Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over (...) which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt). (shrink)

According to the Strawsonian tradition, a person is responsible for an action just in case it is appropriate to hold them responsible for that action. One important way of holding people responsible for wrongdoing is by experiencing and expressing blaming emotions. This raises the questions of what blaming emotions are and in what sense they can be appropriate. In this chapter I will provide an overview of different answers to both these questions. A common thread in the chapter will be (...) a challenge for the Strawsonian tradition. Given that this tradition understands moral responsibility in terms of the appropriateness of blaming emotions, it must provide a realistic picture of these emotions and the practices in which they take part. On the other hand, it also aims to develop a normatively plausible account of the conditions of responsibility. I will try to show that it is often difficult to strike a satisfactory balance between these two aspirations. (shrink)

According to a leading view, emotions such as admiration, contempt, pride, and shame are important vehicles of agential development. Through admiration and contempt, we establish models and countermodels against which to shape our character; through pride and shame, we get a sense of how we measure up to them. Critics of this view object that these emotions always deliver uncompromising evaluations: admiration casts people in a completely positive light, while contempt casts aspersion on them. Therefore, insofar as they lack the (...) capacity for nuance, these emotions are systematically unfitting and misleading. This paper discusses this objection as originally formulated by John Doris as well as Macalester Bell’s response. Drawing from research on emotional intentionality, it will be argued that Doris’ and Bell’s accounts are respectively misguided criticisms and inadequate defences of these emotions. Their mistake lies in an invalid transition from the claim that these emotions are intentionally directed towards persons to the claim that they deliver global evaluations of those towards whom they are directed. By rejecting this inference, it will be shown that these emotions can deliver nuanced and fitting evaluations in a way Doris’ objection overlooks and Bell’s response precludes us from articulating. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that reactive attitudes play a central role in our practices concerned with holding people responsible. However, it remains controversial which emotional attitudes count as reactive attitudes such that they are eligible for this central role. Specifically, though theorists near universally agree that guilt is a reactive attitude, they are much more hesitant on whether to also include shame. This paper presents novel arguments for the view that shame is a reactive attitude. The arguments also support the (...) view that shame is a reactive attitude in the sense that concerns moral accountability. The discussion thereby challenges both the view that shame is not a reactive attitude at all, suggested by philosophers such as R. Jay Wallace and Stephen Darwall, and the view that shame is a reactive attitude but does not concern moral accountability, recently defended by Andreas Carlsson and Douglas Portmore. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that there is what has been called a non-hypocrisy norm on the appropriateness of moral blame; roughly, one has standing to blame only if one is not guilty of the very offence one seeks to criticize. Our acceptance of this norm is embodied in the common retort to criticism, “Who are you to blame me?”. But there is a paradox lurking behind this commonplace norm. If it is always inappropriate for x to blame y for a (...) wrong that x has committed, then all cases in which x blames x (i.e. cases of self-blame) are rendered inappropriate. But it seems to be ethical common-sense that we are often, sadly, in position (indeed, excellent, privileged position) to blame ourselves for our own moral failings. And thus we have a paradox: a conflict between the inappropriateness of hypocritical blame, and the appropriateness of self-blame. We consider several ways of resolving the paradox, and contend none is as defensible as a position that simply accepts it: we should never blame ourselves. In defending this startling position, we defend a crucial distinction between self-blame and guilt. (shrink)

In this paper, I take it for granted both that there are two types of blameworthiness—accountability blameworthiness and attributability blameworthiness—and that avoidability is necessary only for the former. My task, then, is to explain why avoidability is necessary for accountability blameworthiness but not for attributability blameworthiness. I argue that what explains this is both the fact that these two types of blameworthiness make different sorts of reactive attitudes fitting and that only one of these two types of attitudes requires having (...) been able to refrain from φ-ing in order for them to be fitting. (shrink)

It is an increasingly popular view among philosophers that moral responsibility can, in principle, be attributed to unconscious autonomous agents. This trend is already remarkable in itself, but it is even more interesting that most proponents of this view provide more or less the same argument to support their position. I argue that as it stands, the Extension Argument, as I call it, is not sufficient to establish the thesis that unconscious autonomous agents can be morally responsible. I attempt to (...) show that the Extension Argument should overcome especially strong ethical considerations; moreover, its epistemological grounds are not too solid, partly because the justifications of its premises are in conflict. (shrink)

Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This paper focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the (...) recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect. (shrink)