Causal Blame

American Philosophical Quarterly 58 (4):347-58 (2021)
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Abstract

We blame faulty brakes for a car crash, or rain for our bad mood. This “merely causal” blame is usually seen as uninteresting. I argue that it is crucial for understanding the interpersonal blame with which we target ourselves and each other. The two are often difficult to distinguish, in a way that plagues philosophical discussions of blame. And interpersonal blame is distinctive, I argue, partly in its causal focus: its attention to a person as cause. I argue that this causal focus helps explain several central characteristics of interpersonal blame: its tendency to exaggerate a person’s causal role, its weakening through attention to personal history or thoughts about determinism, its characteristic ‘force’ or ‘sting’, and our sense that blame is often harmful or unfair. I conclude by drawing out one implication of blame's causal focus: in a certain range of cases, blame is partly under our voluntary control.

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Eugene Chislenko
Temple University

Citations of this work

Consequentialism and our best selves.Miles Tucker - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):101-120.

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References found in this work

Freedom and Resentment.Peter Strawson - 1962 - Proceedings of the British Academy 48:187-211.
Moral dimensions: permissibility, meaning, blame.Thomas Scanlon - 2008 - Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Intention.G. E. M. Anscombe - 1957 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57:321-332.
The Wrong Kind of Reason.Pamela Hieronymi - 2005 - Journal of Philosophy 102 (9):437 - 457.
Controlling attitudes.Pamela Hieronymi - 2006 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87 (1):45-74.

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