35 The Moral Psychology of Blame A Feminist Analysis Mich Ciurria This chapter brings feminist moral psychology into conversation with dominant theories of blame. There are three main areas of concern in feminist moral psychology: the value of marginalized emotions like care and anger; the role of distorted states in moral reasoning; and the notion that agency is collective or relational. Feminist debates in each of these areas have implications for the dominant theories of blame: cognitive theory; emotional theory; conative theory; and functional theory. These debates call into question some commonly held beliefs about blame, including that it is a personal (apolitical) response to a target agent; that blaming emotions do or should track individual agency; and that blaming norms are generally felicitous and not in need of significant revision. Key words: feminist moral psychology, blame, responsibility, agency, moral reasoning, oppression, social justice 35.1 Introduction In this chapter, I will evaluate the psychology of blame from a feminist perspective. My intention is to bring the literature on feminist moral psychology into conversation with the literature on the psychology of blame. To this end, I will apply some central feminist critiques to four dominant theories of blame: cognitive theory, emotional theory, conative theory, and functional theory. These theories each identify blame with specific psychological contents, except for functional theory, which says that blame (whatever it is) plays a specific functional role in our interpersonal practices. Feminist moral psychology has much to say about the role of cognition, emotions, desires, and beliefs in moral reasoning, so it should have a great deal say about psychological theories of blame. Although feminist moral psychology is a vast and internally diverse field of inquiry, there are a few central debates within this literature—particularly about emotions, the role of distorted states in moral reasoning, and individualism versus collectivism—all of which have implications for theories of blame. With this in mind, I’ll briefly outline the relevant debates in feminist moral psychology in the next section, and then bring them into conversation with debates about the psychology of blame in §35.3. 35.2 Feminist moral psychology There are three main areas of concern in feminist moral psychology that are germane to psychological theories of blame. They revolve around (1) the role of (especially feminine-coded) emotions in moral reasoning, (2) the role of distortions in moral reasoning, and (3) the notion of moral reasoning as a collective or relational enterprise. I’ll briefly unpack these ideas here. (1) Emotions (care, anger) First, feminists emphasize the importance of the emotions in moral reasoning, particularly care and anger. Some feminists ‘believe that if we are to end women’s oppression, we should incorporate into our philosophical theories things associated with women and with the feminine and so previously left out’, such as care (Superson 2020; Ruddick 1980; Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984). Other feminists believe that we should also reconsider the value of masculine-coded emotions like anger, particularly in response to oppression (Lorde 1987; Bell 2009; Cherry 2018; 2020). Both of these claims are controversial (e.g.Tuana 1992; Tronto 1993), but they are focal points within feminist thought, so they will be germane to a feminist analysis of the psychology of blame. (2) Distorted states Second, feminists have emphasized the possibility of acquiring ‘deformed’ states, such as ‘patriarchal desire,’, ‘adaptive preferences’, and ‘repressive satisfactions’, as a result of oppressive influences (Bartky 1990; Nussbaum 1999; Mackenzie 2018). So-called deformed states are types of ignorance internalized in hierarchical societies. The term ‘deformed’ which is common in feminist philosophy, is controversial in critical disability theory, and will be substituted here with the less controversial term ‘distorted.’ Feminists are also interested in the acquisition of distortions by oppressors, including ‘domination values’ (Superson 2020), ‘vices of domination’ (Tessman 2005), arrogance (Lugones 1995; Frye 1983; 1995), and ‘white ignorance’ (Mills 2017). These states are taken to impair moral reasoning and moral agency. (3) Collectivism vs individualism Third, feminists have challenged the traditional, individualistic notion of reasoning and responsibility, and have proposed distributive, collectivist, and relational versions of these concepts (May and Strikwerda 1994; Benson 2000; Isaacs 2011). Many feminists believe that moral reasoning is a collective enterprise, and that moral responsibility is shared by collectives. Because of this methodological preference, some feminists have proposed fairly radical accounts of responsibility, including accounts that hold social groups responsible for collective harms and oppression. In the next section, I’ll bring these debates to bear on the four main theories of blame. 35.3 Theories of blame 35.3.1 Cognitive theory Cognitive theories of blame ‘hold that blame is fundamentally a judgment or evaluation that we make about an agent in light of their actions, attitudes, or character’ (Coates and Tognazzini 2018). One of the earlier cognitivists was J. C. C. Smart, who described blame as a judgment that someone has culpably failed to live up to a standard (Smart 1961). More recently, Michael Zimmerman (1988) and Ishtiyaque Haji (1998) have argued that blame is a judgment that someone has a stain on their moral ledger due to their poor judgment, character, or behaviour. Blame, in this sense, can be purely unemotional. However, cognitivism is compatible with the notion that judgments of blame are guided by emotions, though emotions are extraneous to blame proper. Some of the debates in the cognitivist literature revolve around whether blame should be conceived of as purely cognitive or partially emotional. Some philosophers argue that cognitivists are confused because they conflate blaming with judging blameworthy, where the former alone involves emotional contents (Kenner 1967; Coates and Tognazzini 2018). Others offer empirical reasons for thinking that blame should be understood as emotionally toned (McGeer 2013). But what do feminists have to bring to the table? In this section, I’ll apply the feminist debates about (1) emotions, (2) distortions, and (3) collectivism to the cognitivist account of blame. (Many of these debates are relevant to the other theories of blame as well, and will therefore be revisited in each section). The feminist literature specifically raises questions about whether judgments of blame should be (seen as) shaped by emotions; whether and to what extent blaming judgments are influenced by distorted reasoning; and whether blaming judgments target individuals taken in isolation, or can be distributed across members of collectives. 35.3.1.1 Emotions Many feminists are interested in reappraising the emotions, which they take to be disvalued due to sexist attitudes. There is an ontological and an ethical side to this debate. First, some feminists say that emotions should be built into models of moral reasoning because failing to include them favours a patriarchal understanding of moral psychology––i.e. excluding emotions is sexist. Second, some feminists argue that emotions play an essential role in correct moral reasoning, and should therefore be included in models of well-formed moral decision-making. A theory of blame, then, should include or take into account the value of the emotions. On the first score, feminists have argued that Kantian and Hobbesian moral psychologies, which prioritize reason and judgment over emotionality and sentimentality, are patriarchal in nature. As Anita Superson puts it, Such feminists [who believe that we should include emotions in moral psychology] reject both Kant’s view, that reason should master desire, and Hobbes’s view, that self-interest is the motive that prompts moral action, and favor including in moral theory those [emotional] motives that have traditionally been associated with women. These are motives appropriate to prompting action with intimates in the so-called private sphere to which (at least white, middle class) women have historically been relegated. (Superson 2020: ) This view is controversial, but it raises important questions about theory construction. Some contemporary feminists agree that ontological questions cannot be divorced from feminist ethics and politics (e.g. Haslanger 2000a; Manne 2017). If emotions are ethically and politically valuable, they may be ontologically relevant as well. One might wonder whether cognitive theory leaves out emotionality because of an implicit bias against feminine-coded goods. Perhaps emotions can play an important role in guiding moral judgments and shaping relationships. On the other hand, some feminists worry that emphasizing emotionality in feminist moral psychology may reinforce oppressive gender stereotypes (Tronto 1993). These feminists think that dissociating emotionality from femininity is the only way to dismantle the binary gender logic that keeps women oppressed. They might object that an attempt to incorporate ‘feminine-coded emotions’ into the definition of blame will reinforce outdated gender stereotypes. Having said that, there may be other reasons to think that emotions play an important role in blame. On the pragmatic side, feminist have argued that disvalued emotions like care and anger are valuable in a number of ways that moral psychologists have failed to adequately appreciate. I will address this side of the debate in the next section (on emotional theories of blame). If the arguments in favour of the practical value of emotionality are compelling, this may mean that blame should be understood as (ideally) shaped or strongly guided by emotions. And this would also mean that we should see emotionally charged blame as normal and natural, not a deviation from an ideal cognitive prototype. Unemotional blame may be the anomaly, and it may also be unconducive to widely-shared ideals like blaming the right person in the right way. 3.5.3.1.2 Distorted states A second question of interest to feminists is whether, or to what extent, judgments of blame are shaped by distorted states such as patriarchal desires, adaptive preferences, domination values, arrogance, White ignorance, and so on, and what can be done about this. Some feminists speak as if women’s desires and preferences are all distorted by patriarchal forces (Daly 1978; Dworkin 1987; MacKinnon 1987), while others speak as if none are (Barber 2007). Most feminists lie somewhere in the middle, holding that some of our desires and preferences are distorted while others are not. Feminists are also, of course, concerned with distorted reasoning in oppressors. Martha Nussbaum (1999) gives examples of distorted preferences that interfere with moral reasoning in both oppressed people and oppressors, such as adaptive preferences, inauthentic preferences, and antisocial preferences. Such states interfere with correct reasoning in the sense that they produce false and harmful desires and judgments, which undermine the reasoner’s autonomy and well-being. The implication for conative blame is that our judgments of blame may very well be distorted. There are disputes about just how misshapen our moral judgments are in general. But it may be possible to make rough generalizations about social groups that share what Charles Mills calls ‘structural group-based miscognition[s],’ or distorted cognitive dispositions rooted in shared experiences (2017: 49). Mills gives the example of White ignorance, a ‘cognitive tendency’ to not-know things about racism, which is shared by most if not all White people, as well as some non-White people (2017: 58). White ignorance is not a rare form of delinquency, but rather the default way of seeing the world for White people. Similarly, Marylin Frye (1995; 1983) says that White women share ‘Whitely’ dispositions that give rise to arrogant, rude, and patronizing attitudes toward non-White people. In the same vein, Larry May and Robert Strikwerda (1994) argue that most if not all men share misogynistic attitudes similar to those we find in a rapist, because our society is a rape culture that socializes men into a sexist mindset. Some critical race theorists, on the other hand, contend that Black men suffer from misandric racism, and are consequently stereotyped as rapists and criminals, which may be a form of (intersectional) White ignorance (Curry 2017). Many critical disability theorists have argued that nondisabled people share ableist assumptions about disabled people (Thomson 2017; Barnes 2016; Tremain 2017). These collectivist understandings of moral cognition imply that privileged groups tend to share prejudices that impair their moral reasoning and produce distorted judgments of blame. White women, for instance, may be inclined to patronizingly blame Black people for going to the park in a white-dominant neighborhood (Guynn 2018); men may be disposed to defensively blame women for withholding care and approval (Manne 2017). These analyses suggest that ordinary blaming practices create what Marylin Frye refers to as ‘double binds’, which are ‘situations in which options are reduced to a very few and all of them expose one to penalty, censure, or deprivation’ (1983: 2). For instance, women are blamed for being too sexual but also for being too ‘frigid’ because of patriarchal attitudes towards women’s sexuality. Blame is one of the various mechainsms that uphold these double binds in oppressive contexts. Philosophers have only begun to shine a light on the role of oppression in our blaming practices. In Social Dimensions of Moral Responsibility, feminist contributors highlight the ways in which blame and praise ‘are shaped by cultural practices that include asymmetrical dynamics of power’ (Hutchison, Mackenzie, and Oshana 2018: 21). This includes the fact that socially privileged people, relative to marginalized people, have more control over what counts as blame and praise (McKenna 2018), are seen as more entitled to hold others responsible (Mackenzie 2018; Oshana 2018), have better access to the epistemic resources needed to hold others responsible (Mason 2018), and are seen as more entitled to such goods as respect, restitution, and amends (Hutchison 2018). These analyses help to explain asymmetries in ordinary interpersonal relationships, including that marginalized people are less capable of demanding an apology from powerful people, but are more susceptible to punitive blame. These dynamics arise from inequalities in respect, status, and epistemic clout produced by hierarchies of power. These perspectives also call into question a common philosophical assumption, which is that our intuitions about who deserves or warrants blame are generally accurate (e.g. Strawson 2008/1974; Fischer 2011). In contrast, ‘revisionists’ believe that ordinary moral judgments are systematically distorted (Vargas 2013; Doris 2015a). Likewise, critiques in feminist and queer theory suggest that ordinary morality is much less felicitous than we tend to assume due to the systematic role of prejudice in ordinary moral reasoning as a by-product of systemic inequality (e.g. Haslanger 2000b; Bettcher 2018; Hancox-Li 2019; Flaherty 2019). Many theorists believe that philosophical common sense is similarly distorted because of systemic inequalities in the profession (Dembroff 2020; Tremain 2017). If this is right, then we shouldn’t construct our theory of blame around either ordinary or philosophical intuitions about blame. Rather, we should build our theory around the insights of marginalized people who have direct experiences of oppression and are better positioned to see how blame routinely (mal)functions and enforces double binds. Notably, one of the key aspects of feminist philosophy is that it is inherently political; feminist philosophy ‘originated in feminist politics’, ‘included from the start discussion of feminist political issues and positions’ (Garry et al. 2017: 52), and is ‘motivated by the quest for social justice’ (McAfee 2018). Thus, feminist perspectives on blame will, unlike traditional accounts, foreground the politics of blame, giving less weight to conceptual and semantic concerns. Feminists will be less interested, for example, in questions about what philosophers and ordinary folks mean by blame, and more interested in how blame is distorted by structural oppression, as well as how we can rehabilitate our blaming practices (e.g. Ciurria 2019). In other words, feminists will tend to favor what Sally Haslanger refers to as an ameliorative method (2000a), or what Charles Mills refers to as a non-ideal method (2017), as opposed to an ideal, conceptual, or descriptive method, which abstracts away from political circumstances. 35.3.1.3 Collective responsibility A third question of relevance to feminism is whether judgments of blame should be directed at individuals or collectives. Traditionally, philosophers have treated blame as individually focused; the accepted wisdom is that blame is a judgment about an individual’s actions, attitudes, or character traits, taken in isolation from the broader context. In contrast, feminists emphasize the impact of our social location and our relationships on our agency and reasoning processes. This relational–collectivist focus may imply that we’re more blameworthy than we tend to think, or that we’re less blameworthy, depending on how one looks at it. Overall, feminists tend to favour a more collectivist focus, with some arguing that loose collectives can share responsibility for group harms. May and Strikwerda, for instance, believe that because men collectively participate in rape culture, they are collectively responsible for rape. The underlying rationale is that men participate in practices of male bonding that contribute to a climate of misogyny, and this make them ‘co-conspirators’ in rape (1994: 135). Elsewhere, May similarly argues that White people are collectively responsible for racism because they collectively engage in practices that contribute to a climate of racism, and, in doing so, ‘participate in something like a joint venture that increases the likelihood of [racist] harm’ (1992: 47). These arguments imply that it’s reasonable to hold social groups responsible for cultures of oppression. (In cognitivist terms, we might say that these groups share a stain on their joint moral ledger. Emotionally speaking, they may jointly deserve negative reactive attitudes, as we shall see in the next section). This is one of the stronger forms of collectivism. Cheshire Calhoun defends a weaker position on which people are not to blame for prejudices (like homophobia or ableism) in ‘abnormal moral contexts’, in which a subgroup ‘makes advances in moral knowledge faster than they can be disseminated and assimilated by the general public’ (1989: 396). This is consistent with the widely held belief that people are not to blame for ignorance if they couldn’t have known better (e.g. Levy 2018; Fricker 2007; 2016). People with ‘unexceptional’ types of ignorance do not satisfy what some philosophers call the ‘knowledge condition’ on responsibility, and are therefore not responsible (much less blameworthy) for their prejudices. Calhoun, however, allows that such people can still be amenable to reproach, because reproach can be a ‘tool for effective moral change’, even when the target agent has done her epistemic best (1989: 389). Michelle Moody-Adams (1994), on the other hand, denies that ignorance is generally non-culpable. She claims that our failings as human beings are best attributed not to situational pressures or epistemic barriers, but instead to ‘affected ignorance’ or a wilful desire not to know what we ought to know. While philosophers tend to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are doing their best with limited information, Moody-Adams points out that this is a tenuous empirical thesis that is refuted by the presumption of the banality of evil, the notion that evil is ordinary and widespread. A cursory glance at the (unrevised) historical record reveals that oppressive groups like Nazis and colonizers actually did have access to information about their role in historic evils, but actively ignored, denied, and tried to conceal their participation. Non-culpable ignorance, then, is the exception rather than the rule. When people claim to be ignorant of evil, this is typically a face-saving strategy as opposed to a statement of fact. People do not want to take responsibility for their participation in atrocities because they are committed to their way of life and do not want to be answer for the unimaginable things they have done. Other feminists agree that non-culpable ignorance isn’t necessarily an excuse. Elinor Mason says that even if we harm someone in ignorance, we should take responsibility for our behaviour because this shows the victim proper respect: ‘As a member of a society in which there are women and people of color, and a history of oppression, you should be willing to take on extended responsibility for this sort of [non-culpable] failing’, because doing so shows members of your community the respect to which they’re entitled (2018: 176). Others, like Matthew Talbert (2008), agree that ignorance doesn’t necessarily excuse disrespectful conduct because blame is a fitting response to disrespect and dehumanization, even if these practices are widely accepted in the culture. Something that may interest moral psychologists is the question of how to classify ‘ignorance’, which is a central concern in the feminist literature. While many philosophers refer to the ignorance behind systematic racism and sexism as an epistemic ‘deficit’ or ‘blind spot’ I am using ‘deficit’ and ‘blind spot’ in a critical sense. Some critical disability theorists object to this language as ableist. (e.g. Medina 2013), the accounts given by structuralists like Moody-Adams, Mills, May, and Strikwerda suggest that ignorance may be better understood as an epistemic failing and something for which one may bear responsibility. An epistemic deficit is an externally-imposed constraint or inability that deserves our sympathy and understanding, while an epistemic vice is a character flaw or choice thay may warrant negative regard. The difference, then, is not merely semantic, but ethical, as it has implications for whether we should hold people responsible for their ignorance. Feminist criticisms reveal that distinct problems arise when it comes to allocating blame for oppression. As Superson points out, persons may contribute to a group’s oppression simply by participating in a system of oppression, but not directly harboring sexist (or racist, etc.) intentions or even acting in ways that directly harm others, which are two factors that we ordinarily use to implicate individuals for immoral actions. If ill will and direct harm are constraints on blame, then many people who (indirectly) contribute to systems of oppression will come out blameless. Indeed, recent debates about the nature of racism and sexism call into question a number of widely held assumptions about blame. Kate Manne (2017), for example, says that being a misogynist doesn’t hinge on harbouring misogynistic attitudes, but is instead a matter of policing and enforcing patriarchal norms, whether one endorses those norms or not. In a similar vein, Tommie Shelby says that being racist doesn’t require a ‘racist heart’, but is a matter of propogating racist beliefs; hence, ‘a fundamental problem with a volitional conception of racism—and indeed with many overly moralized analyses of racism—is that it can blind[fold] us to the ways in which seemingly “innocent” people can often be unwittingly complicitous in racial oppression’ (2002: 418). If ‘innocent’ people can contribute to oppression, then perhaps they should be held responsible, even if their hearts weren’t in it and they didn’t know better. One reason for thinking that people should be blamed for their participation in systems of oppression, regardless of the status of their hearts and minds, is that blaming them could confer some of the same benefits that Cheshire Calhoun attributes to reproach: it could serve as an effective tool for moral change, even when the blamed person couldn’t have avoided doing what she did and didn’t harbour any ill will. Blame could advance this end by encouraging ‘innocent’ people to take responsibility for their mistakes, as Mason envisions, or by motivating people to address injustices in which they have played a role, as Iris Marion Young (2011) and Robin Zheng (2018; 2021) maintain, or by disseminating information about oppression, as I have argued (2019). 35.3.2 Emotional theory Emotional theories hold that blame is essentially emotional. This is a common reading of Strawson, one of the most influential theorists of responsibility and blame. As Coates and Tognazzini interpret him, according to Strawson, our status as morally responsible agents is grounded in the non-detached attitudes and emotions that are (in part) constitutive of ordinary interpersonal relationships. Regarding others as morally responsible agents, for Strawson, is not a matter of judgment but of emotional response. (2018) Blame, on this reading, consists of ‘negative reactive attitudes’ such as resentment, disapprobation, and indignation. Other emotional theorists think that, while blame may be essentially emotional, it can be informed by cognitive states such as judgments of desert and volition. The difference between emotional theory and cognitive theory, then, may be one of degree rather than kind. Emotional theorists are specifically interested in investigating, and sometimes vindicating, the emotional side of blame. What can feminist moral psychology bring to this debate? As we saw above, feminists have a special interest in the emotions of care and anger. Anger is often interpreted as a form of resentment, which moral psychologists have discussed at length on account of Strawson’s enduring influence. But feminists are particularly interested in anger as a response to sexist oppression. Could ‘angry blame’ be valuable in this capacity? Secondly, what role, if any, does care play in the formation, expression, and evaluation of blame, particularly in contexts of oppression? To answer these questions, let’s first consider Strawson’s explanation of why we exchange the negative reactive attitudes. First, he says that we’re not capable of fully suspending these emotions even if we wanted to, so a theory of responsibility that doesn’t include them isn’t psychologically tenable. Second, he says that we wouldn’t want to suspend these attitudes even if we could, because our most important relationships depend on them. Eliminating the reactive attitudes would result in intolerable ‘human isolation’ (Strawson 1964: 81). Thus, he’s making two claims: we can’t fully suspend our reactive attitudes, and we wouldn’t want to even if we could. These claims are controversial but they’ve been quite influential, so it’s worth asking whether similar things can be said of anger and care as blame-constituting or blame-mediating emotions. I’ll ask these questions of ‘angry blame’ in the next section, and turn to the role of care in §35.3.2.2. 35.3.2.1 Anger Let’s first consider whether angry blame can be useful, and address the question of whether it can be suppressed or eliminated later. Feminists have much to say about women’s anger. Macalaster Bell (2009) outlines some of the feminist arguments in favour of anger’s appropriateness in response to sexist oppression. The same arguments can be leveraged in support of what Susan Wolf calls ‘angry blame’, or blame characterized by ‘the angry attitudes’ (2011: 8), particularly when considered as a response to oppression. Bell summarizes four feminist defences of the value of anger, which prima facie justify its use in response to sexism: (i) Feminists have argued that ‘responding with anger is a basic and central way for women to protest sexist and oppressive norms and constraints; as a form of protest, anger is an important part of resisting sexist oppression’ (Bell 2009: 168). Responding with angry blame, then, could also be a good way of protesting sexism. (ii) Feminists have argued that anger ‘provides us with a unique way of gaining knowledge about the world’ (ibid.). Feelings of anger can be evidence of an oppressive environment, and having one’s anger silenced can be a sign of oppression. Paying attention to one’s anger and how it is treated can yield knowledge about political and epistemic oppression. Observing how angry blame is felt and received, then, could also yield information about these power dynamics. (iii) Feminists have argued that anger can be ‘a way of bearing witness to women’s oppression’ (Bell 2009: 198). Anger directed at sexist oppression can ‘track an important moral truth; the world is filled with injustice (etc.)’ (p. 198). ‘Bearing witness’ can also be a means of forming coalitions or relationships of political and affective solidarity with victims of oppression (Chemaly 2018; Norlock 2018). Angry blame, then, could also be a way of bearing witness and forming coalitions with victims. (iv) Feminists have argued that anger can help motivate social change. As Audre Lorde attests, ‘[Anger] between peers births change, not destruction, and the discomfort and sense of loss it often causes is not fatal, but a sign of growth. My response to racism is anger’ (1984: 131). Angry blame, then, could also instigate social change. Bell adds a fifth reason to value anger in response to sexism: anger is not only instrumentally but also intrinsically valuable, because it is a virtuous response to sexism. It is virtuous because it is especially fitting in the circumstances: ‘anger does a better job [than other negative emotions] of responding to [a sexist] slight and expressing the agent’s respect for herself and her value as well as for the insulter and her status as a person, no matter how morally deranged’ (Bell 2009: 178). While anger may not be the only appropriate response to sexism, it’s the only response that expresses a firm rejection of the offence and a demand for respect. Thus, anger, more than emotions like disappointment and sadness, is a distinctly fitting rebuke to sexism. This makes it valuable for its own sake, not merely as a means to an end. On the same grounds, we can say that angry blame can be an excellent response to sexism because it repudiates the sexist offence and demands respect. Angry blame can be valuable, in other words, even when it goes unheeded, in much the same way that anger simpliciter can be inherently valuable. Blaming a sexual harasser, for example, can be virtuous even if you get fired from your job and marginalized for speaking out, since standing up for your dignity as a person is an excellent thing to do. Angry blame, then, can be justified on the above five counts. Having established this, let’s return to Strawson’s two questions: are the negative reactive attitudes valuable, and can we completely suppress them? The second question is something of a moot point if we don’t have any good reason to fully suppress our angry blame due to its many uses. Why ask whether we can completely withhold our angry blame if we shouldn’t try to? Feminists moral psychology suggests that angry blame can play many important social roles. Still, one might worry that blame can be too angry. Should we at least try to temper the angry tone of our blame? Myisha Cherry speaks to this concern. She says that ‘we evaluate anger according to its intelligibility, appropriateness, and proportionality’ (2018: 195). Anger is intelligible if it has an object; ‘it will be unintelligible if when asked “What are you angry about?” the person replies ‘At nothing’’ (p. 195). It is appropriate if it fits the world: ‘Did racial discrimination [for example] actually occur?’ (p. 196). And it is proportionate if it is the right sort and level of response; ‘We may judge that a person’s raging response to a raindrop on [their] forehead is disproportionate anger’ (p. 196). We can ask the same questions of angry blame in response to sexism (or any other injustice). Did sexism really occur? Is the level and type of anger proportionate to the sexist offence? Answering these questions isn’t as simple as it may seem, however, because our sympathies (or lack thereof) can bias our evaluations. When evaluating whether a case of anger is justified, we look to the object of the emotion. We ask, ‘Why is this person angry?’ Cherry cites Adam’s Smith’s observation (1976) that ‘when passions of another person are in “perfect concord” with the sympathetic emotions of my own, I judge it as just, proper, and suitable to the object’ (2018: 201). We consider, that is, whether we can sympathize with the person’s ‘passions’ in light of our own experiences. But, as Smith also notes, our sympathies are asymmetrically distributed, since we tend to sympathize more with those close to us than with strangers and outsiders. As a result, we might judge a stranger’s anger to be unjustified simply because we don’t know the person. This is one level of sympathy bias. Another (structural) level is our tendency to show less sympathy to social groups that are depicted unsympathetically by pejorative social scripts. To give a salient example, American scripts criminalize and demonize Black people in ways that render racism ‘simultaneously more invisible end more virulent’, says Angela Davis (1998: 269). Davis cites the criminalization of Blackness as a partial explanation for the police-industrial complex (2011), but it may underlie a broader, structural system of racist evaluations—a general, cultural hostility towards Black people. Another factor in racial sympathy bias is that racism, as an object of Black people’s anger, is beyond the realm of White people’s experiences, which may dispose White people to see it as less harmful or less prevalent than it really is. In these ways, racial sympathy biases give rise to distorted evaluations of anger in groups depicted unsympathetically (or racialized) by social scripts, whose experiences of oppression are unfamiliar or ‘strange’ to the dominant group. In a similar way, women may be susceptible to sexist sympathy biases that dispose people to police and pathologize their anger at sexist oppression. Cherry says that sympathy biases lead to ‘anger policing’, or a demand that the angry person ‘express [their] discontent only on the evaluator’s terms’ (Cherry 2018: 212), as well as gaslighting, or an attempt to pathologize and silence the angry person. Because sympathy biases tend to disfavour marginalized groups, they make those groups more susceptible to policing and gaslighting, as well as negative reactive attitudes based on demonizing stereotypes. Not only are marginalized people anger-policed, but they face unfair anger, hostility, and vilification. So, while anger can be justified in the above five senses, we must be wary of privileged people’s tendency to police and pathologize marginalized people’s anger due to cultural stereotypes and experiential gaps. The same applies to angry blame: if someone expresses angry blame in response to, say, a racist microaggression—which may seem innocent when viewed by a White observer—one shouldn’t be too quick to say the response is ‘too strong’. This rebuke in itself is a form of racist blame: the victim of the microaggression is being blamed for being ‘too angry’! In this way, biased evaluations of blame and biased blaming attitudes go together, as both are underpinned by racial stereotypes and sympathy biases. Racial sympathy biases are examples of distorted states that interfere with correct moral reasoning. Seeing that these biases can contaminate blame judgments and evaluations, we need to ask how pervasive these distortions are, and whether they are caused primarily by individuals or collectives. This brings us back to the discussion from the last section: how many people harbour prejudiced sympathy bias? And to what extent are these biases individual problems versus structural issues? As I have already addressed these questions, I will move on to the role of care in blaming interactions. 35.3.2.2 Care Many feminists believe that care plays an essential role in moral reasoning. Margaret Little (1995), for example, argues that care is essential to understanding the moral landscape. She objects to the ‘Enlightenment’ view on which moral reasoning should be impartial and dispassionate, and counters that ‘sometimes truth is better revealed, the landscape most clearly seen, from a position that has been called “loving perception” or “sympathetic thinking”’ (1995: 118). If a person doesn’t care about the right things, she won’t make the right moral judgements. Little offers an example of uncaring perception that, 25 years later, still rings true: A pharmaceutical company marketing a new all-purpose painkiller, for instance, certainly has a very strong desire to maximize sales. Its marketing division, though, will not reliably notice instances of pain: it will reliably notice instances of affluent or insured people’s pain. (Little 1995: 123) This example is topical because there is substantive evidence that people are less attuned to pain in Black people (Forgiarini et al. 2011) and women (Kiesel 2017) than in White people and men, respectively, and this results in Black people and women, who are seen less sympathetically, having worse access to pain medication, sedatives, and certain treatment options. These discrepancies are known as the racial empathy gap and the gender empathy gap. Could caring perception help mitigate these biases? A failure to care, continues Little, prevents us from seeing certain people as responsible subjects, and incites us to dismiss their agency by either silencing them or patronizingly agreeing with them. Without a decent level of caring perception, we don’t attend to people’s pain and try to help. This connects with Cherry’s analysis, which holds that lack of sympathy for disenfranchised groups gives rise to distorted anger evaluations. The racial empathy gap and the gender empathy gap are biases in emotional reasoning that are liable to produce anger policing and gaslighting towards ‘unsympathetic’ groups—those perceived unfavourably. Hence, angry blame voiced by those groups (say, towards a racist doctor or a hospital’s board of directors) is susceptible to policing and silencing. Arguably, care could be an antidote to sympathy biases that skew our anger evaluations. If we see certain groups in an unsympathetic light because of identity prejudice, then we’re more likely to police their angry blame instead of giving it proper uptake. Privileged people should perhaps try to adjust their caring sensitivities to compensate for their susceptibility to prejudice. This prescription is consistent with an ethic of care, which advises us to expand our sympathies to include strangers, or people outside of our field of caring perception (Noddings 1984; 2013). Other feminists worry that women’s caring inclinations put them in a position of subservience, and may make them complicit in their own subordination. Claudia Card, for one, says that care is not necessarily a virtue, but is sometimes an attempt to gain approval from a dominant class. Women’s caring in patriarchal conditions, in particular, may be the result of ‘institutionalized dependence on men for protection against male assault, for employment, promotion, and validation’, or perhaps an effect of what Adrian Rich (1980) calls ‘compulsory heterosexuality’––obligatory participation in a relationship in which women are subordinate (Card 1993: 204). Similarly, Sarah Hoagland (1991), Marilyn Friedman (1993), and Laurence Blum (1988) worry that women’s caring inclinations may exacerbate their subordination to and dependence on men. If women care for men disproportionally, it stands to reason that they will be less inclined to blame men, since blame expresses, not care, but feelings of resentment, anger, and disapproval. Women living in patriarchal conditions, then, may be more inclined to blame themselves and other women compared to men. And men will share the same misogynistic bias because patriarchy creates a general sympathy for men and a general distrust of women. As Beauvoir (1964) points out, women living under patriarchy are seen as a ‘second sex’, and their subordinate status makes them vulnerable to distrust and hostility, especially when they question men’s authority or defy heteropatriarchal norms in other ways. Something that could help mitigate women’s subservience to men is for women to care more for themselves and other women and less for men. Card posits that there is an asymmetry between men’s and women’s caring in that women love men for themselves, but men love women as ‘extensions [of themselves], tools’ (Card 1993: 206). If women could care more for other women, this would perhaps provide a partial solution to sexist biases in the blaming system. Similarly, men should recognize a responsibility to care more for women and less for themselves and other men. Along the same lines, if White people could care less for other White people and more for racialized minorities, this could potentially mitigate the prevalence of racial sympathy bias, anger policing, gaslighting, and racist blaming dispositions rooted in racial stereotypes. What this discussion reveals is that anger and care significantly influence our blaming attitudes. Angry blame can be epistemically, morally, politically, and intrinsically valuable if expressed in the right way and to the right extent. Unfortunately, we tend to misjudge the appropriateness of angry blame when it’s expressed by marginalized people because of sympathy biases that stem from the patriarchal, colonialist, ableist social contract (see especially Pateman 1989 and Mills 1997 on social contract theory). Some feminist critiques suggest that expanding the scope of our care and sympathy could help to mitigate these biases. Feminists have provided some other recommendations on how to remediate our biases. Maria Lugones (1995) suggests that members of privileged groups should engage in ‘world-traveling’, a process of playfully imagining another person’s perspective. Laurence Thomas (1996), however, is sceptical of our ability to envision the experiences of members of other groups, and instead recommends that we defer to the authority of oppressed people to speak about their own experiences. These practices are not mutually exclusive, but could contribute to a comprehensive strategy. By combining ‘world-traveling’ and deference to people’s experiential authority, we position ourselves to value marginalized people’s blame and recognize their moral authority. At the start of this section, I asked whether we should eliminate blame, and whether we can. Since emotional blame can be valuable, it seems as if we shouldn’t try to eliminate it. But we should try to blame people responsibly, and to evaluate people’s blame fairly, by attuning ourselves to distortions in our moral reasoning. This demands that we not only look inwards but also sensitize ourselves to the structural inequalities that give rise to sympathy biases (Jaggar 1989). Feminist moral psychology suggests that ‘world-traveling’, deference to authority, and political analysis may put us in a better position to clearly and caringly perceive the moral landscape and understand who deserves blame, how much blame each person deserves, and whose blame deserves uptake. 35.3.3 Conative theory Conative theories ‘emphasize motivational elements, like desires and intentions, as essential to blame’ (Coates and Tognazzini 2018). Two of the main conative theorists are George Sher and T. M. Scanlon. According to Sher, blame is a judgment of wrongdoing combined with a backwards-looking desire ‘that the person in question not have performed his past bad act’ (2006: 112). One of the objections to this view is that it is too ‘sanitized’ because it strips blame of its negative emotionality (McGeer 2013). Some feminists might agree with something along these lines; namely, they might think that conative theories are stripped of feminine-coded emotionality because of implicit sexism, or that unemotional blame isn’t the most productive kind of blame. In other words, the same feminist arguments that apply to cognitive theory apply here as well. For more specific criticisms, we’ll need to look at the details of conative theories of blame. Scanlon (2008) takes blame to be a judgment that someone has acted in a way that impairs your relationship with them, together with a decision to modify the relationship accordingly—for example, by cutting ties with the person or eschewing the person’s company. The main objection to this view is that it ‘leaves the blame out of blame’ (Wallace 2011), as we can (seemingly) modify our relationships without blaming people, and we can blame people without modifying our relationships. On the first score, Susan Wolf (2011) offers the example of Robert Harris, a serial killer whom one would want to avoid, although (in her books) he isn’t blameworthy in light of his deprived childhood circumstances. On the second score, Wolf gives the example of a hot-headed Italian family whose members blame each other without impairing their family ties. They ‘blame each other’ in the sense that they exchange negative emotional attitudes, but these exchanges don’t affect their relationships with each other. (As an Italian I’m inclined to question the veracity of this description, which has been disputed by Hannikainen et al. 2019, but the ethnicity of the family doesn’t make a difference to the argument.) Feminist discussions of care and anger in some ways lend support to Wolf’s critique, but they also suggest that blame within strongly-bonded families may be mediated by sexist norms. If Claudia Card is right that women love and care for men partly due to institutionalized dependence and compulsory heterosexuality, then women may be disposed to suppress their blaming attitudes towards men for fear of losing male protection and approval. If so, then the heteropatriarchal family would be stable even if women silently blamed their male family members ‘in their hearts’. (That is, there would be blame in the absence of impaired relationships.) Alternatively, one could argue that family relationships are impaired by sexism in ways that aren’t necessarily perceptible to the family—for example, women may be excluded from major decisions due to the patriarchal structure of the family. Such exclusions could, perhaps, count as Scanlonian blame, even if no one in the family sees them as such. That is, the marginalization of women in the family could constitute a kind of Scanlonian blame, if we take Scanlonian blame to encompass tacit, structural exclusions, when no explicit judgment has been made. The notion of blame as a structural as opposed to individual form of relationship modification has dramatic implications for how we understand Scanlonian blame. We could, for example, see racial segregation as a form of implicit, structural blaming of racialized minorities, who are being excluded from full democratic participation by the predominantly White ruling class. Indeed, many examples of systemic oppression, ranging from racial incarceration to ableist hiring discrimination to workplace sexual harassment, could all be interpreted as structural examples of Scanlonian blame. This reading would fit well with feminism’s emphasis on relational agency and the politics of interpersonal relationships. If this revisionary reading is accepted, we need to ask ourselves whether we might always be (implicitly) blaming marginalized groups through our social practices and lifestyle choices. If I move to a suburb created by White flight, am I blaming Black people in a relational-structural sense? If I give men preferential treatment, am I blaming women by marginalizing them? While Scanlonians would certainly agree that these practices may lead to conative blame (e.g. living in a White suburb may predispose me to blame a Black person for going to a local Starbucks), it’s worth considering whether these practices may constitute Scanlonian blame. Perhaps participating in White flight, for example, simply is an act of racist blame. 35.3.4 Functional theory Functional theories don’t identify blame with any particular mental state, but instead define it by its functional role. One popular functional account holds that blame’s role is to protest wrongdoing (Hieronymi 2001; Talbert 2012; McGeer 2013). Thus, if I protest against my local Republican Senator for trying to shut down Planned Parenthood, I’m blaming him. Another popular functional account holds that blame is a contribution to a conversation initiated by a wrongdoer, and it should serve to advance that conversation (McKenna 2012; Duff 1986; Macnamara 2011; 2015a; Fricker 2016). Blame as a contribution to moral conversation typically expresses a demand for an apology, an explanation, or an excuse. One of the main objections to the functional view is that many cases of blame are not overtly expressed or communicated in the context of a conversation or a protest. In some circumstances, voicing blame may be too costly or dangerous. Can a woman blame a sexist boss if protesting against him will get her fired? Can a Black man blame a White police officer if asking for an apology could get him killed? It seems as if oppressed people often aren’t in a position to blame their oppressors in the functional sense due to epistemic injustice and unequal power dynamics in ordinary conversations. But does this mean that they don’t blame them at all? Gary Watson has addressed this sort of worry by saying that blame is merely ‘incipiently communicative’, meaning that, ‘in some elusive sense, [it] is meant to be expressed’ (2011: 328). Macnamara (2015b) proposes that blame is ‘incipiently communicative’ in the sense that it is a message that exists prior to being sent, similar to a syllabus or an email. Blame, then, can reside in the latent disposition to communicate, not merely the overt act of communicating. Elsewhere, I have offered an alternative explanation, which is that blame isn’t always addressed to the oppressor, but is often communicated about the oppressor to a peer (Ciurria 2019). (For example, I can tell my mom that I blame Harvey Weinstein for his sexism even though I’ll never have a conversation with him, and I wouldn’t want to if I could.) Since oppressed people have always shared their grievances about oppression with each other, even going so far as to construct their own ‘underground’ communication networks and ingroup vernaculars so as to avoid detection, they have always had a means of protesting and protecting themselves against oppressors, even if outsiders were deliberately kept out of the loop. If this is right, then we don’t need a theory of ‘incipient blame’ to explain how the oppressed blame their oppressors: they do so overtly in their own communities, often using epistemic resources that they have constructed on their own. The central debates in feminist theory raise some interesting questions for functionalists. According to dominant functional accounts, blame serves to protest wrongdoing or demand a moral response. Most feminists think that both oppressed people and oppressors are likely to have distorted states that interfere with moral reasoning. Internalized patriarchal preferences, for example, might have disposed a woman to vote for Donald Trump in 2020. White ignorance might dispose a White person to demand an apology from a Black family having a barbecue at the park. These distortions shape our judgments of what counts as an offence, and thus of what deserves to be protested and apologized for. Functionalists should be aware of the role of these distortions in ordinary moral reasoning, which emerge from local norms and customs, or what Manuel Vargas (2013; 2018) and Susan Hurley (2011) call the ‘moral ecology’. Above, we discussed ways of counteracting these biases, including ‘world-traveling’, deferral to experiential authority, and political analysis. These methods may help us protest and demand apologies from the right people in the right way. Still, a feminist might think that we should go further than this and reconsider our understanding of the function(s) of blame. If Macalaester Bells is right that an emotion like anger can have multiple functions, and anger (sometimes) plays a role in blame, then perhaps blame, too, can have a plurality of functions. Consistent with this, John Doris has defended a ‘variantist’ account on which blame plays various roles in various circumstances, and thus cannot be reduced to a single function or social value (2015a; 2015b). And I have defended a pluralist account on which blame can serve a variety of emancipatory aims, with the overarching aim of protesting systems of oppression from multiple angles (2019). Perhaps blame can serve such purposes as raising awareness, bearing witness to victims, instigating change, and expressing virtues. If so, then blame shouldn’t be tied down to a single social role or goal. If functionalists are right to think that blame serves to protest wrongdoing and oppression, then we need to consider whether we might have not only a right but a duty to use blame to this end. In this connection, some feminists have argued that members of oppressed groups have a (possibly defeasible) duty to resist their own oppression. Carol Hay (2005) argues that women living under patriarchal oppression have consequentialist and deontic duties to resist their own oppression and make life better for themselves and other women. Feminists also tend to concur that oppressors have a duty to stop oppressing people and support liberation efforts. If there is, in fact, a shared (possibly defeasible) duty to protest oppression, and if blame can be a form of protest, then we may have a shared duty to blame oppressors as a form of protest. The protest view of blame is particularly germane in light of the George Floyd protests, which were, by some estimates, the largest political movement in American history. If blame is a form of protest, then this movement could be seen as a historic collective blaming action. Likewise, if blame demands a moral account or response, then these protests could be interpreted as blame in the communicative sense. So far, philosophers have said little about whether there can be a duty to blame people, or to blame people in a certain way, but the feminist literature on duties of resistance brings these questions to the fore. In a functional sense, we may have a collective duty to blame agents of oppression by protesting and demanding answers and accountability for their behaviour. 35.4 Conclusion I’ve outlined some of the central debates within feminist moral psychology as they pertain to psychological theories of blame, and raised a number of concerns for philosophers working on blame. The main take-away from this chapter is that feminist analyses of the emotions, distorted states, and collective reasoning and responsibility should be taken fully into account by philosophers of blame. In particular, blame theorists should think about the relationship between social inequalities and distorted states; whether distorted states are shared by members of social groups; whether people can be blameworthy for broadly shared and unexceptional ignorance; whether blaming judgments, attitudes, and blame evaluations are unfairly biased against certain groups due to distorted dispositions, emotions, and beliefs; whether ignorance is typically culpable or not; and whether culpability is even a constraint on blame. This chapter also points to fruitful inroads for feminist moral psychologists to enter debates about blame. Feminists can provide unique insights into what blame is and what it ought to be. 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