Most business ethicists maintain that corporate actors are subject to a variety of moral obligations. However, there is a persistent and underappreciated concern that the competitive pressures of the market somehow provide corporate actors with a far-reaching excuse from meeting these obligations. Here, we assess this concern. Blending resources from the history of philosophy and strategic management, we demonstrate the assumptions required for and limits of this excuse. Applying the idea of ‘the state of nature’ from Thomas Hobbes, we suggest (...) that corporate actors would be excused from duties if complying with them threatened their vital interests. We show how this excuse is not available for most individuals within firms; instead, it is an excuse perhaps available to firms themselves, but only given substantive assumptions about corporate personhood. For those willing to make these assumptions, we apply the competitive advantage construct to delimit the scope of this excuse. We suggest that firms are excused from fulfilling an obligation when complying leads to a competitive disadvantage, as this imperils the firm’s vital interests. After revealing why this excuse does not generalize, we conclude by considering when we should reform the market to avoid the legitimacy of this excuse. (shrink)

This paper argues that praise is governed by a norm of standing, namely the evaluative commitment condition. Even when the target of praise is praiseworthy and known to be so by the praiser, praise can be inappropriate owing to the praiser’s lacking the relevant evaluative commitment. I propose that uncommitted praisers lack the standing to praise in that, owing to their lack of commitment to the relevant value, they have not earned the right to host the co-valuing that is the (...) communicative aim of praise. (shrink)

According to the Public Justification Principle, legitimate laws must be justifiable to all reasonable citizens. Proponents of this principle assume that its satisfaction requires speakers to offer justifications that are representable as arguments that feature premises which reasonable listeners would accept. I develop the concept of dark knowledge to show that this assumption is false. Laws are often justified on the basis of premises that many reasonable listeners know, even though they would reject these premises on the basis of the (...) further considerations that speakers implicitly rely on for their support. Accommodating the fact of dark knowledge requires us to consider the civic virtue of speakers to be more important for public justification than the acceptability of their arguments to reasonable citizens. I sketch an alternative conception of public justification that incorporates these results and argue that it provides a rationale for ignoring the otherwise sound contributions of some participants in political deliberation. (shrink)

Accusations of hypocrisy are a recurring theme in the public debate on climate change, but their significance remains poorly understood. Different motivations are associated with this accusation, which is leveled by proponents and opponents of climate action. In this article, I undertake a systematic assessment of climate hypocrisy, with a focus on lifestyle and political hypocrisy. I contextualize the corresponding accusation, introduce criteria for the conceptual analysis of climate hypocrisy, and develop an evaluative framework that allows us to determine its (...) moral significance. I argue that different instances of climate hypocrisy are problematic to different degrees, depending on how detrimental they are to an agent's attainment of environmental integrity. The resulting framework helps clear the confusion caused by disinformation campaigners, by distinguishing objectionable uses of the climate hypocrisy charge from constructive ones motivated by genuine concern for integrity. (shrink)

This paper considers the formulation of the moral requirement against hypocrisy, paying particular attention to the logical scope of ‘requires’ in that formulation. The paper argues (i) that we should prefer a wide-scope formulation to a narrow-scope formulation, and (ii) this result has some advantages for our normative theorizing about hypocrisy – in particular, it allows us to resist several of Daniela Dover’s (2019) recent arguments against the anti-hypocrisy requirement.

Praise, unlike blame, is generally considered well intended and beneficial, and therefore in less need of scrutiny. In line with recent developments, we argue that praise merits more thorough philosophical analysis. We show that, just like blame, praise can be problematic by expressing a failure to respect a person’s equal value or worth as a person. Such patronizing praise, however, is often more insidious, because praise tends to be regarded as well intended and beneficial, which renders it harder to recognize (...) and object to. Among other things, a philosophical analysis of patronizing praise helps people on the receiving end articulate why they feel uncomfortable or offended by it, shows patronizing praisers how their praise is problematic, and provides input for further philosophical analysis of blame.In the first section of the paper, we discuss how hypocritical praise, just like hypocritical blame, can fail to respect the equality of persons by expressing that the praiser applies more demanding moral standards to the praisee than to themself. We further discuss obstructionist praise, which loosely corresponds to complicit blame, and can similarly express that certain moral standards apply to others but not to the praiser. In the second part of the paper, we discuss another variety of patronizing praise. Praise can be an inaccurate appraisal of a person based on irrelevant considerations – like race, gender, or class – and thereby constitute a failure to recognize their equal worth as a person. We identify three ways in which such praise can manifest. (shrink)

The charge of hypocrisy is a peculiar kind of accusation: it is damning and ubiquitous; it is used to deny the hypocrite standing to speak; and it is levelled against a great variety of conduct. Much of the philosophical literature on hypocrisy is aimed at explaining why hypocrisy is wrongful and worthy of censure. We focus instead on the use of the accusation of hypocrisy and argue for a revisionary claim. People think that hypocrisy in politics is bad and that (...) calling it out is good. Our novel claim is that even if hypocrisy in politics is bad (and that is a big if), calling it out is worse. We give a feminist case as to why accusations of hypocrisy are problematic. We also go further and claim that hypocrisy is a ubiquitous and perhaps even a necessary and beneficial part of political debate in liberal democracies. We also consider and reject candour as a possible alternative solution to hypocrisy in public debate. We argue that requiring people to be candid is not necessarily a good solution because it will often require one to divulge what is private when there are good reasons not to do so. (shrink)

This paper articulates a general distinction between two important communicative ideals—expressive sincerity and discursive integrity—and then uses it to analyze problems with political debate in contemporary democracies. In the context of philosophical discussions of different forms of trustworthiness and debates about deliberative democracy, self-knowledge, and moral testimony, the paper develops three arguments for the conclusion that, although expressive sincerity is valuable, we should not ignore discursive integrity in thinking about how to address problems with contemporary political debate. The paper concludes (...) with a brief discussion of a strategy for improving discursive integrity within public political debate by reflecting on which principles of responsible public debate would promote better democratic decision making. (shrink)

One common reaction to criticism is to try to deflect it by calling into question the motivations of the person doing the criticizing. For example, if I feel like you are blaming me for something that you yourself are guilty of having done in the past, I might respond with the retort, "Who are you to blame me for this?", where this retort is meant to serve not as an excuse but rather as a challenge to the standing of the (...) blamer. The notion of standing has taken center stage in much recent literature on the ethics of blame, though there is no consensus on how best to understand the precise force of the "who are you" retort. In this paper, I look at a different sort of retort, one that also calls into question the motivations of the criticizer. Instead of accusing the criticizer of being motivated by self-righteousness, however, this retort accuses the criticizer of being motivated by envy. How are these two retorts related to each other? If the accusation of envy isn't a challenge to the blamer's standing, then what sort of challenge is it and what normative force does it carry (if any)? Taking my cue from the ethics of blame literature, I try to address these and other questions about the interaction between envy and blame. (shrink)

Traditionally, those writing on blame have been concerned with blaming others, including when one has the standing to blame others. Yet some alleged problems for such accounts of standing arise when we focus on self-blame. First, if hypocrites lack the standing to blame others, it might seem that they also lack the standing to blame themselves. But this would lead to a bootstrapping problem, wherein hypocrites can only regain standing by doing that which they lack the standing to do. Second, (...) in addition to hypocrites, there may be hypercrites, who blame themselves more severely than others. Leading accounts for why hypocrites lack standing to blame others would also seem to imply that hypercrites lack the standing to blame others, but some may find this counterintuitive. We argue that neither of these problems from self-blame poses a unique threat to leading accounts of standing. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical overview of recent work on epistemic blame. The paper identifies key features of the concept of epistemic blame and discusses two ways of motivating the importance of this concept. Four different approaches to the nature of epistemic blame are examined. Central issues surrounding the ethics and value of epistemic blame are identified and briefly explored. In addition to providing an overview of the state of the art of this growing but controversial field, the paper highlights (...) areas where future work is needed. (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)

I discuss the roles of journalism in aspirational democracies, and argue that they generate set of pressures on attention that apply to people by virtue of the type of society they live in. These pressures, I argue, generate a problem of democratic attention: for journalism to play its roles in democracy, the attentional demands must be met, but there are numerous obstacles to meeting them. I propose a principle of salience to guide the selection and framing of news stories that (...) I argue may help address the puzzle: the public-as-protagonist principle. -/- . (shrink)

In response to criticism, we often say – in these or similar words – “Let’s see you do better!” Prima facie, it looks like this response is a challenge of a certain kind – a challenge to prove that one has what has recently been called standing. More generally, the data here seems to point a certain kind of norm of criticism: be better. Slightly more carefully: One must: criticize x with respect to standard s only if one is better (...) than x with respect to standard s. In this paper, I defend precisely this norm of criticism – an underexplored norm that is nevertheless ubiquitous in our lives, once we begin looking for it. The be better norm is, I hope to show, continuously invoked in a wide range of ordinary settings, can undergird and explain the widely endorsed non-hypocrisy condition on the standing to blame, and apparent counterexamples to the norm are no such counterexamples at all. I further contend that, given some plausible principles, my previous “moral commitment” account of the moral standing to blame will be extensionally equivalent to the be better norm. (shrink)

This article offers a justification for accommodating claims of conscience. The standard justification points to the pain that acting against one’s conscience entails. But that defense cannot make sense of the state’s refusal to accommodate individuals where the law interferes with their deeply meaningful but nonmoral projects. An alternative justification, we argue, arises once one recognizes the connection between conscience and moral address: One’s lived moral convictions determine when and with what force one can hold others to account. Acting against (...) one’s convictions can undermine one’s standing to blame others who act in similar ways. When the state compels someone to act against conscience, it renders her complicit in conduct she takes to be wrong and thereby impairs her ability to condemn similar conduct in the future, in a manner akin to the hypocrite. The reason the state should not compel people to act against conscience, then, is that doing so would undercut their moral standing. (shrink)

Upon doing something generous for someone with whom you are close, some kind of reciprocity may be appropriate. But it often seems wrong to actually request reciprocity. This chapter explores the wrongness in making these requests, and why they can nevertheless appear appropriate. After considering several explanations for the wrongness at issue (involving, e.g. distinguishing oughts from obligation, the suberogatory, imperfect duties, and gift-giving norms), a novel proposal is advanced. The requests are disrespectful; they express that their agent insufficiently trusts (...) the hearer to recognize their own reasons to reciprocate, and the close relationship between them morally requires this kind of trust. This proposal is articulated and situated in the recent discussion of the normativity of requests. The chapter concludes by explaining how these requests may appear appropriate. Agents in these relationships often have standing to make requests, though the standing is lacking in these particular cases. (shrink)

According to an influential account of standing, hypocritical blamers lack standing to blame in virtue of their lack of commitment to the norm etc. which they invoke. Nevertheless, the commitment account has the wrong shape for it to explain why hypocrites lack standing to blame. Building on the lessons of that critique I propose a novel account of what undermines standing to blame – the comparative fairness account. This differs from the commitment account and the other prominent account of why (...) hypocrites lack standing to blame offered in the literature: the moral equality account. Finally, I observe that, intuitively, lack of commitment undermines standing to blame and that many hypocrites might lack standing for that reason also. Moreover, typically the hypocrite's failure to address their own faults is a feature in virtue of which, other things being equal, the hypocrite is less committed to the norm in question. These two observations provide the basis for an error theory of the commitment account's appeal, despite its inability to explain why, qua hypocritical blamer, one lacks standing to blame. (shrink)

A looming deadline. A difficult situation at home. A heated phone conversation that redirects our attention. Certain features of our circumstances can be (at least partially) excusing; sometimes, agents who act wrongly in the face of circumstantial pressures are not (that) blameworthy for having done so. But we’re rather bad at detecting these factors that excuse others from blame. When put together, these two observations yield an under-appreciated problem: we fall short of procedural norms of blame in fairly systematic ways.

A notable feature of our practice of blaming is that blamees can dismiss blame for their own blameworthy actions when the blamer is censuring them hypocritically and, as it is often put, lacks standing to blame them as a result. This feature has received a good deal of philosophical attention in recent years. By contrast, no attention has been given the possibility that, likewise, refraining from blaming can be hypocritical and dismissed as standingless. I argue that hypocritical refrainers have a (...) duty to blame, if asked to do so, and possibly even if they are not asked to do so. Acknowledging this fact about hypocritical silence is crucial to an adequate understanding of our practice of blaming. Specifically, it bears on a worry that naturally arises when we consider cases where the blamee is blameworthy yet the blaming is problematic, because standingless. The worry is that, absurdly, the idea of standing justifies our being more interested in silencing preachers of virtue than making wrongdoers overcome vice. However, if one can lack standing not to blame, this concern is unwarranted. If there is such a thing as standing to blame, then sometimes one must, for reasons of standing, speak up in the face of wrongdoing, meaning, in effect, that one lacks the right not to challenge wrongdoers to improve. (shrink)

The Moral Equality Account of Hypocrisy (ME) is a prominent theory of why hypocrites lack moral standing to blame. Hypocrites make exceptions for themselves and thereby implicitly deny moral equality, which is an essential premise of moral standing to blame. ME has recently faced challenges from philosophers who deny that it is the hypocrite’s rejection of moral equality that causes her to lose moral standing to blame. I have distinguished three main challenges which I discuss and rebut in this article: (...) “The Internal Blame and Blame of Fictional Characters Challenge”, which I attribute to Todd ( 2019 ), and “The Hypercrite Challenge” and “The Inegalitarian Norm Challenge”, which are due to Lippert-Rasmussen ( 2021 ). The article begins by offering an account of ME. It fills in a few gaps in the theory, by explaining why it is necessary for a blamer to invoke a special right to blame and by determining the type of right that standing to blame is. It also distinguishes between the question of why hypocrisy is wrong or bad, and the question of why it undermines moral standing to blame. I hold that several theories provide plausible answers to the first question, but only ME has so far given a good answer to the second question. When distinguishing properly between these two questions, we see that ME can respond satisfactorily to the three challenges. (shrink)

Both in everyday life and in moral philosophy, many think that our own past wrongdoing can undermine our standing to indignantly blame others for similar wrongdoing. In recent literature on the ethics of blame, we find two different kinds of explanation for this. Relative moral status accounts hold that to have standing to blame, you must be better than the person you are blaming, in terms of compliance with the norm. Fault-based accounts hold that those who blame others for things (...) of which they are also guilty exhibit familiar moral faults, such as making an exception of oneself, and that these faults explain why they lack standing. I argue in support of relative moral status accounts, showing that they both better trace our practice of dismissing blame on the basis of lack of standing, and that they have more explanatory resources than have been appreciated. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the retort ‘easy for you to say’ is a complaint about the target’s standing, but that it invokes a standing norm that is unjustified. Moreover, I argue that in many cases the person for whom it is ‘easy to say’ should speak.

I explore Mandeville’s account of moral judgement and its implications for the understanding of hypocrisy. According to Mandeville, we have a psychological need to like ourselves sufficiently, so as to carry on with our lives. Because our self-liking necessarily depends on the opinions others form of us, we are extraordinarily sensitive to praise and condemnation. The practice of moral judgement exploits this sensitivity. Hypocrisy is an intrinsic element of this practice.

Hypocrisy seems to be a distinctive moral wrong. This thesis offers an account of that wrong. The distinctive wrong of hypocrisy is not a rational failing, or a deception of others. It is a problem in how we critique, and blame, others, when we ourselves are guilty of similar faults. Not only does it seem wrong to blame others hypocritically; it is also widely remarked that hypocrites ‘lack standing’ to blame. I defend both judgments. When we engage others in response (...) to wrongdoing, there is both instrumental and non-instrumental value in ensuring that those who face similar moral predicaments reason about these predicaments, and the appropriate responses to them, together. Hypocrisy is wrong because it hampers our ability to realise that value. And hypocrites lose standing to blame for a similar reason. Standing depends on the value of particular people engaging in an accountability procedure together, a value which the hypocrite forestalls, by failing to acknowledge wrongdoing in the course of blaming. This account of a duty to blame non-hypocritically helps unpack the relationship between hypocrisy and a range of other defects in a person’s standing. It also responds to a central sceptical challenge to the wrongness of hypocritical blaming. The challenge is that accurate hypocritical blaming can’t be wrong because it is morally good, and indeed is morally better than not blaming others at all. My response: hypocritical blaming is wrong, not because it is morally worse than not blaming at all, but because it is second-best, i.e. worse than non-hypocritical blaming, which enables mutual deliberation about wrongdoing. (shrink)

Moral and legal philosophy are too entangled: moral philosophy is prone to model interpersonal moral relationships on a juridical image, and legal philosophy often proceeds as if the criminal law is an institutional reflection of juridically imagined interpersonal moral relationships. This article challenges this alignment and in so doing argues that the function of the criminal law lies not fundamentally in moral blame, but in regulation of harmful conduct. The upshot is that, in contrast to interpersonal relationships, the criminal law (...) cannot lose its standing to blame through institutional analogues of hypocrisy, complicity, and meddling. Rather, certain forms of structural and severe historical and contemporary injustice point to the question of the overall legitimacy of state authority. (shrink)

Moral agency is limited, imperfect, and structurally constrained. This is evident in the many ways we all unwittingly participate in widespread injustice through our everyday actions, which I call ‘structural wrongs’. To do justice to these facts, I argue that we should distinguish between summative and formative moral criticism. While summative criticism functions to conclusively assess an agent's performance relative to some benchmark, formative criticism aims only to improve performance in an ongoing way. I show that the negative sanctions associated (...) with summative responses are only justifiably imposed under certain conditions when persons exercise their agency wrongly — conditions that do not always hold for structural wrongs. Yet even in such cases we can still use formative responses, which are warranted whenever agents fall short of moral ideals. Expanding our repertoire of moral criticism to include both summative and formative responses enables us to better appreciate both the powers and limitations of our agency, and the complexity of moral life. (shrink)

Philosophers analyzing standing to blame have argued that in view of a blamer’s own fault she can lack standing to blame another for an act even if the act is blameworthy and that standingless, hypocritical blame is pro tanto morally wrongful. The bearing of these conclusions on standing to praise is yet to receive the attention it deserves. I defend two claims. The first is the conditional claim that if and are true, so are and. The latter are: a praiser (...) can lack the standing to praise herself for an act even if that act is praiseworthy and standingless, hypocritical praise is pro tanto morally wrongful. So I am suggesting that facts about standing to blame reflect more general facts about standing to hold responsible. The second is the claim that and are true. (shrink)

This paper points out neglected considerations about the standing to blame. It starts from the observation that the standing to blame debate largely focusses on factors concerning the blamer or the relation of blamer and wrongdoer, mainly hypocrisy and meddling, while neglecting the victim of wrongdoing. This paper wants to set this right by pointing out how considerations about the victim can impact a third party’s standing. The first such consideration is the blamer’s personal relation to the victim. It is (...) argued that persons close to the victim thereby gain standing even in the presence of factors that would normally undermine it. Arguing from the well-known sexual assault case of Chanel Miller and the public reactions to it, the paper then introduces two more considerations about standing hitherto neglected. First, given that blame has an expressive function and serves to contradict expressive aspects of wrongdoings, it is argued that third-party blame can morally support the victim in the face of wrongdoing and that such support matters to victims. It is argued that this importance of third-party blame can ground standing. Thirdly and relatedly, the paper argues that insufficient collective responses to wrongdoing, i.e. when other bystanders do not respond with sufficient blaming responses, can equally ground standing of third parties. It is argued that these considerations are relevant not only for an ethics of blame broadly conceived but also for standing to blame in particular. Thereby, the paper establishes that considerations about the victim are central for discussion of the standing to blame. (shrink)

A good chunk of the recent discussion of hypocrisy concerned the hypocritical “moral address” where, in the simplest case, a person criticises another for $$\phi $$ -ing having engaged in $$\phi $$ -ing himself, and where the critic’s reasons are overtly moral. The debate has conceptual and normative sides to it. We ask both what hypocrisy is, and why it is wrong. In this paper I focus on the conceptual explication of hypocrisy by examining the pragmatic features of the situation (...) where accusations of hypocrisy are made. After rejecting several extant views, I defend the idea that moral criticisms are best understood as moves in an agonistic or hostile conversation, and that charges of hypocrisy are attempts to prevent the hypocrite from gaining an upper hand in a situation of conflict. I finish by linking this idea to frame-theoretic analysis and evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

Provided we blame others accurately, is blaming them morally right even if we are guilty of similar wrongdoing ourselves? On the one hand, hypocrisy seems to render blame morally wrong, and unjustified; but on the other, even hypocritical blaming seems better than silence. I develop an account of the wrongness of hypocritical blaming which resolves this apparent dilemma. When holding others accountable for their moral failings, we ought to be willing to reason, together with them, about our own, similar failings. (...) Hypocrisy undermines this process of mutual deliberation. Thus, even if better than silence, hypocritical blaming is second-best, and that is why it is wrong. (shrink)