Abstract
An agent A blames B hypocritically for violating a moral norm N if and only if: (i) A is likewise blameworthy for violating N, and (ii) A is not disposed to blame herself for violating N. Normally, an assertion involving blame is retracted following the objection that (i) and (ii) hold. I discuss two prima facie explanations for such a withdrawal: that the objection hampers the speaker’s assertoric authority, rendering (i) and (ii) the necessary condition to assert, and that the joint condition is, instead, merely a regulative rule. Having shown that the former option is too revisory as it requires reformulation of all normative accounts of assertion on the table, and the latter false, I proceed to argue that (i) and (ii) do not target assertions to begin with. An assertion involving blame is, instead, a clear case of a double speech act: after arguing for this claim, I proceed to show that qua assertion, the act is correct given one’s preferred normative account, whereas it is incorrect qua blaming, as in order to perform such an act, the speaker needs to satisfy the conditions (i) and (ii).
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Notes
Of course, the same applies to all relevantly similar moral wrongdoings. I will not attempt to cash out the sense of “relevantly similar” as it is not needed for the purposes of the paper.
I address this issue in Section 3.
I use “correct” interchangeably with other normative adjectives found in the literature such as “proper” or “warranted”.
The challenged speaker need not withhold, however: instead, she may hedge the assertion in the relevant way (e.g. “As far as I remember, p”, “According to the NY Times, p” etc.). Note that the moral is unchanged: the speaker cannot maintain the original assertion, as she lacks the authority to do so.
Namely, in addition to its existing norm (e.g. that one should assert that p only if the condition C is satisfied), the theories should add the clause that whenever p constitutes a blame, one should assert that p only if the further condition of Non-Hypocrisy holds.
Not all regulative norms allow for the analogous objection: wittiness is similarly viewed as a regulative norm, although the reply “Don’t say that! It’s not witty” is rarely an objection.
This kind of counterexample doesn’t generalize. Assuming that relevance is another regulative norm, the counterpart reply “I don’t care if it’s irrelevant to say p. It is still true to say p.” normally wouldn’t work. Still, Non-Hypocrisy is even more clearly unlike the relevance norm, than it is unlike the politeness rule: although saying that p may become relevant during the same conversation, a failure to comply with Non- Hypocrisy cannot change.
Austin (1962:83) distinguishes approving of from approving, noting that only the former passes the test for being an explicit performative.
Although a necessary condition, it is not its defining feature. One seems susceptible to the same type of objection if making a general moral claims. Thus, asserting that “Hiding one’s taxable activities is morally wrong” is likely to be met with the challenge along the lines of (2): “You can’t say that. You don’t pay the taxes yourself”. This positions the act of blaming in a wider group of speech acts with the moral content, being distinguished insofar as it addresses someone in particular. Thanks to Manuel García-Carpintero for helpful discussion on this point.
One may have the conflicting intuition, however, and insist that in uttering (7) “I blame you for stealing a record”, one does not assert that she blames one for stealing the record, but instead only succeeds in placing a blame. Jary’s (2007) argument that assertions are never made in the performative case can be used to uphold such an intuition. However, observe that (7) presents the so-called “minimal context” as it lacks “hereby” (indeed, “I hereby blame you” doesn't sound as natural as “I hereby promise/order/censure”) which, although odd-sounding, could yield more robust intuitions on the nature of the speech act performed. I side with García-Carpintero (2013:7) in that such minimal contexts are too theoretical and that we can’t rely on the ordinary speaker's intuitions in the mentioned cases.
Yet, the argument shouldn’t depend on this possibility: promises, by means of example, always supervene on assertions in the exact same way — whether prefixed (“I promise”, “I blame”) or not, whatever one’s favored account predicts of one illocutionary act, will predict of the other as well.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Manuel García-Carpintero, Javier González de Prado Salas, Anton Markoč and Neri Marsili for their comments and helpful discussion. The previous version of the paper was presented at the workshop "Assertion, norms and effects" held at the University of Trieste. Many thanks to the organizers and the audience for their feedback.
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Milić, I. Hypocritical Blame: A Question for the Normative Accounts of Assertion. Philosophia 48, 1543–1549 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00167-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00167-9