Abstract
Much has been written lately about cases in which blame of the blameworthy is nonetheless inappropriate because of facts about the blamer. Meddlesome and hypocritical cases are standard examples. Perhaps the matter is none of my business or I am guilty of the same sort of offense, so though the target is surely blameworthy, my blame would be objectionable. In this paper, I defend a novel explanation of what goes wrong with such blame, in a way that draws the cases together. In brief, I argue that blaming is essentially an attentive activity, and that, consequently, meddlesome and hypocritical blamers are attending to the wrong things.
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Notes
By ‘deserve’ I mean to imply no more and no less than that the blameworthy are those that are worthy of blame. This should be common ground for all responsibility theorists, whatever their differences over the further details.
On the standing to blame, and discussion of similar cases, see Bell (2013), Coates & Tognazzini (2013), Cohen (2006), Fritz & Miller (2018), McKiernan (2016), Radzik (2012), Friedman (2013), Todd (forthcoming), Tognazzini & Coates (2016) and Watson (2013). Tackling such cases belongs to the wide realm of the ‘ethics of blame’ (cf. Scanlon 2008).
I take up the standing to blame more directly in King (forthcoming)
I thus depart from Todd (forthcoming), which argues that meddlesome and hypocritical blame are separate problems.
I remain neutral on the exact nature of attention. For discussion of options, see Mole (2017). I rely here on quite general features of attention, ones that any plausible account of its nature should capture, at least for creatures like ourselves.
As a reminder, this doesn’t imply that misdirected attention is all that is ever wrong about such blame.
It also isn’t clear to me that the moral critique of one’s dispositional states doesn’t target the disposition in light of its manifested instances, rather than the disposition alone. We might think being a hothead is problematic because it makes one more likely to be unjustified in one’s anger. The disposition inherits its fault from the reasons against the manifestation. But I take no stand on the matter here, other than to motivate the idea that what’s wrong with blame is plausibly found in the activity of blaming, which involves more than a static attitude but less than overt expression.
On some views of blame, blaming might require occurrent emotional states, like anger or resentment. If I don’t feel the feel associated with the state, I’m not actually blaming. So the claim here is not that attention is sufficient for the activity of blame, but rather that the activity of blaming is sufficient for attending to the wrongdoer in light of their wrongdoing.
My thanks to an anonymous referee for calling on me to clarify this point.
For a similar observation, put to different purposes, see Sommers (2013).
Example taken from McKiernan (2016).
This way of putting it also opens up the possibility of a mismatch between how we conceive of someone’s centrality and their actual centrality to our lives. I set this complication aside, though I think we should take actual centrality to be more important than what’s perceived to be the case (though the latter can certainly influence the former).
For a view of responsibility and blame predicated on the normative role of our relationships, see Scanlon (2008). While I don’t adopt the full specifics of his view, I am sympathetic to many points he makes.
For those familiar with Google’s social networking apparatus, it reflected some of the model’s intuitive appeal as well as its limitations.
After incorporating this model into the paper, I came across an op-ed advising similar norms, though without explanation, for those at varying distances from someone going through a medical or legal crisis (Silk 2013). The authors, also drawing upon a concentric circle model (referring to it as the ‘Ring Theory’ of kvetching), claim that you are permitted to complain outward but only offer support inward. I take no stand on their pronouncements, except to insist that (as I argue here) whether you are permitted to complain in either direction plausibly depends on additional factors beyond personal relationships, as it is with blaming as well.
In general, there are plausibly a range of reasons that are all connected to the value intimate relationships bestow in all the various ways they do.
To the extent that we justifiably expect our luncheon conversations to be private there may be additional reasons that restaurant staff have to ignore them.
Though I think it’s fair to say we are often nosier than we let on.
Alternatively, as discussed earlier regarding Clifford’s habits of attention, passing thoughts and notations may violate no norm of attention, especially if dismissed in turn.
One might think at this point that the waiter only meddles if matters aren’t serious enough. That is, if the couple at the table is discussing a terrorist plot or a hastily committed crime, those things are his business in virtue of their seriousness. I’m inclined to disagree, and hold fast to the idea that what counts as meddling is largely dictated by the relationships involved. Be that as it may, nothing in my argument hangs on this point. If one prefers, one can assume that meddling as a wrong simply disappears in the face of serious moral matters, rather than being outweighed by them. It will still be true that blamers in such cases both (a) have more reason to attend than to ignore and (b) blame appropriately.
[Note withheld for blind review].
Though it strikes me that we tend to get more exercised about hypocrisy in the public sphere than the private. This may be partially a function of the additional reasons we have within our private relationships to understand and accept one another, and partially a function of the ways in which public hypocrisy often involves more serious overt blaming behavior.
Intuitions about whether specific cases count as instances of hypocrisy may vary. Since I’m interested in the moral inappropriateness of blame generally, I’m prepared to treat hypocrisy quite liberally. Thus, it doesn’t really matter whether particular cases count as hypocrisy in some particular sense so long as they are worth explaining alongside other paradigmatic cases.
See Herstein (2017) for a discussion of Erdogan and hypocrisy.
As Wallace (2010) notes, ‘hypocrisy’ has its etymological roots in ‘play-acting’ (308).
Todd (forthcoming) makes a similar point in observing that blame can be hypocritical even when directed at fictional characters (with whom, of course, one cannot interact).
Here I echo similar points made by Wallace (2010), by which I’ve been influenced. He argues that hypocritical blamers have a “practical commitment to critical self-scrutiny” (326), so we agree that such blamers are flouting some moral demand to clean up their own act. But Wallace draws no general connections between hypocrisy and other forms of problematic blame, as is part of my aim here.
Bell (2013) notes that a blamer’s familiarity with the wrongdoing in question can shed additional light on the matter or give the criticism extra weight. One’s own past misdeeds, then, may actually put one in a better position to blame, at least when properly incorporated into one’s other moral activities.
Wallace raises a similar point regarding inconsistency of attitudes and behavior (2010, 309–311). To reiterate from the previous section on meddling: I treat ‘activities’ more broadly than the natural reading of ‘behavior’. Thus, attending to something counts as an activity; it’s something one engages in, in a way that distinguishes it from dispositional states. One can blame someone only dispositionally, since currently one feels no anger or resentment. Such blame is not an activity, on my use of the term. If one, however, is blaming another, and thus attending to their wrongdoing, they’re engaged in an activity of blaming, even if they perform no overt blaming actions.
They believe their account leaves open whether two equally hypocritical blamers could nonetheless differ in terms of the fault manifested in their blame (130, No.29), but it is entirely opaque how their view might manage that distinction.
One could be disposed to blame others for some norm violation without being disposed to blame a particular person for that norm violation. So, it seems A could have the relevant differential blaming disposition without counting as blaming B, insofar as A is not disposed to blame B at all (perhaps in an infatuated A’s eyes B can do no wrong). This is a separate concern from the fact that on their view there is no difference between a hypocritical blamer (one who doesn’t blame oneself) and an inconsistent one (who blames one person but not another for the same infraction).
Anyone who’s lived with someone who tended to criticize for domestic habits they routinely exhibited, or even ones of similar scale, will recognize the significance of non-moral hypocrisy.
Matthew 7:1–5.
My thanks to Bénédicte Veillet for noting this aspect of the case. However, given the massive moral faults of the despot, I’m inclined to think such reasons are likely to be outweighed. Intuitions may differ.
I have throughout remained neutral on the nature of blame, as I think it’s a distraction from the matter at hand. One could insist that blame must involve “angry” attitudes, and so deny that a softened response still counts. This makes no difference to my argument here. I set the scope in terms of familiar cases of meddlesome and hypocritical blame, treating blame rather broadly. Those who adopt a narrower view of blame are free to translate my position to apply to meddlesome and hypocritical responses to the blameworthy. I’ll simply note that I think overly narrow characterizations of blame are implausible, given the vast variety of our responses to the blameworthy, all of which seem to me perfectly ordinary examples of blaming another.
My own examples are not immune to this charge—feel free to make your own hypocrisy joke.
For a skeptical consideration of the possibilities, see King (forthcoming).
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to Robert Hughes, Joshua May, Michael McKenna, Andrew Morgan, Mark Schroeder, Seana Shiffrin, Angela Smith, Sabine Tsuruda, Bénédicte Veillet, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal, for their helpful written comments. I'd also like to thank the audiences at Yale and UCLA, especially Herbert Morris for his encouragement.
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King, M. Attending to blame. Philos Stud 177, 1423–1439 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01260-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01260-w