Abstract

Praise and blame are both forms of moral assessment. Yet, the literature on standing has focussed on blame – to blame appropriately one needs standing to do so. Praise has been mostly ignored. This paper argues that the asymmetrical treatment of praise and blame is unwarranted: there’s no good reason to think that we need standing to blame, but don’t need standing to praise. This conclusion is important because it provides a new line of argument for scepticism about standing to blame.