a capacity to see oneself as flawed is a different sort of failure than lacking the capacity to feel. (shrink)

When a wrongdoing occurs, victims, barring special circumstance, can aptly forgive their wrongdoers, receive apologies, and be paid reparations. It is also uncontroversial, in the usual circumstances, that wronged parties can aptly blame their wrongdoer. But controversy arises when we consider blame from third-parties after the victim has forgiven. At times it seems that wronged parties can make blame inapt through forgiveness. If third parties blame anyway, it often appears the victim is justified in protesting. “But I forgave him!” In (...) other cases, however, forgiveness seems irrelevant: B can forgive A, but it can still seem that third parties can aptly blame A for the wrong against B. This perplexity adds a dimension to ongoing discussion regarding criteria for apt blame and the related issues of standing and fittingness. This paper explores the status of third party blame after forgiveness. I argue that while post forgiveness blame is often inapt, in many other cases forgiveness is irrelevant. This difference is explained by appeal to the various relationships third parties might have to wronged parties, and how these differences affect the ways we blame and thereby blame’s aptness. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine whether agents who commit testimonial injustice are morally responsible for their wrongdoing, given that they are ignorant of their wrongdoing. Fricker (2007) argues that agents whose social setting lacks the concepts or reasons necessary for them to correct for testimonial injustice are excused. I argue that agents whose social settings have these concepts or reasons available are also typically excused, because they lack the capacity to recognise those concepts or reasons. Attempts to trace this lack (...) of capacity back to an earlier culpable wrongdoing will often fail, due to there being no point at which these perpetrators knowingly chose to develop their prejudices. Attempts to ground culpability under Talbert’s (2008) Attributionist account of moral responsibility will also fail. This is because perpetrators’ lack of awareness of what they are doing makes it the case that they are not expressing objectionable evaluative judgments in the way required for blameworthiness. Finally, I argue that our temptation to blame agents who commit testimonial injustice is not completely unfounded. Appealing to Watson’s (1996) attributability/accountability distinction allows us to make sense of how some responses to the jurors are appropriate, despite their being excused. (shrink)

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they (...) improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame. (shrink)

In everyday life, we assume that there are degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. Yet the debate about the nature of moral responsibility often focuses on the “yes or no” question of whether indeterminism is required for moral responsibility, while questions about what accounts for more or less blameworthiness or praiseworthiness are underexplored. In this paper, I defend the idea that degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness can depend in part on degrees of difficulty and degrees of sacrifice required for performing the (...) action in question. Then I turn to the question of how existing accounts of the nature of moral responsibility might be seen to accommodate these facts. In each case of prominent compatibilist and incompatibilist accounts that I consider, I argue that supplementation with added dimensions is required in order to account for facts about degrees of blameworthiness and praiseworthiness. For example, I argue that the reasons-responsiveness view of Fischer and Ravizza requires supplementation that takes us beyond even fine-grained measures of degrees of reasons-responsiveness in order to capture facts about degrees of difficulty to extend the reasons-responsiveness view by appealing to such measures). I conclude by showing that once we recognize the need for these additional parameters, we will be in a position to explain away at least some of the appeal of incompatibilist accounts of moral responsibility. (shrink)

The idea of self-forgiveness poses a serious challenge to any philosopher interested in giving a general account of forgiveness. On the one hand, it is an uncontroversial part of our common psychological and moral discourse. On the other, any account of self-forgiveness is inconsistent with any general account of forgiveness which implies that only the victim of an offense can forgive. To avoid this conclusion, one must either challenge the particular claims that preclude self-forgiveness or offer an independently plausible account (...) of self-forgiveness. I deploy both strategies in this article, explaining what self-forgiveness is and how it is possible. (shrink)

Theorists attending to the epistemic condition on responsibility are divided over whether moral ignorance is ever exculpatory. While those who argue that reasonable expectation is required for blameworthiness often maintain that moral ignorance can excuse, theorists who embrace a quality of will approach to blameworthiness are not sanguine about the prospect of excuses among morally ignorant wrongdoers. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that moral ignorance always reflects insufficient care for what matters morally, and therefore that moral ignorance never excuses. Furthermore, (...) quality of will theorists treat their skepticism about excuses for the morally ignorant as a natural implication of their approach. It is therefore unsurprising that, while many have argued for the blamelessness of certain morally ignorant agents on grounds concerning reasonable expectation, the possibility that morally ignorant agents might be blameless even according to quality of will views has not been adequately addressed. I illustrate and explain how it is possible for morally ignorant agents to display sufficient care for the morally relevant features of their wrong behavior. Thus, even if quality of will views are correct, moral ignorance sometimes excuses. (shrink)

It is intuitive that circumstantial ignorance, even when culpable, can mitigate blameworthiness for morally wrong behavior. In this paper I suggest an explanation of why this is so. The explanation offered is that an agent’s degree of blameworthiness for some action depends at least in part upon the quality of will expressed in that action, and that an agent’s level of awareness when performing a morally wrong action can make a difference to the quality of will that is expressed in (...) it. This explanation makes use of Holly Smith’s distinction between benighting and benighted actions as well as a notion developed here called “capture.”. (shrink)

An increasingly popular theory of moral responsibility, Attributionism, identifies attitudes as the locus of direct responsibility. And yet, two agents with qualitatively identical attitudes may differ in their responsibility due to a difference in whether they act on those attitudes. On the most plausible interpretation of Attributionism, attitude duplicates differ in their responsibility only with respect to the scope of what they’re responsible for: one agent is responsible for only their attitudes, while the other is responsible for their attitudes and (...) for acting in a way that reflects those attitudes. Against this, I argue that attitude duplicates may also differ with respect to their degrees of praiseworthiness, and that this is best explained by either the effort or sacrifice instantiated in one’s actions—explanations unavailable to Attributionism. If this is correct, then Attributionism fails to provide an adequate account of praiseworthiness, and therefore fails as a theory of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Skepticism about blameworthiness says that there is good reason to doubt that, in our world, humans are ever blameworthy for their deeds. A significant problem for the discussion of this view is that it is unclear how to understand the kind of blame that should be at issue. This paper makes a new proposal. The basic idea is that the kind of blame skeptics should be skeptical about is constituted by responses that can violate the targets’ claims and by the (...) responders’ thought that the targets have forfeited this claim because of their morally objectionable actions and because of how they were when they performed them. This view identifies an important part of our everyday lives and frames discussions about skepticism about blameworthiness in a new way. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend my book Conversation and Responsibility in response to three critics: Julia Driver, David Shoemaker, and Manuel Vargas. Driver raises questions about my account of private blame. Shoemaker finds problems with my account of quality of will. And Vargas questions the conversational nature of my account.

An assumption central to some forms of retributivism is that it is noninstrumentally good that a culpable wrongdoer suffers in receiving a deserved punishment. A justification for this can be built from a conversational theory of moral responsibility, and in particular deserved blame. On such a theory, deserved blame is fitting as a response to a wrongdoer insofar as it is conversationally meaningful as a reply to a wrong done. Punishment, it might be argued, has this feature too. The conversational (...) aim in both deserved blame and punishment is for the guilty to grasp the meaning conveyed by those who blame or punish and then respond meaningfully by, for example, apologizing or expressing remorse. Ideally, a culpable agent would experience a form and degree of guilt suitable for a wrong done. So, a conversational theory of punishment can then be justified in terms of providing conditions conducive for a culpable wrongdoer to respond to punishment by manifesting an appropriately pained response of guilt. (shrink)

_ Source: _Page Count 36 The situationist movement in social psychology has caused a considerable stir in philosophy. Much of this was prompted by the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Both contended that familiar philosophical assumptions about the role of character in the explanation of action were not supported by experimental results. Most of the ensuing philosophical controversy has focused upon issues related to moral psychology and ethical theory. More recently, the influence of situationism has also given rise (...) to questions regarding free will and moral responsibility. There is cause for concern that a range of situationist findings are in tension with the reasons-responsiveness putatively required for free will and moral responsibility. We develop and defend a response to the alleged situationist threat to free will and moral responsibility that we call pessimistic realism. We conclude on an optimistic note, exploring the possibility of strengthening our agency in the face of situational influences. (shrink)

The situationist movement in social psychology has caused a considerable stir in philosophy. Much of this was prompted by the work of Gilbert Harman and John Doris. Both contended that familiar philosophical assumptions about the role of character in the explanation of action were not supported by experimental results. Most of the ensuing philosophical controversy has focused upon issues related to moral psychology and ethical theory. More recently, the influence of situationism has also given rise to questions regarding free will (...) and moral responsibility. There is cause for concern that a range of situationist findings are in tension with the reasons-responsiveness putatively required for free will and moral responsibility. We develop and defend a response to the alleged situationist threat to free will and moral responsibility that we call pessimistic realism. We conclude on an optimistic note, exploring the possibility of strengthening our agency in the face of situational influences. (shrink)

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P.F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non-standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither anti-realist (i.e. purely 'conventionalist') nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead ‘constructivist’. On (...) the ‘Scaffolding View’ I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. While this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is providing a plausibly defensible account of how so-called responsible agents genuinely deserve to be treated as such. (shrink)

If I do you a good turn, you may respond with gratitude and express that gratitude by saying “Thank you.” Similarly, if I insult you, you may react with resentment which you express by shouting, “Screw you!” or something of the sort. Broadly put, when confronted with another’s morally significant conduct, we are inclined to respond with a reactive attitude and to express that reactive attitude in speech. A number of familiar speech acts have a call-and-response structure. Questions, demands and (...) hails are all call-types, and each seeks a defining response. Questions seek answers, demands seek compliance, and a hail, for example, “Hi Coleen” seeks a “Hi” in return. Many theorists claim that expressions of the reactive attitudes also have this structure. Yet, this insight raises a number of questions. There are, after all, many familiar call-types, not only questions, demands and hails, but also requests, invitations, recommendations and entreaties. Given this, it is natural to wonder whether the expressed reactive attitudes are a sui generis call-type or whether they can be properly assimilated to one of the better-known forms. Further, we might wonder about the response component. It is utterly familiar that the response suited to a demand is compliance, and that the response sought by a question is an answer, but what response do the expressed reactive attitudes seek? The answer to this question is not similarly ready to hand. In this paper, I provide a recognition-based theory of the call-and-response structure of the expressed reactive attitudes. On my account, both the positive and negative expressed reactive attitudes are modes of recognition that seek for their target to give expression to her recognition of having been appropriately recognized. In the negative case, the target does this by feeling and expressing guilt or remorse, and in the positive case, by feeling and expressing self-approbation. (shrink)

One influential tradition holds that blame is a moral attitude: blame is appropriate only when the target of blame has violated a moral norm without excuse or justification. Against this, some have recently argued that agents can be blameworthy for their violation of epistemic norms even when no moral norms are thereby violated. This paper defends the appropriateness of aesthetic blame: agents can be blameworthy for their violation of aesthetic norms as such, where aesthetic norms are the norms of social (...) practices that aim at aesthetic values. I adapt a generic account of blame as protest, which can take variable forms, and then argue that aesthetic distortion cases—cases in which an existing artwork is distorted in its presentation—most clearly warrant blame even in the absence of violations of moral norms. (shrink)

In large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. The mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. But how do we actually do this? The current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a desire (...) to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. Participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. But when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. (shrink)

Duties to oneself are allegedly incoherent: if we had duties to ourselves, we would be able to opt out of them. I argue that there is a constraint on one’s ability to release oneself from duties to oneself. The release must be autonomous in order to be normatively transformative. First, I show that the view that combines the division of the self with the second-personal characterization of morality is problematic. Second, I advance a fundamental solution to the problem of the (...) incoherence of duties to oneself, one that does not rely on any division of the self, temporal or otherwise. I build upon the prevalent idea that, in releasing others from duties, we exercise the power of consent. The transformative force of consent partly derives from our autonomy. Invoking a plausible characterization of autonomy, I argue that release from duties requires the right kind of mental state. (shrink)

The classical ethical questions of whether and to what extent moral criticism is a sort of rational criticism have received renewed interest in recent years. According to the approach that I refer to as rationalist, accounts of moral responsibility are grounded by explanations of the conditions under which an agent is rationally answerable for her actions and attitudes. In the sense that is relevant here, to answer for an attitude or action is to give reasons that at least purport to (...) justify it. To hold someone answerable for an attitude or action is thus to hold her rationally liable for it. T. M. Scanlon’s view is perhaps the most well-known example of this approach. The rationalist approach has recently been attacked by David Shoemaker for being too narrow: the charge is that attitudes exist for which an agent is responsible even though she cannot, in the relevant sense, answer for them. If there are morally significant attitudes that are attributable to an agent even though she cannot answer for them, then it would seem incomplete, misguided, or worse to treat morality as fundamentally a matter of demanding and giving reasons. By developing some remarks based on G. E. M. Anscombe’s _Intention_, I defend the rationalist approach against this critique. I show how an agent may be answerable for an attitude even though she cannot answer for it. The objective of this paper is thus twofold: to contribute to the discussion of the connection between rational liability and ethical responsibility, and to provide an example of the broad relevance of Anscombe’s thought to contemporary practical philosophy. (shrink)

Sometimes it is not one’s place to blame or forgive. This phenomenon is captured under the philosophical notion of standing. However, there is an asymmetry to be explained here. One can successfully blame, even if one lacks the standing to do so. Yet, one cannot successfully forgive if one lacks the standing to do so. In this article we explain this asymmetry. We argue that a complete explanation depends on not only a difference in the natures of the standing to (...) blame and forgive but also a difference in the natures of blame and forgiveness themselves. (shrink)

This paper points out neglected considerations about the standing to blame. It starts from the observation that the standing to blame debate largely focusses on factors concerning the blamer or the relation of blamer and wrongdoer, mainly hypocrisy and meddling, while neglecting the victim of wrongdoing. This paper wants to set this right by pointing out how considerations about the victim can impact a third party’s standing. The first such consideration is the blamer’s personal relation to the victim. It is (...) argued that persons close to the victim thereby gain standing even in the presence of factors that would normally undermine it. Arguing from the well-known sexual assault case of Chanel Miller and the public reactions to it, the paper then introduces two more considerations about standing hitherto neglected. First, given that blame has an expressive function and serves to contradict expressive aspects of wrongdoings, it is argued that third-party blame can morally support the victim in the face of wrongdoing and that such support matters to victims. It is argued that this importance of third-party blame can ground standing. Thirdly and relatedly, the paper argues that insufficient collective responses to wrongdoing, i.e. when other bystanders do not respond with sufficient blaming responses, can equally ground standing of third parties. It is argued that these considerations are relevant not only for an ethics of blame broadly conceived but also for standing to blame in particular. Thereby, the paper establishes that considerations about the victim are central for discussion of the standing to blame. (shrink)