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Blame

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  1. The whitewashing of blame.Eugene Chislenko - forthcoming - European Journal of Philosophy.
    I argue that influential recent discussions have whitewashed blame, characterizing it in ways that deemphasize or ignore its morally problematic features. I distinguish “definitional,” “creeping,” and “emphasis” whitewash, and argue that they play a central role in overall endorsements of blame by T.M. Scanlon, George Sher, and Miranda Fricker. In particular, these endorsements treat blame as appropriate by definition (Scanlon), or as little more than a wish (Sher), and infer from blame's having one useful function that it is a good (...)
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  • Guilty Artificial Minds: Folk Attributions of Mens Rea and Culpability to Artificially Intelligent Agents.Michael T. Stuart & Markus Https://Orcidorg Kneer - 2021 - Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5 (CSCW2).
    While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential underlying reasons for (...)
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  • Responsibility for rationality: foundations of an ethics of mind.Sebastian Schmidt - 2025 - New York, NY: Routledge.
    How can we be responsible for our attitudes if we cannot normally choose what we believe, desire, feel, and intend? This problem has received much attention during the last decades, both in epistemology and ethics. Yet its connections to discussions about reasons and rationality have been largely overlooked. This book develops the foundations of an ethics of mind by investigating the responsibility that is presupposed by the requirements of rationality that govern our attitudes. It has five main goals. First, it (...)
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  • Belief, blame, and inquiry: a defense of doxastic wronging.Z. Quanbeck - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (10-11):2955-2975.
    According to the thesis of doxastic wronging, our beliefs can non-derivatively wrong others. A recent criticism of this view claims that proponents of the doxastic wronging thesis have no principled grounds for denying that credences can likewise non-derivatively wrong, so they must countenance pervasive conflicts between morality and epistemic rationality. This paper defends the thesis of doxastic wronging from this objection by arguing that belief bears distinctive relationships to inquiry and blame that can explain why beliefs, but not credences, can (...)
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  • Blaming.Leonhard Menges - 2023 - In Maximilian Kiener (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Responsibility. Routledge.
    In the last two decades, blame has become a core topic in ethics, philosophical moral psychology and, more recently, epistemology. This chapter aims at clarifying the complex state of the debate and at making a suggestion for how we should proceed from here. The core idea is that accounts of blame are often motivated by very different background goals. One standard goal is to provide a unifying account of our everyday blame practices. The chapter argues that there is reason to (...)
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  • On the Concept and Ethics of Vaccination for the Sake of Others.Steven R. Kraaijeveld - 2023 - Dissertation, Wageningen University and Research
    This dissertation explores the idea and ethics of vaccination for the sake of others. It conceptually distinguishes four different kinds of vaccination—self-protective, paternalistic, altruistic, and indirect—based on who receives the primary benefits of vaccination and who ultimately makes the vaccination decision. It describes the results of focus group studies that were conducted to investigate what people who might get vaccinated altruistically think of this idea. It also applies the different kinds of vaccination to ethical issues surrounding COVID-19, such as lockdown (...)
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  • Praise and Blame.Daniel J. Miller - 2022 - 1000-Word Philosophy.
    We praise people for morally good things: giving to charity, being generous, having compassion for the needy. We blame for morally bad things: cheating on one’s spouse, being selfish, harboring ill will towards others. What are praise and blame, though? When are they appropriate? This essay reviews influential answers to these questions.
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  • Moral Patiency Partially Grounds Moral Agency.Dorna Behdadi - manuscript
    This paper argues that, although moral agency and moral patiency are distinct concepts, we have pro tanto normative reasons to ascribe some moral agency to all moral patients. Assuming a practice-focused approach, moral agents are beings that participate in moral responsibility practices. When someone is a participant, we are warranted to take a participant stance toward them. Beings who lack moral agency are instead accounted for by an objective stance. As such, they are assumed to be exempted from moral responsibility (...)
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  • A Standing Asymmetry between Blame and Forgiveness.Kyle G. Fritz & Daniel J. Miller - 2022 - Ethics 132 (4):759-786.
    Sometimes it is not one’s place to blame or forgive. This phenomenon is captured under the philosophical notion of standing. However, there is an asymmetry to be explained here. One can successfully blame, even if one lacks the standing to do so. Yet, one cannot successfully forgive if one lacks the standing to do so. In this article we explain this asymmetry. We argue that a complete explanation depends on not only a difference in the natures of the standing to (...)
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  • Too far beyond the call of duty: moral rationalism and weighing reasons.Chris Tucker - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (6):2029-2052.
    The standard account of supererogation holds that Liv is not morally required to jump on a grenade, thereby sacrificing her life, to save the lives of five soldiers. Many proponents defend the standard account by appealing to moral rationalism about requirement. These same proponents hold that Bernie is morally permitted to jump on a grenade, thereby sacrificing his life, to spare someone a mild burn. I argue that this position is unstable, at least as moral rationalism is ordinarily defended. The (...)
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  • (1 other version)Moral Luck and Unfair Blame.Martin Sand & Michael Klenk - 2021 - Journal of Value Inquiry:1-17.
    Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control affect her blameworthiness. Several scholars deny the existence of moral luck by distinguishing judging blameworthy from blame-related practices. Luck does not affect an agent’s blameworthiness because morality is conceptually fair, but it can affect the appropriate degree of blame for that agent. While separatism resolves the paradox of moral luck, we aim to show it that it needs amendment, because it is unfair to treat two equally blameworthy people unequally. We argue (...)
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  • Moral difference between humans and robots: paternalism and human-relative reason.Tsung-Hsing Ho - 2022 - AI and Society 37 (4):1533-1543.
    According to some philosophers, if moral agency is understood in behaviourist terms, robots could become moral agents that are as good as or even better than humans. Given the behaviourist conception, it is natural to think that there is no interesting moral difference between robots and humans in terms of moral agency (call it the _equivalence thesis_). However, such moral differences exist: based on Strawson’s account of participant reactive attitude and Scanlon’s relational account of blame, I argue that a distinct (...)
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  • The paradox of self-blame.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):111–125.
    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 (...)
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  • Left Wittgensteinianism.Matthieu Queloz & Damian Cueni - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (4):758-777.
    Social and political concepts are indispensable yet historically and culturally variable in a way that poses a challenge: how can we reconcile confident commitment to them with awareness of their contingency? In this article, we argue that available responses to this problem—Foundationalism, Ironism, and Right Wittgensteinianism—are unsatisfactory. Instead, we draw on the work of Bernard Williams to tease out and develop a Left Wittgensteinian response. In present-day pluralistic and historically self-conscious societies, mere confidence in our concepts is not enough. For (...)
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  • Blame it on Disappointment: A Problem for Skepticism about Angry Blame.Leonhard Menges - 2020 - Public Affairs Quarterly 34 (2):169-184.
    Blame skeptics argue that we have strong reason to revise our blame practices because humans do not fulfill all the conditions for it being appropriate to blame them. This paper presents a new challenge for this view. Many have objected that blame plays valuable roles such that we have strong reason to hold on to our blame practices. Skeptics typically reply that non-blaming responses to objectionable conduct, like forms of disappointment, can serve the positive functions of blame. The new challenge (...)
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  • The Self-Effacing Functionality of Blame.Matthieu Queloz - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (4):1361-1379.
    This paper puts forward an account of blame combining two ideas that are usually set up against each other: that blame performs an important function, and that blame is justified by the moral reasons making people blameworthy rather than by its functionality. The paper argues that blame could not have developed in a purely instrumental form, and that its functionality itself demands that its functionality be effaced in favour of non-instrumental reasons for blame—its functionality is self-effacing. This notion is sharpened (...)
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  • BCI-Mediated Action, Blame, and Responsibility.Joseph Vukov & Kit Rempala - 2020 - American Journal of Bioethics: Neuroscience 11.
    Rainey et al. (forthcoming) discuss the complications that arise with assigning responsibility for brain computer interface (BCI)-mediated actions. Because BCI-mediated actions can differ from non-BCI-mediated actions in terms of control and foreseeability, the authors suggest that our ethical and legal evaluation of these actions may differ in important ways. While we take no issue with the authors’ discussion or conclusion, we also recognize the difficulty of grappling with the relationship between control, foreseeability, and moral responsibility practices, even without the additional (...)
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  • The Facts and Practices of Moral Responsibility.Benjamin De Mesel & Sybren Heyndels - 2019 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (3):790-811.
    Strawsonians about moral responsibility often claim that our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, rather than the other way round. Many have argued that such ‘reversal’ claims have an unwelcome consequence: If our practices of holding morally responsible fix the facts of moral responsibility, does this not imply, absurdly, that if we held severely mentally ill people responsible, they would be responsible? We provide a new Strawsonian answer to this question, and we explore the relation (...)
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  • Attending to blame.Matt King - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (5):1423-1439.
    Much has been written lately about cases in which blame of the blameworthy is nonetheless inappropriate because of facts about the blamer. Meddlesome and hypocritical cases are standard examples. Perhaps the matter is none of my business or I am guilty of the same sort of offense, so though the target is surely blameworthy, my blame would be objectionable. In this paper, I defend a novel explanation of what goes wrong with such blame, in a way that draws the cases (...)
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  • Precarious work and its complicit network.Chuanfei Chin - 2019 - Journal of Contemporary Asia 49.
    How does precarious work entail social vulnerabilities and moral complicities? Theorists of precarity pose two challenges for analysing labour conditions in Asia. Their first challenge is to distinguish the new kinds of social vulnerability which constitute precarious work. The second is to assign moral responsibility in the social network that produces vulnerability in depoliticised and morally detached ways. In this article, the social and normative dimensions of precarious work are connected through a conceptual investigation into how Singapore allocates responsibility for (...)
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  • Marginal participation, complicity, and agnotology: What climate change can teach us about individual and collective responsibility.Säde Hormio - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Helsinki
    The topic of my thesis is individual and collective responsibility for collectively caused systemic harms, with climate change as the case study. Can an individual be responsible for these harms, and if so, how? Furthermore, what does it mean to say that a collective is responsible? A related question, and the second main theme, is how ignorance and knowledge affect our responsibility. -/- My aim is to show that despite the various complexities involved, an individual can have responsibility to address (...)
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  • Responsibility Beyond Belief: The Epistemic Condition on Moral Responsibility.Christopher Michael Cloos - 2018 - Dissertation,
    In this dissertation, I argue for a new conception of the epistemic condition on moral responsibility.
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  • Who Can Blame Whom? Moral Standing to Blame and Punish Deprived Citizens.Gustavo A. Beade - 2019 - Criminal Law and Philosophy 13 (2):271-281.
    There are communities in which disadvantaged groups experience severe inequality. For instance, poor and indigent families face many difficulties accessing their social rights. Their condition is largely the consequence of the wrong choices of those in power, either historical or more recent choices. The lack of opportunities of these deprived citizens is due to state omissions. In such communities, it is not unusual for homeless members of these particular groups to occupy abandoned lands and build their shelters there. However, almost (...)
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  • A Unified Account of the Moral Standing to Blame.Patrick Todd - 2019 - Noûs 53:347-374.
    Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: -/- 1. One’s blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent’s wrongdoing. 3. One must be warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the (...)
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  • The emotion account of blame.Leonhard Menges - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (1):257-273.
    For a long time the dominant view on the nature of blame was that to blame someone is to have an emotion toward her, such as anger, resentment or indignation in the case of blaming someone else and guilt in the case of self-blame. Even though this view is still widely held, it has recently come under heavy attack. The aim of this paper is to elaborate the idea that to blame is to have an emotion and to defend the (...)
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  • A Scalar Approach to Vaccination Ethics.Steven R. Kraaijeveld, Rachel Gur-Arie & Jamrozik Euzebiusz - 2023 - The Journal of Ethics 28 (1):145-169.
    Should people get vaccinated for the sake of others? What could ground—and limit—the normative claim that people ought to do so? In this paper, we propose a reasons-based consequentialist account of vaccination for the benefit of others. We outline eight harm-based and probabilistic factors that, we argue, give people moral reasons to get vaccinated. Instead of understanding other-directed vaccination in terms of binary moral duties (i.e., where people either have or do not have a moral duty to get vaccinated), we (...)
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  • Metaethics for Neo-Pragmatists: A Pragmatic Account of Linguistic Meaning for Moral Vocabulary.Thomas Wilk - 2019 - Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University
    In this dissertation, I aim to develop and defend a novel, pragmatist approach to foundational questions about meaning, especially the meaning of deontic moral vocabulary. Drawing from expressivists and inferentialists, I argue that meaning is best explained by the various kinds of norms that govern the use of a vocabulary. Along with inferential norms, I argue we must extend our account to discursive norms that govern normative statuses required to felicitously utter certain speech-acts—norms of authority—and the transitions in normative statuses (...)
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  • Whataboutisms and Inconsistency.Axel Arturo Barceló Aspeitia - 2020 - Argumentation 34 (4):433-447.
    Despite being very common in both public and private argumentation, accusations of selective application of general premises, also known as “whataboutisms”, have been mostly overlooked in argumentation studies, where they are, at most, taken as accusations of inconsistency. Here I will defend an account according to which allegations of this sort can express the suspicion that the argumentation put forward by one party does not reflect his or her actual standpoint and reasons. Distinguishing this kind of argumentative moves is important (...)
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  • Determinism and Divine Blame.John Ross Churchill - 2017 - Faith and Philosophy 34 (4):425-448.
    Theological determinism is, at first glance, difficult to square with the typical Christian commitment to the appropriateness of divine blame. How, we may wonder, can it be appropriate for God to blame someone for something that was determined to occur by God in the first place? In this paper, I try to clarify this challenge to Christian theological determinism, arguing that its most cogent version includes specific commitments about what is involved when God blames wrongdoers. I then argue that these (...)
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  • (1 other version)Intuition, Orthodoxy, and Moral Responsibility.John Ross Churchill - 2016 - Faith and Philosophy 33 (2):179-199.
    Many Christian philosophers hold that moral responsibility is incompatible with causal determinism, a thesis known as incompatibilism. But there are good reasons for resisting this trend. To illustrate this, I first examine an innovative recent case for incompatibilism by a Christian philosopher, one that depends crucially on the claim that intuitions favor incompatibilism. I argue that the case is flawed in ways that should keep us from accepting its conclusions. I then argue for a shift in the way that this (...)
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  • Epistemic Atonement.Elise Woodard - 2023 - In Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics Volume 18. Oxford University Press.
    When we think about agents who change a long-standing belief, we sometimes have conflicting reactions. On the one hand, such agents often epistemically improve. For example, their new belief may be better supported by the evidence or closer to the truth. On the other hand, such agents are often subject to criticism. Examples include politicians who change their minds on whether climate change is occurring or whether vaccines cause autism. What explains this criticism, and is it ever justified? To answer (...)
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  • Hiding Behind Machines: Artificial Agents May Help to Evade Punishment.Till Feier, Jan Gogoll & Matthias Uhl - 2022 - Science and Engineering Ethics 28 (2):1-19.
    The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. We investigate the empirically accessible question of whether the imposition of harm by an agent is systematically judged differently when the agent is artificial and not human. The results of a laboratory experiment suggest that decision-makers can actually avoid punishment more easily by delegating to machines than by delegating (...)
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  • Blame and Protest.Eugene Chislenko - 2019 - The Journal of Ethics 23 (2):163-181.
    In recent years, philosophers have developed a novel conception of blame as a kind of moral protest. This Protest View of Blame faces doubts about its intelligibility: can we make sense of inner ‘protest’ in cases of unexpressed blame? It also faces doubts about its descriptive adequacy: does ‘protest’ capture what is distinctive in reactions of blame? I argue that the Protest View can successfully answer the first kind of doubt, but not the second. Cases of contemptful blame and unexpressed (...)
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  • How to be an Epistemic Consequentialist.Daniel J. Singer - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (272):580-602.
    Epistemic consequentialists think that epistemic norms are about believing the truth and avoiding error. Recently, a number of authors have rejected epistemic consequentialism on the basis that it incorrectly sanctions tradeoffs of epistemic goodness. Here, I argue that epistemic consequentialists should borrow two lessons from ethical consequentialists to respond to these worries. Epistemic consequentialists should construe their view as an account of right belief, which they distinguish from other notions like rational and justified belief. Epistemic consequentialists should also make their (...)
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  • Misinformation as Immigration Control.Mollie Gerver - 2017 - Res Publica 23 (4):495-511.
    It is wrong to force refugees to return to the countries they fled from. It is similarly wrong, many argue, to force migrants back to countries with life-threatening conditions. I argue that it is additionally wrong to help such refugees and migrants voluntarily return whilst failing to inform them of the risks. Drawing on existing data, and original data from East Africa, I describe distinct types of cases where such a wrong arises. In ‘Misinformation Cases’ officials tell refugees that it (...)
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  • An Argument against Bernard Williams’ Account of Reason Internalism.Muhammad Heydarpour & Hosein Dabbagh - 2022 - Journal of Philosophical Theological Research 24 (1):21-42.
    Bernard Williams in his “Internal and External Reasons” argues for internalism about reasons. He holds that according to internalism of reasons, agent A has reason to Φ if and only if he has a desire ψ which will be satisfied by Φ-ing and he also believes that it is so. Williams maintains that if one does not have a preceding desire and cannot form any desires through deliberation then it will be rational to claim that he does not have reason (...)
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  • Reasons and oughts: an explanation and defence of deontic buck-passing.Euan Hans Metz - 2018 - Dissertation, University of Reading
    This thesis is about what a normative reason is and how reasons relate to oughts. I argue that normative reasons are to be understood as relational properties of favouring or disfavouring. I then examine the question: What is the relation between reasons, so understood, and what we ought to do, believe, or feel? I argue that the relation is an explanatory one. We should explain what we ought to do in terms of reasons, and not the other way around. This (...)
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