Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
Draft – Please cite published version
Abstract:
This paper identifies why hypocrites lack the standing to blame others for certain wrongs. I
first examine previous analyses of ‘standing’, and note these attempts all centre around the
idea of entitlement. I then argue that thinking of standing to blame as a purely moral
entitlement faces numerous problems. By examining how the concept of standing is used in
other contexts, I argue that we should think of standing to blame in partly metaphysical
terms. That is, we should think of it as a status which grants agents the ability to do certain
things. Using Darwall’s (2006) account of second-personal obligations, I argue that we
should think of blame as expressing demands. For these demands to impose obligations on
others, however, we must first have the authority to make these demands. I argue that agents
who lack standing to blame lack the authority to blame, and thus lack the ability to impose
second-personal obligations on others by making these demands. They lack this authority
because they fail to accept other people’s second-personal authority to make similar demands
on them.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Luke Russell, Caroline West, Dana Nelkin, Isabelle
Wentworth, Hannah Tierney, Daphne Brandenburg, and David Shoemaker for helpful
comments on earlier drafts. Thanks especially to two very helpful anonymous reviewers at
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly who helped flesh out and improve the arguments here.
Thanks also to audiences at the 2019 Australasian Association of Philosophy conference held
at the University of Wollongong.
Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
1.
Introduction
Philosophers writing on moral responsibility have spent much time examining what
conditions wrongdoers must meet to count as appropriate targets of blame. Recently,
attention has shifted to whether blamers must also meet certain conditions before their blame
is appropriate. The idea is that would-be blamers must first meet certain conditions in order
to possess standing to blame.
Multiple philosophers have recently argued that hypocrites lack the standing to blame
wrongdoers for certain wrongs (Coates & Tognazzini, 2013; Duff, 2010; Friedman, 2013;
Fritz & Miller, 2018; Isserow & Klein, 2017; Roadevin, 2018; Todd, 2019; Wallace, 2010).
Hypocritical blaming is often thought to evince some kind of moral fault, even if the person
being blamed is indeed culpable. If Shaun and Katia both cheat on their spouses, Shaun can
judge that Katia has done something wrong. Shaun can think that Katia has a callous
character, and he can inform Katia there are strong moral reasons to feel remorse. Blame,
however, is off the table. If Shaun were to openly rebuke Katia, Katia – as morally flawed as
she is – is within her rights to say, ‘Who are you to blame me?’ or ‘Look who’s talking!’ This
response acknowledges the speaker has committed a wrong and that certain responses from
the moral community are appropriate, but denies that the hypocrite is in any position to
blame.
The problem is that we currently lack any account of hypocrisy which both provides a
plausible explanation for why hypocrites lack the standing to blame, and avoids generating
unintuitive assessments regarding key thought experiments. In trying to identify why
hypocrites lack the standing to blame, existing accounts take a similar approach. They
proceed by first investigating what is objectionable about hypocrisy, and try to use this to
thereby explain why hypocrites lack the standing to blame. In this paper, I want to take a
different approach. I want to start by examining standing, and from there work towards an
account of why hypocrites lack the standing to blame. I believe this is necessary, because
much of the existing literature seems to be appealing to a vague notion of standing. Since
‘hypocrites losing their standing to blame’ is our explanandum, having a mistaken conception
of ‘standing’ risks setting philosophers on the wrong path in their search for an explanation.
Let me briefly note that when I say that hypocrites lack the standing to blame, this doesn’t
mean that they lack the standing to blame all wrongdoers for any wrong whatsoever. An
adulterer clearly retains his standing to blame murderers. However, it is reasonable to ask
what kinds of wrongs hypocrites lack the standing to blame others for committing, and how
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hypocrites can regain their standing to blame. For now, it will suffice to focus on intuitively
paradigmatic cases of hypocritical blame. These are cases where an agent culpably commits a
wrong, does not atone or is not apologetic for this, and blames a second agent for
committing a relevantly similar wrong for relevantly similar reasons. Such agents usually lack
the standing to blame similar wrongdoers, and are open to pejorative charges of hypocrisy if
they blame.
This paper proceeds as follows. In §2 I examine how the term ‘standing’ is used in a
variety of contexts, noting that most philosophers writing on hypocrisy have taken standing
to be a kind of moral entitlement. I argue that thinking of standing to blame as a moral
entitlement faces problems, and these cannot be remedied by making reference to other,
better understood concepts such as appropriateness, desert, or fairness. The mistake is
caused by thinking of standing in exclusively moral terms, and we should instead think of
standing as a status which grants agents the ability to do certain things. Using Darwall’s
account of second-personal obligations, in §3 I argue that we should think of blame as
expressing second-personal demands. For these demands to in fact impose obligations on
others, however, it must be the case that we have the authority to make these demands.
Agents who lack standing to blame lack the authority and thus ability to exercise the
normative power we normally exercise in making these demands. Hypocrites in particular
lack this authority because they do not accept other people’s second-personal authority to
make similar demands on them. In §4–5 I show that this account is able to avoid a number
of problems other accounts of hypocrisy face, while retaining their strengths.
2. What is Standing?
To get clearer about different senses of standing, let’s briefly look at how the concept has
been used in a range of contexts.
2.1 Standing and Entitlements to Blame
‘Standing’ was originally understood as a legal notion, referring to a status granted to certain
citizens. Citizens who wish to bring a lawsuit to court must have the ‘standing’ to do so,
which means that they (or someone they are representing) have been (or are at risk of being)
negatively affected by the events in the case (Lujan vs. Defenders of Wildlife, 1992) . In short,
one has standing if one is entitled to bring a case to court, with this entitlement being granted
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by the legal system. One retains this standing even if they choose not to bring the case to
court.
This language was then picked up in the forgiveness literature, in discussions over who is
entitled to forgive. A key question for philosophers in this domain concerns under what
conditions forgiveness has actually taken place. Many philosophers argue that only victims
have the standing to forgive (Murphy & Hampton, 1990; Zaragoza, 2012; cf. Pettigrove,
2009; Radzik, 2010). These philosophers argue that if I am not the victim (or at least closely
related), even if I forswear my resentment and declare I have forgiven the perpetrator,
forgiveness will not have taken place. Forgiveness is simply not something I am able to do.
Notice that in each of these contexts, the conception of standing at issue is metaphysical
standing. Agents are entitled to forgive or sue, in the sense that they are able to forgive or
bring a case to court if they so choose. They have been granted an ability to do something in
virtue of meeting certain conditions. It seems that this sense of standing can’t be what we are
investigating when examining hypocrisy, since hypocrites clearly can blame.1 Additionally,
there are important differences between the legal and moral cases. For example, third parties
who are not direct victims cannot bring cases to court, but third parties are often entitled to
blame, as Friedman (2013) points out.
The language of entitlements then gets used in the moral domain, and this is where some
lack of clarity with our terms risks occurring. When ϕ-ing is morally impermissible, we say
that agents are not entitled to ϕ, even though they are physically or metaphysically capable of
ϕ-ing. To say ϕ-ing is morally impermissible is to say an agent is not entitled to ϕ by morality,
or that they are unable to ϕ in such a way that conforms with the requirements of morality.
The language of moral entitlement is used by numerous philosophers when they briefly
reference standing to blame. For example, Coates and Tognazzini (2012, 2013) describe
standing as concerning whether a wrong is within the blamer’s “jurisdiction” (2012, p. 203)
or whether certain “propriety conditions” obtain (2013, p. 17). Friedman (2013) takes the
concept to refer to whether a blamer is “entitled” to have their blame taken seriously by the
moral community (p. 278). King (2015) writes that standing “enables one to blame with
license or justification” and without it, blame is “morally problematic” (p. 1–2). Scanlon
Cohen (2006) claims that hypocrites literally cannot perform the speech act of condemning,
but doesn’t offer any sustained argument for this, and seems to have not received any
support from other philosophers. I argue below that we shouldn’t dismiss thinking of
standing to blame in this way.
1
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(2008) describes hypocrites as being “not in a position” to blame (p. 137). However, none of
these philosophers specify how to understand these terms in sufficient detail, and Smith
(2007) doesn’t use any other descriptors to explain what standing to blame is at all.
Thinking of standing to blame as an entitlement to blame seems very intuitive. But this
sort of terminology comes with a risk. Since we’re already not entitled to act in morally
impermissible ways, thinking of standing as an entitlement risks not doing any work when we
try to explain why hypocrites lack the standing to blame. If we ask, ‘Is it permissible for
Shaun to blame Katia?’ the answer, ‘Shaun’s blame would be morally impermissible because
he is a hypocrite, and therefore lacks standing to blame’ may be equivalent to ‘Shaun’s blame
would be morally impermissible because he is a hypocrite, and his blame is therefore morally
impermissible’. We thus need some further story about how saying an agent lacks standing to
blame is different to saying it is simply all-things-considered morally impermissible for that
agent to blame. Without such a story, we’d lack the standing to blame whenever blaming
would result in terrible consequences overall. We would also still lack an answer to why
hypocrites lack the standing to blame, which was our initial task.
2.2 Standing and Appropriate Blame
If we want our concept of standing do some explanatory work, our understanding of this
‘entitlement’ to blame must refer to something other than all-things-considered moral
impermissibility. A natural alternative answer is to think about appropriateness. Questions over
whether an agent has standing qua entitlement to blame would thus refer to questions about
whether an agent’s blame is appropriate. In favour of this approach, we could point to the
fact that it does seem apt to describe hypocritical blame as inappropriate, and that following
Wallace (1994) much of the philosophical literature on moral responsibility has centred
around when blame and the reactive attitudes are appropriate.
Thinking of standingless blame as a kind of inappropriate blame is initially promising, in
that this would mean we’d successfully distinguished it from blame which is all-thingsconsidered morally impermissible. Almost all philosophers writing on moral responsibility
accept that whether we should blame someone, all-things-considered, is a different question
to whether blame is appropriate. In particular, consequentialist considerations can make
blaming someone wrong, even if that person is an appropriate target of blame. If blaming
someone innocent was the only way avoid some terrible outcome, then you ought to blame
them. Blame here would be inappropriate, but all-things-considered justified. Conversely, if
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someone culpably commits a minor wrong, but blaming them would make them suicidal,
then blame would be appropriate, but not all-things-considered justified.
However, another problem arises here. In investigating what it means for blame to be
appropriate, philosophers have generally focused on the conditions under which someone is
an appropriate target of blame in virtue of their wrongdoing. Here, then, is a challenge to the
proposal that questions about standing to blame concern whether it is appropriate for an
agent to blame: what reason do we have to think that blaming when one lacks standing is
inappropriate in the same way that blaming the innocent is inappropriate? What relevant
feature do these differing cases share which makes blame inappropriate in both instances?
The fact that an agent lacks standing to blame doesn’t seem like the general kinds of
consequentialist considerations identified above which can make blame unjustified. But we
can’t conclude from this fact alone that blaming when one lacks standing is therefore
inappropriate in the way that blaming the innocent is inappropriate.
For example, Pereboom (2014) and Nelkin (2016) interpret the claim that S is an
appropriate target of blame to mean that S is a deserving target of blame. This doesn’t seem to
generate any obvious explanation for how hypocrites could lack the standing to blame, since
hypocritical blame still gives wrongdoers what they deserve.2 Wallace (1994) interprets the
claim that S is an appropriate target of blame to mean that it would be fair to blame S. This
has some appeal, because it does seem like hypocrites treat the people they blame unfairly.
But there are a number of ways to unfairly blame, without this undermining one’s standing to
blame. Suppose I blame you, but fail to blame another colleague for a similar wrong. I treat
One could perhaps argue that certain agents are not entitled to mete out deserved
responses, by making an analogy with how vigilantes are not entitled to punish lawbreakers.
A difficulty with this approach concerns the differences between the legal and moral cases.
Judges, police and lawmakers are granted entitlements in virtue of having gone through
certain processes and conventions, and upholding the law serves a number of different
functions to morality. In contrast, blaming wrongdoers is something that agents in the moral
community seem to have a default entitlement to.
2
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you unfairly in blaming you, but I haven’t thereby lost my entitlement to blame you
altogether.3
One might be motivated to interpret ‘appropriateness’ as concerning the ethics of
expressing blame, after it has already been determined that an agent is blameworthy.4 Blame
often seems ‘inappropriate’ if it is disproportionately strong compared to the wrong
committed, expressed when one lacks sufficient evidence of wrongdoing, applied
inconsistently (Friedman, 2013), targets a minor wrong that is ‘none of your business’ (Smith,
2007), or expressed when the wrongdoer has suffered enough already. Numerous factors
seem to make expressing blaming inappropriate in some sense, and it could be that
hypocritical blame is another factor on this list.
A few considerations count against thinking of hypocrisy as being inappropriate in the
same way that blaming too strongly or on insufficient evidence is inappropriate. First, taking
such an approach doesn’t by itself answer why hypocritical blame is inappropriate. We still
need some further story, and it isn’t clear we can find one by looking for some shared
property with these other conditions that putatively undermine standing. This is because the
inappropriateness of blame in these other conditions seems to be explained by more general
pro tanto obligations we have to each other. We generally ought to respect people’s privacy,
treat people fairly, and take reasonable precautions against imposing costs on the
undeserving.
Second, this approach makes it puzzling why existing philosophical work on standing to
blame focuses so much on hypocrisy, and why these other putative means of losing standing
to blame aren’t receiving more attention. This seems conspicuously tied to the fact that our
moral practices treat hypocrisy as far more significant than other ways in which people blame
objectionably. We have religious and cultural admonitions against ‘throwing stones in glass
houses’, ‘casting the first stone’, and ‘ignoring the mote in one’s eye while pointing out the
One could perhaps argue that they were using ‘fairness’ in a non-interpersonal sense, i.e. (1)
an agent is an appropriate target of blame if and only if it is fair to blame them given only the
agent’s blameworthiness, not (2) an agent is an appropriate target of blame it is fair to blame
them given the agent’s blameworthiness and the blameworthiness of other agents. Setting
aside the worry that insofar as it’s fairness we care about, (1)’s exclusion of other agents seems
ad hoc, Nelkin (2016) points out that (1) looks identical to the claim that agents are
appropriate targets of blame if and only if they are deserving of blame.
4 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point. Presumably, on this approach, questions
of whether an agent is blameworthy would instead be described as concerning whether the
agent is a fitting target of blame (cf. Nelkin, 2016).
3
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speck in others’ eyes’ (Marvin, 1922). People who blame without sufficient evidence display a
moral fault, but only hypocrites were given a special place in Dante’s eighth circle of hell
(Alighieri, 2003).
Finally, this approach leaves us wondering why hypocritical blame gives its targets a
distinct complaint that other kinds of objectionable blame do not. If Katia accuses Shaun of
cheating when she lacks sufficient evidence of this, perhaps she is open to a charge of having
given insufficient consideration to Shaun’s interests, since her evidence suggests that she will
be blaming someone innocent. But Shaun gains an additional kind of complaint against
Katia’s blame if Katia has also been cheating. Blaming when one lacks sufficient evidence is a
fault, but it is a very different fault to that displayed by hypocrites, which we react to in a
particular way. As noted earlier, philosophers investigating hypocrisy take the ‘Who are you to
blame me?’ and ‘Look who’s talking!’ responses to be central to our inquiry (Bell, 2013;
Friedman, 2013; Fritz & Miller, 2018). Todd (2019, p. 349) notes that there seems to be
“something further” at issue when it comes to hypocritical blame which is absent when we
tell people to (say) ‘mind your own business’. The upshot of all this is that hypocritical blame
seems to be objectionable in a distinctive kind of way, and simply pointing to other ways in
which blame can be inappropriate is not a satisfying explanation for why hypocrisy
undermines standing to blame.
2.3 Standing and Permission to Exclude Reasons
One last attempt at outlining the nature of standing to blame begins by examining reasons
for action. Herstein (2017) argues that to say an agent lacks standing is to say that we can
permissibly exclude the reasons the agent gives us with their directives. For example, imagine an
adult woman being asked by her parents to stop smoking. Given their relationship, this
request is a valid directive. The request is itself a source of a reasons to stop smoking, in
addition to those reasons she already possessed. But if her parents are also smokers, Herstein
argues that it is permissible for the daughter to exclude this reason from her deliberations, in
a way that it would not be permissible were the parents not smokers. Directive-based reasons
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can be permissibly excluded when the directing agent has committed a similar wrong, lacks a
stake in the matter, or lacks a certain status.5
There are a few reasons this account of hypocrisy and standing is unsatisfying for our
task. Herstein is only attempting to describe the general structure of permissible exclusion,
and has no account of when directives are valid or invalid (i.e. when directives actually create
reasons). He also has no explanation for why someone’s prior wrongdoing is the sort of
thing which makes it permissible to exclude the reasons their directives give us.
These questions aside, an important problem is that the account of directives and reasonexcluding has difficulty generalising to instances of hypocritical blame. Herstein argues that
when we permissibly exclude a directive-based reason, in many cases we still incur derivative
obligations to do the next best thing. For example, even if the daughter can permissibly
exclude the reasons that her parent’s request to stop smoking gives her, she still gains reasons
to smoke less unhealthy cigarettes, or to not smoke in front of her parents. It seems unclear
how such a ‘trace’ of a reason remains in paradigmatic instances of hypocritical blame. If it is
permissible for me to dismiss a hypocrite’s blame, what exactly is the ‘next best thing’ that I
morally ought to do in response to their blame instead? Additionally, a permissible exclusion
account leaves us wondering why hypocritical blame is objectionable. If the reasons created
by hypocritical blame can be permissibly excluded, and the recipient of the blame can simply
ignore these, then it is unclear what exactly the hypocrite has done that is objectionable.
Even if the recipient does act on the reason given to them by the hypocrite’s directive, the
directive isn’t thereby made unobjectionable, because it would remain appropriate for third
parties to object to the hypocrite’s blaming.
Allow me to summarise my argument so far, and the puzzle we currently face. Agents
who lack the standing to blame due to hypocrisy lack an entitlement to blame in some sense.
But they seem to lack this entitlement in a way that is different to the way that agents lack an
entitlement to blame the innocent, the way they lack an entitlement to blame when
consequentialist considerations make blaming all-things-considered unjustified, and the way
that they lack an entitlement to blame in the absence of sufficient evidence, or when they do
It also seems unclear whether there is a difference between matters that one lacks a stake in,
and matters in which one lacks a certain status. Not having a stake in a matter just is a certain
kind of status that agents can lack, evidenced by the fact that Herstein describes both kinds
of agents as ‘outsiders’ (p. 3111–3112). Both seem to be instances of a single condition
against blaming when a matter is ‘none of our business’.
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not have a stake in the matter. If standingless blame is simply all-things-considered
unjustified blame, then our concept of ‘standing’ doesn’t do any explanatory work. If
standingless blame is thought to be a kind of inappropriate blame, this needs further
explanation, because the appropriateness of blame is traditionally thought to depend on
whether a wrongdoer is blameworthy, i.e. a culpable wrongdoer. If we instead interpret the
appropriateness at issue to concern the expression of blame to culpable wrongdoers, we still
lack any explanation for why hypocritical blame is inappropriate. We also seem unable to
account for why expressing hypocritical blame seems distinctly objectionable compared to
other kinds of objectionable expressed blame. And without any answer for why hypocrites
lack the standing to blame, we may have to conclude that standingless blame is, in fact, not
objectionable at all. This would mean that our ‘Who are you to blame me?’ responses aren’t
tracking anything particularly morally significant.6
2.4 Standing and Normative Powers
Trying to explain why hypocrites lack the standing to blame by thinking about the nature of
standing has been unsuccessful. Because of this, I believe we should take a different
approach. I think that the lack of a solution thus far stems from the fact that all parties to
this debate are thinking of standing to blame qua entitlement to blame in exclusively moral
terms. Recall that it seemed like standing to blame couldn’t be thought of similarly to how
we use the term ‘standing’ in other domains, because these other domains concerned an
ability (e.g. to sue and to forgive), and hypocrites clearly do have the ability to blame. I
believe a promising account can be found by reconsidering this reasoning, and thinking of
standing to blame in the same way we think of other kinds of standing: as a status which
gives agents certain abilities.
My proposed answer comes from noticing two things in the previous discussion. First,
notice that talk about metaphysical standing to ϕ readily lends itself to discussions regarding
certain kinds of actions, namely consenting, ordering, promising, sentencing and pardoning.
It sounds intelligible to say that I lack the standing to promise or consent on behalf of other
Bell (2013) does argue that hypocritical blame isn’t inappropriate, but she takes
‘appropriate’ to simply mean fitting and serving one of blame’s numerous aims (e.g. marking
impairments in relationships). Since hypocritical blame does these things, she challenges
others to explain why hypocrites lack the standing to blame. However, this account uses
‘appropriate’ in a way different to most other philosophers, as Fritz and Miller (2018) note.
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agents. A notable exception is parents, who are able to consent on behalf of their children,
having this entitlement in virtue of their relationship and because we typically take parents to
be best placed to act in their children’s interests (Buchanan & Brock, 1989). Parents have the
standing to consent to their child being treated in certain ways (within limits) and strangers
lack such standing. Parents are also able to order and impose duties on their children. Again,
notice that the standing here is an ability that agents can exercise. Strangers simply are not
able to consent to having someone else’s child receive invasive surgical treatment if they are
not suitably related to that child.
The second thing worth noting is that these abilities which lend themselves to talk of
metaphysical standing all seem to be normative powers. Pardoning, consenting, ordering,
promising, forgiving, and sentencing are all things we do which change others’ normative
situation in particular ways. When one has been pardoned, one no longer has any obligation
to atone, and others no longer have the right to punish. When one consents, one waives or
removes certain duties other agents have. When one orders, one imposes obligations on
others. When one promises, one imposes obligations on one’s self, and makes it appropriate
for others to blame them for violating those obligations. When one sentences, one makes
certain forms of institutional treatment legal. Each of these actions are normative powers
that agents can possess or acquire.7 The stranger who can’t consent on my behalf is simply
not able to remove other people’s duties to not treat me in certain ways.
This neat and unified picture of standing across a number of domains suggests that the
standing at issue regarding hypocrisy could also concern normative powers. To say that
hypocrites lack the ‘standing to blame’ would thus be a bit misleading. Though hypocrites are
able to blame, they cannot exercise the normative power that agents ordinarily exercise in
blaming.
Though on Owens’s (2012) account forgiveness isn’t strictly a ‘power’ because it may not
occur through will alone, he accepts that agents have the capacity to forgive and thereby
change others’ normative situation (p. 50–56). This is all that is needed for my account.
Nelkin (2013) and Warmke (2015) argue that forgiving can release wrongdoers from certain
kinds of personal obligations, and certain attitudes or treatment which were previously
permissible (e.g. resentment) can become impermissible or inappropriate. While I think there
are at least some cases where forgiving means it would be wrong to continue treat
perpetrators in certain ways, a number of philosophers have argued that one can forgive a
wrongdoer while continuing to punish them (Allais, 2008; Garrad & McNaughton, 2011;
Pettigrove, 2012; Russell, 2016).
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What might this normative power be? A common refrain amongst philosophers is that
blame expresses demands, and that in blaming we are holding wrongdoers answerable to us.
I believe the answer comes from realising that demands are things which require authority to
be made, and this is what previous attempts to explain why hypocrites lack the standing to
blame have been circling around. By using Darwall’s (2006) account of second-personal
authority, I believe we can develop a neat and unified answer to why hypocrites lack the
standing to blame.
3. Second-Personal Authority
To understand Darwall’s account of authority, we first need to understand his broader
account of second-personal reasons and obligations. Darwall argues that there are two
different kinds of moral obligations or moral reasons for action. Suppose you are standing
on my foot, hurting me. I could try to give you a reason to remove your foot by getting you
to feel sympathy, to see my being in pain as bad. But importantly, on this approach, I
wouldn’t be so much addressing the reason to you as merely pointing out that it already
existed. The reason I give you by making this kind of address is not primarily about you qua
the agent causing me pain. It would only be a general sort of reason, which could be pointed
out to anyone in a position to reduce the amount of pain in the world by anyone aware of
that pain.
The second way that I can get you to take your foot off mine is by addressing to you a
(purportedly valid) demand. I can demand this as the person whose foot you are stepping on,
or as a member of the moral community, and this demand would concern your relations to
me qua the person you are hurting. In making this demand, I am giving you a secondpersonal reason, a reason “whose validity depends on presupposed authority and
accountability relations between persons and, therefore, on the possibility of the reason’s
being addressed person-to-person” (2006, p. 8). According to Darwall, these second-personal
reasons are at the heart of our moral responsibility practices. When we blame people, we
blame them by making second-personal demands of them. Additionally, since we blame
people for failing to treat us in certain ways we have a right to expect, the obligations
wrongdoers violate are also second-personal in nature. They are obligations to us.
In directing agents to comply with our second-personal demands, we want them to act for
certain reasons. We don’t want them to merely act out of fear of punishment. Instead, we
want the agent to recognise the legitimacy of the demand, and direct their will to comply
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with that demand because they respect our demand is legitimate. Respecting these demands
is the way in which the agent treats us as one of Rawls’ (1985) “self-originating sources of
valid claims” (p. 242). My status as a being with dignity is what grounds my authority to
make demands of you to treat me in certain ways. And in demanding that you treat me a
certain way, I am demanding that you do so precisely because I am a being with dignity.
Darwall argues that having the authority to make moral demands is a ‘normative felicity
condition’ on such demands being legitimate, analogous to the felicity conditions Austin
(1962) argued a speech act needs to succeed. Normative felicity conditions must be met in
order for the demands to be successful; that is, for those demands to in fact create reasons or
obligations for addressee of those demands. That the blamer has the authority to make these
demands is the main condition needed for such demands to be successful. Note that this
authority is not a de facto authority granted by convention, but a de jure authority granted by
morality. If I demand that you, a stranger, give me ten push ups for instance, then my
demand is infelicitous because I do not have the authority to make such a demand. If I
demand for you to take your foot off mine, my demand is successful because I do possess
such an authority and so you have no right to object to my demand.8
Additional normative felicity conditions also exist. A key insight from Darwall is that
when we hold someone accountable by making second-personal demands, we presuppose
and are thereby committed to a number of things. First, we presuppose that the other person
is free and rational, that they have the capacity to recognise and comply with such demands
qua demands. We presuppose that they have the capacity to direct their will in the required
way, and to hold themselves responsible for wrongdoing through self-blame. In blaming, we
also presuppose that these demands are the kinds of demands that we have the authority to
make, because we are beings with dignity. Note that we make these presuppositions, and are
In an unpublished manuscript, Tognazzini (ms) takes hypocrites to lack the authority to
address second-personal reasons, but doesn’t investigate where this authority comes from,
and thus doesn’t explain how something about an agent’s prior wrongdoing can undermine
this authority. He tentatively suggests that since “your blame only conveys a second-personal
reason if I can take up your perspective and address the reason to myself” (p. 16), perhaps a
coherent perspective which both parties can share is also required, and perhaps there is no
such perspective we can take up with a hypocrite given their inconsistent standards. One
worry with this proposal is that some exception-seeking hypocrites do have a coherent
perspective that could, in principle, be shared by others. It’s just a false and unjustified one in
which couldn’t be accepted by a free and rational being among equals. Another is that we
will also lack any coherent perspective with arbitrarily inconsistent blamers, and so they will
also lack standing to blame. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this paper.
8
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
committed to them being the case, even if we never actually have explicit thoughts like ‘this
person can direct their will in response to my demands’.
These presuppositions are not merely things the addresser is committed to. They are
normative felicity conditions which need to be met in order for demands to be genuinely
second-personal and in fact create reasons for the addressee. One simply cannot make a
second-personal demand to someone if they do not believe that person is capable of
understanding and complying with that demand. One also cannot make this kind of demand
if they are aiming to coerce the other person, or if one does not see themselves as a source of
self-originating claims.
However, in presupposing that the other person has the capacity to freely and rationally
direct their will in recognition of my second-personal demands, I have thereby presupposed
that they a kind of being with dignity too. I presuppose that they are a source of selforiginating claims which I need to respect, and who can make demands on me. Secondpersonal claims presuppose “a common competence, authority, and, therefore, responsibility
as free and rational, a mutual second-personality that addresser and addressee share and that
is appropriately recognized reciprocally” (p. 21).
In presupposing that both of us are beings with dignity which needs to be respected, and
that both of us are members of the moral community who can hold others morally
accountable, we are also committed to there being certain standards which we can hold each
other morally responsible for failing to meet. We are committed to there being standards that
can be accepted by us qua free and rational beings among equals. What those standards amount
to depends on which account of morality is correct. Darwall thinks that this account
naturally lends itself to contractualism. Specifically, what actions are right or wrong largely
depend on what sort of principles agents couldn’t reasonably reject, with morality’s content
deriving itself (at least partly) from our equal dignity. Watson (2007) and Wallace (2007)
dispute whether Darwall succeeds in arguing from the structure of second-personal reasons
to the structure of morality, but we can set this particular debate aside. What matters for my
account is that our commitment to there being shared normative standards is also a
normative felicity condition. In order to succeed in making a second-personal demand to
you, I must presuppose that we have a shared authority qua members of the moral
community, and that I as a free and rational being among equals am able to hold you to
account for failing to meet those standards, while you have the authority to hold me to the
14
Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
same. In short, successfully making a second-personal demand requires that I recognise
shared standards are in place, and accept these standards as authoritative for me.
Recall we are investigating why hypocrites lack the standing to blame. Here is what
happens when we put all of the pieces of Darwall’s account together and examine
hypocritical blame. In blaming, the hypocrite makes a second-personal demand. They make a
demand as a member of the moral community. The hypocrite thereby holds the wrongdoer
accountable to them, calling on the wrongdoer to answer to them and comply with their moral
demands. The hypocrite necessarily purports to have the authority to make this demand, and
presupposes that the wrongdoer too is an authoritative source of second-personal demands.
The hypocrite is thus purporting to address the wrongdoer from the shared normative
perspective of the moral community. And they expect the wrongdoer to accept that secondpersonal demand from that standpoint too, thereby accepting the authority of the hypocrite
to make this demand.
However, the hypocrite is someone who has themselves committed wrongdoing similar to
what they are blaming the other person for committing. They have done something which is
inconsistent with the shared normative standards they are purportedly committed to when
blaming the wrongdoer. Of course, mere inconsistency with the moral demands we make of
others doesn’t make one a hypocrite, or prevent such demands from being genuinely secondpersonal. But the kind of inconsistency evinced by hypocrites is notable, because it
demonstrates that they do not accept certain kinds of obligations as authoritative on them.
The hypocrite is someone who tries to make a second-personal demand on others, while failing to accept
the authority of others to make the same kind of second-personal demand on them. Agents who blame
purport to have an authority to issue certain kinds of second-personal demands. But agents
who lack standing to blame lack this authority because their prior wrongdoing shows that
they violate the normative felicity conditions needed to make such second-personal
demands. Wrongdoers cannot be expected to accept this demand, because doing so would
accept the hypocrite’s authority to make this demand, which is to accept that the hypocrite
15
Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
has an authority to make demands on others that others cannot make on them. In short, the
hypocrite is not relating to the wrongdoer as an equal.9
On this account, inconsistency between one’s second-personal demands and behaviour
doesn’t undermine standing when the source of the inconsistency is not proof of a failure to
accept others’ second-personal authority. If I fail to comply with others’ demands because I
am coerced, or have an irresistible desire, or a reduced capacity to comply with those
demands, then we don’t have any evidence that I fail to accept others’ demands on me. If, on
the other hand, I have the capacity to easily comply with those demands but simply choose
not to, then I likely do not treat those demands as authoritative.
4. Advantages
This account improves on previously offered explanations for why hypocrisy undermines
standing to blame. Let me briefly examine these accounts and note some objections. I will
then identify how my account avoids these objections, which will also help clarify some
details.
Fritz and Miller (2018) argue that standing to blame requires that agents be disposed to
blame consistently, and hypocrites lack standing to blame because they have a ‘differential
blaming disposition’. In blaming people for norm violations for which they do not blame
themselves, the hypocrite implicitly denies the equality of persons. Fritz and Miller take it to
be a plausible assumption that our right to blame others is grounded in the equality of
persons, so anyone who rejects the equality of persons thereby loses their standing to blame.
Todd (2019) points out that on this account, agents who blame inconsistently lose their
Like Herstein (2017), I argue that recipients of hypocritical blame do not need to respond
to reasons they would ordinarily be given in being blamed. But whereas I argue that
hypocrites do not create genuinely second-personal demands, Herstein argues that hypocrites
can give reasons through directives, but these reasons may be permissibly excluded. He
argues this is more plausible because otherwise agents who answer to hypocritical directives
because of those directives would be acting irrationally, since hypocritical directives do not
create any additional reason to answer. Responding to this worry would require an in-depth
discussion of reasons for action which is outside the scope of this paper. Briefly, I’m not so
sure we can cleanly isolate (e.g.) ‘because my parents asked’ as a reason without implicitly
also pointing to other considerations, so there are avenues for arguing that acting in response
to such a demand is not irrational.
9
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
standing to blame anyone for similar wrongs altogether.10 This makes the account
unacceptably restrictive regarding who possesses standing to blame. For example, the
account entails that when citizens of Western nations blame terrorists for an attack in
France, such blame will be inappropriate if those citizens failed to blame similar terrorists for
an attack in Turkey some months earlier. The account also has the consequence that the
Western citizens lose their standing to blame the terrorists in France in the same way that the
terrorists in Turkey would. It seems implausible that a terrorist’s objection to being blamed
by an office worker’s inconsistent blaming of terrorists is similar in kind to their objection to
being blamed by another actual terrorist.
Fritz and Miller were right that paradigmatic hypocrites fail to treat people equally in some
important way, and my account preserves this insight without thereby being committed to
saying that inconsistent blamers also lack the standing to blame. Because accepting others’
authority to make second-personal demands doesn’t require having a perfectly consistent
blaming disposition, some merely inconsistent wrongdoers can retain their standing to
blame, though they might still be criticisable on other grounds, and may lack the standing to
blame other inconsistent blamers for blaming inconsistently. Thinking about secondpersonal authority also allows us to build on Fritz and Miller’s idea that our right to blame is
grounded in the equality of persons. Second-personal demands necessarily presuppose that
the other person can freely and rationally accept the demand given to them as authoritative.
In order for such a demand to succeed (or in order to not forfeit our right to blame, in Fritz
and Miller’s language) we must in fact have that authority, which requires us to accept others’
authority to make the same demands on us (not implicitly deny their equal moral status).
This in turn allows us to formulate in more detail how hypocrites implicitly deny the equality
of persons: they address a demand while not accepting others’ authority to address the same
kind of demand on them, which inherently presupposes that they have a kind of authority
that the rest of us lack.
Fritz and Miller try to downplay this kind of objection by noting that two kinds of
inconsistent blamers will retain their standing to blame: the person whose blaming
disposition varies with their mood, and the person who finds themselves unable to blame
one particularly charming friend. They argue that in the first case, the inconsistency does not
arise from a rejection of the impartiality of morality, and in the second, this person’s
disposition is masked by the wrongdoer’s charm. However, they accept that inconsistent
blaming of the kind in the terrorist case removes an agent’s standing to blame.
10
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
Another recent and convincing account of hypocrisy comes from Todd (2019). Through
careful consideration of a number of thought experiments, Todd argues that agents lack the
standing to blame a wrongdoer when they are not sufficiently committed to the values that
would condemn the wrongdoer’s actions. For Todd, commitment to a value requires
endorsement of that value, and a certain level of motivation to comply with that value. Here
are the cases he uses to motivate this account:
Diet: Charlie knows that Linus, who has a weakness for sweets, is trying to lose
weight. Nevertheless, he takes Linus to a place for dinner that he knows is located
next to an incredible ice cream shop. Quite predictably, after dinner Linus visits
the shop next door and has some ice cream. Charlie blames Linus.
Nazis: Jonas and Thomas are Nazi commanders in a WWII death camp. Jonas
orders Thomas to investigate the fence and sound the alarm if anyone is trying to
escape. Thomas investigates, sees someone escaping and sounds the alarm.
However, Jonas is actually a double agent, working to sabotage the camp. He only
gave that order to keep up appearances, and he picked Thomas to investigate
because he thought Thomas would be the most likely to have mercy and not
sound the alarm, allowing the prisoners to escape. Jonas blames Thomas.
Abandoned: Paul, when he is 25, abandons his wife and newborn infant to go
touring around the world and ‘find himself’. His wife and child suffer terribly as a
result. Later in life, at the age of 45, he comes to realize the virtues and obligations
of fidelity and becomes a committed husband and father to his wife and child, with
whom he is somehow reconciled. He now holds values, very deeply, which
condemn his past actions. Paul hears of another 25-year-old, Peter, who has
abandoned his wife and child to explore the world just as he once did, and blames
him.
Mistaken Blame: Samuel is a shop owner who has himself never tried to shoplift –
but not for want of wishing to do so. Samuel simply lacks the means to try – a
fact he regrets. He simply has no vehicle to travel to other stores, and there are no
suitable targets within walking distance. If there were, he would try to shoplift
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
from those stores. One day, Samuel gets a call: someone has been shoplifting
from his own store. On hearing this, Samuel burns with rage and incredulity and a
desire to confront the criminal. However, in fact the call has been made to the
wrong number, and no-one has stolen anything from Samuel’s store.
Todd (2019, pp. 344–362).
Intuitively, Samuel and Charlie lack the standing to blame, while Paul and Jonas possess
standing to blame. Todd argues that these intuitions can be rendered consistent by accepting
that agents lack the standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the kinds
of moral values which would condemn the wrongdoing under consideration. On his account,
an agent blaming someone for a wrong similar to a wrong that the agent has themselves
previously committed doesn’t itself undermine their standing to blame. Instead, the agent’s
wrongdoing is strong evidence that they are not sufficiently committed to the relevant values.
The strengths of Todd’s account are that it is simple and seemingly delivers the correct
verdicts for a number of cases. But a crucial weakness is that Todd doesn’t have any answer
to why commitment to the relevant values is necessary for standing to blame, something he
acknowledges (p. 371). Since my Darwallian account can explain why hypocrites lack
standing to blame, if it were to also deliver identical assessments of the agents’ standing to
blame in these thought experiments, then it would have all the strengths of Todd’s account
without the main weakness.
It seems that Jonas does treat his second-personal obligations to Thomas as authoritative.
While he is causally involved in Thomas’ wrongdoing, Jonas’s actions were all-thingsconsidered permissible given he had no other options likely to save more prisoners, and so
Thomas cannot justifiably blame Jonas. Jonas has not violated any second-personal demands
that Thomas or the prisoners could reasonably make of him.
Paul also treats his second-personal obligations to Peter as authoritative. Peter is a
culpable wrongdoer, and thus blameworthy. The fact that Paul committed similar
wrongdoing decades earlier says nothing about how he treats his obligations to his family or
Peter now. It also seems like Samuel fails to treat the second-personal obligations of other
shop-owners as authoritative on him. The fact that he wants to shoplift, and would do so
given the chance, shows that he does not respect the demands from other shop-owners. He
thus lacks the standing to blame others for shoplifting from him.
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
Diet seems under-described for our purposes. King’s (2015) original presentation of the
case describes Charlie’s action as permissible and not ill-intentioned. King also says it is
possible that Charlie has a reasonable belief Linus will resist the treats. My intuition is that
when described this way, Charlie does have the standing to blame Linus. Todd too admits
any blame Charlie would be entitled to would be “extremely mild” (p. 356), so I don’t think
this case is particularly supportive of either my account or Todd’s.
My Darwallian account of second-personal demands thus provides an equally acceptable
explanation of our intuitions in these thought experiments as Todd’s account. It could very
well be that the class of agents who lack sufficient commitment to the moral values which
condemn a certain wrong just is the class of agents who do not treat others’ second-personal
demands as authoritative, but I’ll leave this possibility aside.
That my account retains the intuitiveness of Todd’s account may seem prima facie
surprising, because each takes standing to blame to be granted by different things, and we
arrived at our conclusions by very different routes. But on reflection, there is a good
explanation for why they seem to deliver such similar assessments: both take an agents’
motivations to play an important role in whether that agent has the standing to blame.
In the discussion thus far, most of our focus has been on interactions between
wrongdoers after they have committed wrongdoing. And when thinking about secondpersonal authority in the context of understanding hypocrisy, it is very natural to focus on
the demands that get addressed in blaming after someone has committed wrongdoing. It is
easy to think that if we blame someone for a wrong that we have committed ourselves, but
accept their authority to blame us for our wrongdoing, then we are not being hypocritical. If
we believe they have the authority to blame us and we accept their blame, it seems like we
accept their second-personal authority. This line of thought is supported by a number of
philosophers. Duff (2010) argues that being ready to answer for wrongdoing gives one the
standing to blame others, Roadevin (2018) argues that blamers are not hypocritical if they
apologise for their own wrongdoing, and Friedman (2013) holds that agents who have
acknowledged and rectified their wrongdoing regain their standing to blame.
I propose that this reasoning goes too quick, and that Todd had something right in taking
an agent’s standing to blame to depend on their motivations in some way. To see why
standing to blame seems to depend on more than whether a wrongdoer has apologised or is
ready to answer for their wrongdoing, consider a number of ways in which agents can count
as hypocrites. Take, for example, the subjunctive hypocrite, who has not committed any
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
wrong similar to that which they are blaming others for committing, but only due to a lack of
opportunity. It is unreasonable to expect such a person to apologise or to be ready to answer
for their wrongs – they haven’t committed any – but this person seems to lack the standing
to blame others for those wrongs. Consider also the complacent hypocrite, who does
apologise or answer to others for his wrongs, but continues to keep committing similar
wrongs. This person understands that in performing these wrongs they are an appropriate
target of blame from others, but still makes little effort to reform their character, despite
having the capacity and opportunity to do so. Finally, consider the exception-seeking
hypocrite, who honestly, but unjustifiably, believes that their wrongdoing is different in kind
to the wrong that they are blaming others for committing. They answer to us, but the
answers they provide are not acceptable.
To possess standing to blame, it is not enough to simply believe that one recognises
others’ second-personal authority, nor to simply agree one would be blameworthy for
violating others’ demands, nor even to comply with the demands others make when they
blame us for culpable wrongdoing. The relevant sense in which we must accept others’
second-personal authority is stronger than this. In order to accept a class of second-personal
obligations, one must have a certain degree of motivation to comply with them. One must
treat those demands as authoritative by regularly conforming one’s behaviour to them, or at
least trying sufficiently to do so.11 On my account, the fact that an agent treats their own
wrongdoing consistently with how they treat others’ wrongdoing is not always enough to
demonstrate these agents possess standing to blame. An agent’s disposition towards
wrongdoing itself can sometimes suggest that they do not treat certain second-personal
obligations as authoritative, even if the agent is also disposed to blame themselves and accept
blame from others.
The subjunctive hypocrite lacks standing to blame despite not having committed any
wrongdoing because the fact that they would commit wrongdoing, given the chance, can
show that they do not accept others’ moral authority to demand they not perform that
wrong. Actual wrongdoing is not necessary for one to lack the standing to blame; merely
failing to accept the authority of others’ second-personal authority is sufficient. Someone
This is implied by Darwall in a few places, e.g. “One should not act in ways that one
demands or expects (or would demand or expect) that others not act, or equivalently, in ways
that one would resent or object to. If I am going to object to others’ stepping on my feet (and thus
demand that they not do so), then I must not step on their feet either” (2006, p. 117, emphasis added).
11
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
who has not cheated on their partner only because they lack the chance to do so does not
possess the standing to blame adulterers. Of course, it is difficult to know whether any
blamer, given the chance, really would have done the same thing as the person they are
blaming, which explains why objections to subjunctive hypocrisy are not all that common
(Piovarchy, 2020).
Similarly, the exception-seeking hypocrite does not accept others’ authority to hold them
accountable for violating shared normative standards that could be accepted by a free and
rational person among equals. They may profess to accept those shared standards, and
believe that their actions are consistent with a reasonable interpretation of what those
standards are, but more often than not their belief is the product of motivated reasoning.
What they have to gain from blaming others while escaping blame for their own wrongdoing
motivates them to believe that others’ legitimate demands are in fact not authoritative.12
Taking an agent’s standing to blame to be determined by whether they accept others’
second-personal authority also allows us to explain why there seems to be some relationship
between the seriousness of a wrong under consideration, and the number of transgressions
an agent must commit before they lose their standing to blame others for similar
transgressions. It also explains why we are sometimes uncertain whether agents possess
standing to blame when their wrongdoing is the result of weakness of will. The vegetarian
who refrains from eating meat because of its contribution to global warming, but eats steak
one time, seems to retain their standing to blame regular meat-eaters. But a single instance of
infidelity can cause one to lack the standing to blame adulterers. Though the vegetarian and
adulterer both commit a single transgression, the difference in their standing to blame is a
product of the seriousness of their wrongs, and the ease with which they can avoid
wrongdoing. Cheating on one’s partner is typically taken to be more serious than eating meat
on one occasion, and much easier to avoid, given we all need to eat regularly and vegetarian
options are not always available. Because of this, we take the adulterer’s actions to be strong
evidence that they do not accept their partner’s authority to demand they not cheat, while the
It is possible that some agents who seek an exception for their actions could escape the
charge of hypocrisy if they have fulfilled their procedural epistemic duties. Such agents are
simply very unlucky in their moral beliefs. A useful test of whether an agent’s exceptionseeking is hypocritical or not will be how they would react upon realising that their
exception-seeking was unjustified. If they experience guilt, surprise, quickly try to make
amends, and are now motivated to avoid performing similar wrongs in the future, their
exception-seeking was probably not hypocritical.
12
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
vegetarian’s actions do not necessarily show they fail to accept others’ second-personal
demands that they not contribute to global warming.
In contrast, a ‘vegetarian’ who knows they should avoid eating meat and accepts blame for
eating meat, but who eats meat daily, lacks the standing to blame people who eat meat. This
is because their continued meat-eating is evidence that they do not truly accept others’
second-personal demands to not contribute to global warming as authoritative. An agent
who is ready to self-blame and accept criticism for their wrongs, but who keeps doing the
wrong thing despite having the means to reform their habits, is too complacent with their
moral failings. They lack the standing to blame agents who commit similar wrongs, because
given their capacity and opportunity to avoid wrongdoing, their decision to not exercise this
capacity expresses a lack of sufficient concern with the wrongness of their actions. Arguing
that such agents retain the standing to blame simply because they accept blame from others
for similar wrongs risks treating blame like a cost of admission to wrongdoing, rather than an
authoritative demand which ought to be respected. Of course, some agents’ repeated failure
to do the right thing is caused by factors that do not express a failure to accept others’
second-personal demands as authoritative (e.g. addiction, mental illness), and such agents
could retain their standing to blame.
5. Remaining Questions
One remaining worry regards how to limit the scope of what kinds of wrongs hypocrites lack
the standing to blame others for. There is consensus that agents only count as hypocrites
when they blame others for wrongs that are in some way relevantly similar to wrongs they
themselves have committed (or would commit, given the chance). Adulterers retain the
standing to blame murderers, for instance. In presenting my argument, thus far I’ve spoken
about ‘kinds of obligations’ to mark this restriction, but have not offered any justification for
it.
Let me first note that this question is something that other proposed accounts must also
answer. For example, Fritz and Miller (2018) argue that an agent lacks the standing to blame
when that agent has a differential blaming disposition “with respect to violations of [some
norm] N” (p. 9), but don’t offer any justification for taking norms to be the relevant
reference class. We need some principled answer for why Sebastian, who blames some
adulterers but not others, lacks the standing to blame anyone for being unfaithful, but James,
who blames shop-lifters, but not adulterers, retains his standing to blame both, despite his
23
Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
failure to blame adulterers having no justifiable basis. Since both shop-lifters and adulterers
violate moral obligations, it seems open for the shop-lifters to argue that James’ arbitrary
failure to blame some kinds of wrongdoers, but not others, implicitly denies the equality of
persons
Likewise, Todd (2019) argues that agents lack standing to blame when they are not
sufficiently committed to the kind of values which would condemn the wrong under
consideration, but offers no explanation for why values which condemn a wrong are the
relevant reference class for identifying which wrongdoers retain standing to blame.
Adulterers and shop-lifters both violate moral obligations and both fail to respect the people
they wrong, which arguably acts as evidence that they are both insufficiently committed to
morality. Nevertheless, they seem to retain the standing to blame each other.
I believe a partial answer can be offered because my account takes demands to be
important, and our acceptance of others’ authority to make second-personal demands is not
an all-or-nothing affair. The adulterer does not accept others’ authority to demand that he
not have an affair. But if he refrains from stealing and murdering because he recognises that
these actions are wrong, he seems to accept others’ second-personal authority to demand
that he not do these things, even if he doesn’t accept their authority to demand that he not
cheat on his partner. The answer to why hypocrites lack the standing to blame agents for
some wrongs, but not others, is that it is only in blaming agents for violating demands similar
to those they have (or would have) also violated that hypocrites fail to respect others’
second-personal authority. There remains a further question of why our demands of one
another tend to be made under certain reference classes and not others (e.g. why we demand
that someone not cheat, not that they not-cheat-on-Tuesdays, nor that they just generally not
wrong us), but answering this question isn’t pivotal to our current project. Instead, this
seems to be more like the question of why our obligations tend to take to take certain forms
and not others, which is something we can set aside.
One last worry concerns the claim that blame addresses demands. It is particularly hard to
see how blame that is private addresses demands. Though Duff and Roadevin argue that
hypocrites only lack the standing to express blame towards wrongdoers, Todd, Fritz and
Miller believe that even private hypocritical blame is objectionable. There is thus a question
of whether my account applies to private hypocritical blame, or only to hypocritical blame
that is expressed to the wrongdoer.
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
Philosophers have tried to argue that private blame expresses demands in a few ways. For
example, Smith (2013) argues that even private blame “implicitly seeks some kind of moral
acknowledgment on the part of the blameworthy agent and/or on the part of others in the
moral community” (p. 43). An alternative approach comes from McKenna (2013) and
Fricker (2016), who both argue that our blaming practices are too disunified to hope for a
theory of blame that can be spelled out in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. They
instead propose focusing on and trying to make sense of the most paradigmatic cases of
blaming (i.e. expressed directed blames), treating other cases (i.e. private blame and blaming
the dead) as derivative in some way.
When we speak of blame’s demands, we tend to identify them as something expressed in
response to a violation of an obligation. Darwall, however, understands demands a bit more
broadly than this. When you stand on my foot and I demand that you get off it, it’s not the
case that you only gained this obligation after I told you to get off. In Strawsonian fashion, a
demand to not tread on my foot was already in place, constituted by our proneness to
respond with resentment and indignation.13 Even if made privately, the reactive attitudes “are
incipiently forms of communication” (Watson, 1987, p. 230) and “always implicitly secondpersonal” (Darwall, 2006, p. 67), coming “with an implicit RSVP” (ibid., p. 145). This
broader conception of demands explains why, despite the fact that blaming the dead and
blaming privately seem to not address anything, so many philosophers maintain that blame
centrally involves the addressing of demands (Hieronymi, 2004; McGeer, 2012; Shoemaker,
2007, 2011; Strawson, 1962; Wallace, 1994, 2011; Watson, 2004). A demand-based
explanation for why hypocrites lack standing to blame thus puts us in good company.
One problem for the claim that hypocrites lack the standing to even feel private blame is
that while private hypocritical blame does seem somewhat criticisable, it also seems less
criticisable than directly expressing hypocritical blame towards a wrongdoer. It especially
seems less criticisable if the agent refrains from expressing this blame because they know they
lack the standing to do so. If it turns out that private blame does not address anything, I am
happy to restrict my argument to the claim that hypocrites only lack the standing to express
blame towards wrongdoers, or what Wallace (2010) calls ‘hypocritical moral address’. But for
By ‘our’ proneness, he is referring to the moral community qua regulative ideal, not
necessarily any actual community, since some communities might be e.g. apathetic towards
wrongdoing. See Darwall (2007).
13
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
now, understanding demands in a broader sense seems to explain why private blame can be
an appropriate target of the ‘Who are you to blame me?’ response.
6. Conclusion
This paper has examined why hypocrites lack the standing to blame. First, I argued that
attempting to explain what standing to blame is by appealing to existing conceptions of
entitlement or appropriateness doesn’t generate any illuminating answers. I then argued that
we should reject thinking of standing to blame in exclusively moral terms, and instead think
of it as the ability to exercise a normative power. Using Darwall’s account of second-personal
obligations, I argued that hypocrites lack the standing to blame because they lack the
authority to make the kinds of demands agents normally make in blaming.
Thinking about hypocrisy in this way has a number of benefits. It describes how
hypocrisy is distinctly objectionable in comparison to other ways in which blame can be
inappropriate. It unites talk of standing to blame with how we think about standing in other
contexts. It explains why some agents who blame others for wrongs they themselves have
committed do not count as hypocrites. It delivers intuitively acceptable assessments
regarding which agents have standing to blame across a variety of contexts. It is consistent
with how blame is paradigmatically understood by philosophers researching moral
responsibility. And it explains how hypocrites can regain their standing to blame: by
becoming the kind of person who accepts others’ second-personal demands as authoritative.
10761 Words
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Hypocrisy, Standing to Blame and Second-Personal Authority
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