Abstract
Functionalist accounts of blame have been rising in popularity. Proponents of the approach claim that, by defining blame in terms of its function or functions, their account has the advantage of being able to accommodate a wide range of attitudes and activities as blame; but their opponents question the extensional and explanatory adequacy of such accounts. This paper contributes to this burgeoning literature by presenting new challenges to the existing functionalist accounts. The fundamental problem, I shall argue, lies in the fact that they all focus on using functions to define blame as a type of practice, but this strategy fails to pick out a unique moral-psychological type and does not offer a complete set of extension-determining criteria for the concept of blame. This amounts to a serious theoretical disadvantage. I consider various responses to the challenges throughout the paper, concluding that the best reply available to the functionalist theorist involves using functions to directly define blame tokens.
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Notes
That is, unless scientists also appeal to functions in the identification and individuation of the trait types themselves. To the extent that they do this, their definitions of the functions of trait types might suffer a similar circularity problem to the one described in the current section (see Nanay 2010).
One might reply that the decision is not just about one individual case. In the case of one individual instance of resentment toward the dead, our decision is not about whether to include a single attitude as blame, but whether to include a fairly large set of cases—all cases of resentment toward the dead—as blame or not. This reply fails for two reasons. First, it is simply unclear why we should group all cases of resentment toward the dead together in the classification decision. Second, even if we grant that we should group all cases of resentment toward the dead together—call this set of cases S3—it is still unclear how the functionalist has theoretical resources to choose between identifying the blame-type as (a*) S1 ∩ S2 ∩ S3 or (b*) S1 ∩ S2. If (b*) includes enough tokens that play a communicative function, for example, then one may very well argue that (a*) also includes enough tokens.
McGeer might seem to dismiss the importance of identifying whether a particular case counts as blame. She denies that a proper analysis of blame must pick out “essential features” that are “present in every legitimate instance of blame” (2013: 168), and she puts it that sometimes “exceptional cases are beside the point” (2013: 170). These remarks may give an impression that McGeer does not treat identifying particular instances of blame as an important goal. But this is not exactly right. These remarks are in the context where McGeer criticizes those theories that require an essential content-based feature of blame, such as cognitive and emotional accounts. The remarks are not explicitly used to undermine the goal of picking out particular instances of blame. After all, to the extent that the functionalist theory of blame is meant to be a competitor to the cognitive and emotional accounts, it should be able to characterize exactly what tokens constitute the moral-psychological kind that shares the same functional profile, despite these functional features not being essential content-based features.
For metaphilosophical discussion on conceptual engineering, see, e.g., Cappelen (2018).
This specific version of dispositional functionalism seems subject to counterexamples, since there are intuitively non-blame activities that can easily do the job of initiating and facilitating a process of moral communication. Given this, it is worth noting that dispositional functionalism is more plausible when it is combined with pluralist rather than monist functionalism. For example, a pluralist view that blame-tokens are defined as whatever attitudes or activities that serve a series of functions including protest, communication, and signaling is less susceptible to counterexamples.
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Acknowledgements
For valuable comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper, I want to thank many people including Hannah Altehenger, David Brink, Ying Liu, Leonard Menges, Jennifer Nado, Dana Nelkin, Manuel Vargas, Robert Wallace, Monique Wonderly, and participants of the Online Moral Responsibility Workshop at the University of Salzburg in July 2022. Special thanks to the two anonymous referees for this journal, whose comments have improved the paper significantly. Work on this paper was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 34851-G.
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Work on this paper was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 34851-G.
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Wang, S.T. Rethinking Functionalist Accounts of Blame. J Ethics (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09468-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09468-z