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Moral Rebukes and Social Avoidance

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Notes

  1. P. F. Strawson, "Freedom and Resentment," Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 48 (1962). See also, R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); and Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint: Morality, Respect and Accountability (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2006).

  2. I will follow the recent convention of using “resentment” to refer to the attitude distinctive of victims and “indignation” to refer to the more impersonal attitude that might be held by either a victim or a bystander.

  3. Linda Radzik, "On Minding Your Own Business: Differentiating Accountability Relations within the Moral Community," Social Theory & Practice, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2011).

  4. P. Flaspohler, J. Elfstrom, K. Vanderzee, H. Sink and Z. Birchmeier, "Stand by Me: The Effects of Peer and Teacher Support in Mitigating the Impact of Bullying on Quality of Life," Psychology in the Schools, Vol. 46, No. 7 (2009).

  5. John Stuart Mill, "Utilitarianism," in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), Vol.13; see Alan Ryan, "John Stuart Mill's Art of Living," in J.S. Mill on Liberty in Focus, ed. John Gray and G. W. Smith (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 166.

  6. R. A. Duff, Trials and Punishments (New York: Cambridge, 1991), pp. 39–71.

  7. Ibid., pp. 45–46.

  8. Ibid., p. 46.

  9. Ibid., pp. 45–46.

  10. Ibid., p. 47.

  11. The possibility that moral criticism can aid moral perception is noted by Jean Harvey, "Oppression, Moral Abandonment, and the Role of Protest," Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 27, No. 1 (1996): p. 158.

  12. Duff, op. cit., p. 52.

  13. Ibid., p. 59.

  14. Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint; and Stephen Darwall, "Justice and Retaliation," Philosophical Papers, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2010). Darwall’s writings on blame focus on the nature and justification of blaming attitudes. He insists that the appropriateness of the attitude does not necessarily legitimate the expression of that attitude in the form of a rebuke. [Stephen Darwall, "Reply to Korsgaard, Wallace and Watson," Ethics, Vol. 118, No. 52–69 (2007): p. 62n.] However, Darwall does suggest that, when we do actively blame a person (“to her face”) we are expressing blaming attitudes.

  15. Darwall, "Justice and Retaliation," p. 334.

  16. Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, pp. 50–51.

  17. See especially Darwall, "Justice and Retaliation".

  18. Strawson, op. cit., p. 207.

  19. John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty," in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVIII, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), paragraph IV, pp. 5–6.

  20. Stephen S. Leff and Nicki R. Crick, "Interventions for Relational Aggression: Innovative Programming and Next Steps in Research and Practice," School Psychology Review, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2010).

  21. Not all theorists associate contempt with a refusal of respect. See Michelle Mason, "Contempt as a Moral Attitude," Ethics, Vol. 113, No. 2 (2003).

  22. Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy (New York: Cambridge, 1988).

  23. Bibb Latané and John Darley, The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn't He Help? (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1970); and Bibb Latané and S. Nida, "Ten Years of Research on Group Size and Helping," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 89, No. 2 (1981).

  24. Dan Olweus, Bullying at School: What We Know and What We Can Do (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993).

  25. See Cheshire Calhoun, "Standing for Something," Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 92, No. 5 (1995); and Thomas E. Hill Jr., "Symbolic Protest and Calculated Silence," Philosophy and Public Affairs Vol. 9, No. 1 (1979).

  26. See Linda Radzik, "On the Virtue of Minding Our Own Business," Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2012).

  27. Hill, op. cit., p. 95.

  28. The example is drawn from Coleen Macnamara, "Holding Others Responsible," Philosophical Studies, Vol. 152, No. 1 (2011): 85–86.

  29. This idea appears, in different ways, in Gary Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil: Variations on a Strawsonian Theme," in Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions: New Essays in Moral Psychology, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman (New York: Cambridge, 1987); Christopher Bennett, "Varieties of Retributive Experience," Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 207 (2002); Darwall, "Justice and Retaliation"; R. Jay Wallace, "Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 38, No. 4 (2010); R. Jay Wallace, "Dispassionate Opprobrium: On Blame and Reactive Sentiments," in Reasons and Recognition: Essays on the Philosophy of T. M. Scanlon, eds. Samuel Freeman, Rahul Kumar and R. Jay Wallace (New York: Oxford, 2011); and Michael McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility (New York: Oxford, 2012).

  30. See Joel Feinberg, "The Expressive Function of Punishment," in Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); Duff, op. cit.; and Jean Hampton, "Correcting Harms Versus Righting Wrongs: The Goal of Retribution," UCLA Law Review, Vol. 39 (1992).

  31. While expressive theories of punishment can be developed as mixed theories, they are sometimes also presented simply as forms of desert theory (e.g. Hampton, ibid.). Theories of the latter sort emphasize the fact that the message of condemnation sent by punishment fits the crime rather than the likelihood that the message will be received or that it will have deterrent or reformative effects on anyone.

  32. Feinberg, op. cit., p. 116.

  33. Ibid., p. 100.

  34. Compare Daniel Farnham, "A Hegelian Theory of Retribution," Journal of Social Philosophy, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2008).

  35. Some theorists use the term ‘retributivism’ to refer to any theory that claims that wrongdoing entails negative desert of some kind or other. But I find this unhelpful. In fact, it leads people who want to give a central role to desert to believe that they must also endorse suffering as such. And it leads people who want to reject the idea that suffering is intrinsically good to think that they must then abandon notions of desert. For examples, see, respectively, Duff, op. cit., pp. 42 and 59; and T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard, 1998), p. 274.

  36. Might this form of negative desert be acceptable even to hard incompatibilists? For discussion see McKenna, op. cit., p. 117; and Derk Pereboom, "Hard Incompatibilism," in Four Views on Free Will, eds. John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom and Manuel Vargas (New York: Blackwell, 2007), p. 86.

  37. I defend the following account of the nature of making amends in Linda Radzik, Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law, and Politics (New York: Oxford, 2009).

  38. Duff’s theory of criminal punishment resembles the atonement theory in many ways (Duff, op. cit.). However, Duff talks about the criminal’s penance rather than the making of amends. Penance, in my opinion, continues to put too much emphasis on the suffering of the wrongdoer as a good in its own right. Penance is also overly concerned with the moral reformation of wrongdoer, while the making of amends requires the wrongdoer to also repair his relationship with his victim and (where relevant) his community. The latter problem (though not the former) is remedied by Christopher Bennett, The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment (New York: Cambridge, 2008).

  39. Jean Hampton, "The Moral Education Theory of Punishment," Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1984).

  40. Murphy and Hampton, op. cit., p. 130.

  41. See Radzik, “On the Virtue of Minding Our Own Business.”

  42. These sorts of benefits are emphasized by Cheshire Calhoun, "Responsibility and Reproach," Ethics, Vol. 99, No. 2 (1989): p. 405.

  43. The benefits of active blaming for people other than the wrongdoer can also provide a point to actively blaming a wrongdoer who has passed away.

  44. Bernard Williams, "Morality, the Peculiar Institution," in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1985), p. 193.

  45. Ibid.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks audiences at Rice University and the University of Leiden, as well as Justin Coates, Andrew Khoury, Benjamin McMyler, Robert R. Shandley, George Sher, and Bruno Verbeek for helpful comments on earlier versions of this material.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, 77843-4237, USA

    Linda Radzik

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Radzik, L. Moral Rebukes and Social Avoidance. J Value Inquiry 48, 643–661 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-014-9463-8

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