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  • Oh Blame, Where Is Thy Sting?
  • Nancy Nyquist Potter (bio)

I think that Hanna Pickard and I are in agreement that the dichotomy between ‘having’ and ‘not having’ control and conscious knowledge should be rejected. Personality disordered (PD) service users, like the rest of us, have degrees of not knowing and knowing, controlling and not controlling, such that pinpointing exactly when assignment of responsibility should enter into judgments of service users is murky and difficult. This position includes both metaphysical and epistemological issues in that it is a separate question whether or not we can know someone is responsible from the question of whether or not someone is responsible and to what degree. Because Pickard focuses on metaphysical questions, I raise some epistemological points, as well as moral and cultural ones. It is important to remember that when Pickard says that ‘so long as one knows what one is doing, one is responsible for one’s behavior to the degree that one can exercise choice and control over it,’ she is making a metaphysical point about whether or not a service user is responsible for some behavior (2011, 212). This is precisely the question, but one might wonder what evidence exists that would indicate that PD service users do have an ability to control and choose behaviors among various options. For example, I agree with Pickard that ‘reduction [of capacities] isn’t extinction’ (2011, 213), but what about those with impulse control disorder? Although it is no easier to determine the parameters of that problem than the more general one of conscious knowledge and control over one’s behaviors, it at least raises the possibility that some PD service users do not have the ability to control some of their actions because of impulse control disorder (cf Potter 2009 for an analysis of impulsivity.)

As Pickard notes, holding someone responsible means treating him or her as accountable or answerable for his or her behavior (p. 215). In this paper, I emphasize the point that accountability does not necessarily lead to or entail blame. On her analysis of blame, Pickard distinguishes (among other things) between expecting an accounting, on the one hand, and making judgments of blameworthiness, on the other. My remarks are meant to expand on these ideas, focusing on (a) the conditions for judgments of blameworthiness with respect to PD service users and (b) the notion of entitlement and the characteristics of the ‘sting’ of blame.

Considerations and Conditions of Blame

The cluster of concepts in moral philosophy that includes blame, blameworthiness, responsibility, accountability, pardon/excuse, and mitigation stands in need of analysis even though philosophers and others have been doing so for over two thousand years. The idea of responsibility without blame is a captivating one because it opens up the possibility of holding others accountable without engaging in blaming in the vernacular (accusatory, [End Page 225] ‘stinging’) sense of the term. Considerations of accountability and blame include:

  • • factual/descriptive features of behavior (what was the action, who actually performed it, who was the target of the action, if anyone);

  • • legal aspects (what does the law say about actions like these, does the service user understand the legal implications of his or her actions);

  • • moral aspects (what obligations if any were violated, what consequences follow from the action, does the service user understand the moral implications of his or her actions);

  • • cultural contexts (how do culturally-inflected assumptions, biases, and stereotypes play into judgments of the action, what cultural values are embedded in the action); and

  • • epistemic features (what can we say we know about the person’s intentions, how well do we truly understand his or her capability to make voluntary and informed choices).

These considerations are not a stage theory; woven throughout any consideration of accountability and blame will be questions of context and epistemology.

Conditions for judgments of blameworthiness also exist. Edwards, for example, in a discussion of mental illness (2009) argues that the appropriateness of blame depends upon three things:

  1. 1. The fairness of attributing moral responsibility;

  2. 2. The effects that withholding responsibility will have upon the broader ethical system; and to answer these questions, we need to know

  3. 3. The details of the...

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