In this paper I articulate a view of doxastic control that helps defend the legitimacy of our practice of blaming people for their beliefs. I distinguish between three types of doxastic control: intention-based, reason-based, and influence-based. First I argue that, although we lack direct intention-based control over our beliefs, such control is not necessary for legitimate doxastic blame. Second, I suggest that we distinguish two types of reason-responsiveness: sensitivity to reasons and appreciation of reasons. I argue (...) that while both capacities are necessary for satisfying the control condition, neither is sufficient. Finally, I defend an influence-based view of doxastic control according to which we have the capacity to execute intentions to engage in reflection that causally influences our beliefs in positive epistemic ways. This capacity is both necessary and sufficient for satisfying the control condition for legitimate doxastic blame. I end by defending the view from two objections: that reflection is not necessary for meeting the control condition, and that it is not sufficient. (shrink)

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 non-derivatively wrong. First, forming a belief (but not updating one’s credence) closes inquiry, and suspending judgment (but not updating one’s credence) opens inquiry. Consequently, beliefs can distinctively wrong others by prematurely closing inquiry or inappropriately opening inquiry. Second, beliefs (but not credences) can constitute blame. Unfittingly blaming someone can wrong them, and hence beliefs which constitute unfitting blame can distinctively wrong. In addition to defending the claim that only beliefs can non-derivatively wrong, this paper gestures towards an ethics of belief which attends to the relationship between belief and attitudes such as inquiry, faith, trust, and blame. (shrink)

What should we believe when epistemic and practical reasons pull in opposite directions? The traditional view states that there is something that we ought epistemically to believe and something that we ought practically to (cause ourselves to) believe, period. More recent accounts challenge this view, either by arguing that there is something that we ought simpliciter to believe, all epistemic and practical reasons considered (the weighing view), or by denying the normativity of epistemic reasons altogether (epistemic anti‐normativism). I argue against (...) both accounts and defend the traditional view. An agent can be blameworthy in doxastic dilemmas for complying with their practical but not their epistemic reasons. This reveals how epistemic reasons are normative: the concept of epistemic blame helps us track epistemic normativity. (shrink)

Epistemologists have recently argued that there is such a thing as ‘epistemic blame’: blame targeted at purely epistemic norm violations. Leading the charge has been Cameron Boult, who has argued across a series of papers that we can make sense of this phenomenon by building an account of epistemic blame off of Scanlon’s account of moral blame. This paper argues a relationship-based account of epistemic blame is untenable, because it eliminates any distinction between blameworthy and (...) excused agents. Attempts to overcome this problem cannot succeed because of the important but unrecognised ways his account deviates from Scanlon’s, and because of differences in how our moral and epistemic conduct are affected by our attitudes and expectations. (shrink)

How is it possible for deontic evaluations of beliefs to be appropriate if we do not have voluntary control over our beliefs? Gaultier argues that we should reject the claim that we can have indirect control over beliefs in virtue of the basic voluntary control we have over our actions. We have another kind of indirect control over beliefs: we can demonstrate doxastic strength or, on the contrary, doxastic weakness when forming our beliefs. That is, we can resist (...) or, on the contrary, fail to resist the influence of some of our conative attitudes. And in the same way that we take our actions to be open to blame when they result from having demonstrated weakness of will even though this does not consist in doing something at will, we take our beliefs to be open to blame and hence subject to deontic evaluation, when they result from having demonstrated doxastic weakness even though this does not consist in doing something at will. (shrink)

This paper considers the possibility that ‘epistemic hypocrisy’ could be relevant to our blaming practices. It argues that agents who culpably violate an epistemic norm can lack the standing to blame other agents who culpably violate similar norms. After disentangling our criticism of epistemic hypocrites from various other fitting responses, and the different ways some norms can bear on the legitimacy of our blame, I argue that a commitment account of standing to blame allows us to understand (...) our objections to epistemic hypocrisy. Agents lack the epistemic standing to blame when they are not sufficiently committed to the epistemic norms they are blaming others for violating. This not only gives us a convincing account of epistemic standing to blame, it leaves us with a unified account of moral and epistemic standing. (shrink)

I argue that the problem of responsibility for attitudes is best understood as a puzzle about how we are responsible for responding to our object-given reasons for attitudes – i.e., how we are responsible for being (ir)rational. The problem can be solved, I propose, by understanding the normative force of reasons for attitudes in terms of blameworthiness. I present a puzzle about the existence of epistemic and mental blame which poses a challenge for the very idea of reasons for (...) attitudes. We are left with three options: denying that there are any reasons for attitudes, opting for pragmatism about reasons for attitudes, or arguing that the challenge rests on a misunderstanding of the normative force of reasons for attitudes. I finally suggest a version of the last strategy. We can understand the normative force of reasons for attitudes, and thereby solve the problem of mental responsibility, by acknowledging that the way we blame each other for failing to respond correctly to our reasons for attitudes is different from the way we blame each other when one failed to respond correctly to reasons for action. (shrink)

Statistical evidence—say, that 95% of your co-workers badmouth each other—can never render resenting your colleague appropriate, in the way that other evidence (say, the testimony of a reliable friend) can. The problem of statistical resentment is to explain why. We put the problem of statistical resentment in several wider contexts: The context of the problem of statistical evidence in legal theory; the epistemological context—with problems like the lottery paradox for knowledge, epistemic impurism and doxastic wrongdoing; and the context of (...) a wider set of examples of responses and attitudes that seem not to be appropriately groundable in statistical evidence. Regrettably, we do not come up with a fully general, fully adequate, fully unified account of all the phenomena discussed. But we give reasons to believe that no such account is forthcoming, and we sketch a somewhat messier account that may be the best that can be had here. (shrink)

In this book, Rik Peels provides a comprehensive original account of intellectual duties, doxastic blameworthiness, and responsible belief. The discussions, relating to work in epistemology as well as moral responsibility, are clear and often provide useful entries into the literature. Though I disagree with some of the main conclusions, the arguments are carefully laid out and typically merit a good amount of thought even where one remains unconvinced. After providing an overview of the contents, I specifically suggest that Peels (...) theory fails to account for one important kind of doxastic obligations and doxastic blame. (shrink)

Paul Silva has recently argued that doxastic justification does not have a basing requirement. An important part of his argument depends on the assumption that doxastic and moral permissibility have a parallel structure. I here reply to Silva's argument by challenging this assumption. I claim that moral permissibility is an agential notion, while doxastic permissibility is not. I then briefly explore the nature of these notions and briefly consider their implications for praise and blame.

Thanks to the advent of social media, large numbers of Americans believe outlandish falsehoods that have been widely debunked. Many of us have a tendency to fault the individuals who hold such beliefs. We naturally assume that the individuals who form and maintain such beliefs do so in virtue of having violated some epistemic obligation: perhaps they failed to scrutinize their sources, or failed to seek out the available competing evidence. I maintain that very many ordinary individuals who acquire outlandish (...) false beliefs thanks to their use of popular social media platforms (and other similar internet technologies) deserve little or no blame for believing these falsehoods. Such individuals would be fully blameworthy only if they had formed or maintained the relevant beliefs partly in virtue of violating some epistemic obligation and had no excuse for violating that obligation. However, the nature of these internet technologies provides excuses for violating the relevant epistemic obligations, and so individuals are excused for holding the resulting false beliefs. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that individual moral obligations and responsibility entail shared (or joint) moral obligations and responsibility. However, whether individual epistemic obligations and responsibility entail shared epistemic obligations and responsibility is rarely discussed. Instead, most discussions of doxastic responsibility focus on individuals considered in isolation. In contrast to this standard approach, I maintain that focusing exclusively on individuals in isolation leads to a profoundly incomplete picture of what we're epistemically obligated to do and when we deserve epistemic (...) class='Hi'>blame. First, I argue that we have epistemic obligations to perform actions of the sort that can be performed in conjunction with other people, and that consequently, we are often jointly blameworthy when we violate shared epistemic obligations. Second, I argue that shared responsibility is especially important to doxastic responsibility thanks to the fact that we don't have the same kind of direct control over our beliefs that we have over our actions. In particular, I argue that there are many cases in which a particular individual who holds some problematic belief only deserves epistemic blame in virtue of belonging to a group all the members of which are jointly blameworthy for violating some shared epistemic obligation. (shrink)

Arguably, the original conception of epistemic justification comes from Descartes and Locke, who thought of justification deontologically. Moreover, their deontological conception was especially strict: there are no excuses for unjustified beliefs. Call this the “classical deontologist” conception of justification. As the original conception, we ought to accept it unless proven untenable. Nowadays, however, most have abandoned classical deontologism as precisely that—untenable. It stands accused of requiring doxastic voluntarism and normative transparency. My goal is to rescue classical deontologism from these (...) accusations. I show how, given a specific form of internalism coupled with a plausible theory of epistemic blame, we can be blameworthy for all of our (non-exempt) unjustified beliefs without transparency or voluntarism. The result is that the classical deontological conception of justification should regain its privileged status. (shrink)

A number of authors have argued that, in order for S to be appropriately held morally responsible for some action or attitude (say, via moral blame), that action or attitude must somehow reflect or express a negative aspect of S’s (“true”, “deep”, or “real”) self. Recently, theorists of “epistemic blame” and “epistemic accountability” have also incorporated certain “self-disclosure” conditions into their accounts of these phenomena. In this paper, I will argue that accounts of epistemic responsibility which require disclosure (...) of an objectionable feature of a person’s self neglect central aspects of our responsibility practices. Specifically, I will argue that we can appropriately hold individuals epistemically responsible for things which do not reflect or express negative aspects of “who they are” in any way. While disclosure of an objectionable feature of (what I will call) a person’s “doxastic self” isn’t altogether irrelevant when it comes to holding that person epistemically responsible, it also isn’t necessary. One lesson I wish to draw is that, insofar as our epistemic responsibility practices are capable of shedding light on the nature of epistemic normativity itself, theorists interested in the latter should be focused on more than just accountability responses which track objectionable features of a person’s self. (shrink)

This paper focuses on extant approaches to counteract the consumption of fake news online. Proponents of structural approaches suggest that our proneness to consuming fake news could only be reduced by reshaping the architecture of online environments. Proponents of educational approaches suggest that fake news consumers should be empowered to improve their epistemic agency. In this paper, we address a question that is relevant to this debate: namely, whether fake news consumers commit mistakes for which they can be criticized and (...) that they could easily avoid by reforming their doxastic conduct. Proponents of structural approaches, like R. Rini and B. Millar, have defended in different ways a negative answer to this question. In this paper, we criticize their views and suggest that individual users could improve on their epistemic practice by widening their information diet. (shrink)

A wide range of more objectivist norms appear to leave uncharted an important part of normative space. In the beginning of this paper I briefly outline two broad ways of seeking more subject-directed norms: perspectivism and feasibilism. According to feasibilism, the ultimate reason why more objectivist norms are inadequate on their own is not that they fail to take into account the limits of an agent’s perspective, but that they are not sensitive to limits on what ways of choosing, acting, (...) and believing are feasible in a given situation. I think of these ways of choosing, acting, and believing in terms of an agent's dispositions. In this paper I focus on a knowledge-first implementation of feasibilism, a view in epistemology that supplements a knowledge norm with a norm urging one to manifest dispositions that are among the most knowledge-conducive feasible ones. A view with different norms that sometimes cannot be jointly satisfied raises questions about the status of these norms. By drawing on two general hypotheses about the relationship between succeeding (e.g. knowing) and manifesting dispositions conducive to success, I argue for a view on which the prescriptive and the hypological come radically apart. The result is that an epistemic analogue of a thesis that many have assumed to hold in the moral realm should be rejected. This thesis is Only Blameworthy for Wrongs: we can only ever be blameworthy for acts that are morally wrong. I argue that on the picture presented, we can be epistemically blameworthy for doxastic states that do not violate any prescriptive epistemic norms. I then generalise the considerations to the moral realm, arguing against Only Blameworthy for Wrongs. (shrink)

We regularly make graded normative judgements in the epistemic domain. Recent work in the literature examines degrees of justification, degrees of rationality, and degrees of assertability. This paper addresses a different dimension of the gradeability of epistemic normativity, one that has been given little attention. How should we understand degrees of epistemic criticizability? In virtue of what sorts of factors can one epistemic failing be worse than another? The paper develops a dual-factor view of degrees of epistemic criticizability. According to (...) the view, degrees of epistemic criticizability are (i) an inverse function of degrees of doxastic justification and (ii) a function of degrees of agent culpability. The paper develops an account of each factor, and explains how they should be weighted. The paper also addresses the importance of modelling degrees of epistemic criticizability in a broader context. I focus on the role that such a model can play in the ethics of epistemic criticism. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze epistemic blameworthiness. After presenting Michael Bergmann’s definition of epistemic blameworthiness, I argue that his definition is problematic because it does not have a control condition. I conclude by offering an improved definition of epistemic blameworthiness and defending this definition against potential counterexamples.

This paper proposes a new theory of the nature of hypocritical blame and why it is objectionable, arguing that hypocritical blame is a form of dishonest signaling. Blaming provides very important benefits: through its ability to signal our commitments to norms and unwillingness to tolerate norm violations, it greatly contributes to valuable norm-following. Hypocritical blamers, however, are insufficiently committed to the norms or values they blame others for violating. As allowing their blame to pass unchecked threatens (...) the signaling system, our strong interest in maintaining valuable norm-following by tracking who has what commitments justifies objecting to hypocritical blame. This theory has a number of strengths over competing accounts: it delivers intuitive verdicts about when blame is objectionable across a range of cases, it is a naturalistic explanation, it is consistent with a leading theory of the nature of blame, it explains why hypocritical pronouncements that don’t feature blame are similiarly objectionable, it does not rely on contentious analyses of the nature of ‘standing’, and it preserves the common intuition that hypocrites are in some way dishonest. (shrink)

Doxastic voluntarism is the thesis that our beliefs are subject to voluntary control. While there’s some controversy as to what “voluntary control” amounts to (see 1.2), it’s often understood as direct control: the ability to bring about a state of affairs “just like that,” without having to do anything else. Most of us have direct control over, for instance, bringing to mind an image of a pine tree. Can one, in like fashion, voluntarily bring it about that one believes (...) a specific proposition? Doxastic voluntarists hold that, at least in some circumstances—such as when the evidence is ambiguous—we can. Doxastic involuntarists, in contrast, maintain that we cannot. Some involuntarists hold that the concept of belief itself precludes the possibility of believing voluntarily. Others hold that the impossibility of voluntary belief is a contingent psychological fact. Historically, the issue of doxastic voluntarism has been connected to how many think about religious commitment: a prominent view of faith is that it is a voluntary decision to believe. Furthermore, the issue of voluntarism has also been viewed as having bearing on fundamental questions in epistemology. For example, are epistemic norms duties to believe in certain ways? Are there practical or moral reasons to believe? If the answer to either question is “yes,” it seems some measure of voluntary doxastic control is required. -/- In section 1, we expand on the definition of doxastic voluntarism, and survey various kinds of control (e.g. direct, indirect, long-range) and the doxastic attitudes we might control (e.g. outright belief, withholding, credences). In section 2, we discuss a number of historical views on doxastic voluntarism. In section 3, we survey motivations for rejecting doxastic voluntarism. There are two general strategies: arguments that appeal to psychological considerations, and conceptual arguments regarding the nature of belief. In section 4, we survey five approaches to defending voluntarism: those that appeal to epistemic permissivism, doxastic compatibilism, skepticism, one-off considerations, and non-standard views of belief. In section 5, we cover empirical work on doxastic voluntarism. The last two sections discuss two implications of voluntarism. In section 6, we discuss voluntarism’s implications for the ethics of belief, and in section 7, we discuss issues at the intersection of voluntarism and religious faith. (shrink)

Blaming others for things that are not our business can attract charges of meddling and dismissals of blame. It is well known that such charges are often contentious because the content and applicability of anti-meddling norms can be difficult to nail down. This paper argues that another important source of contention is that it is often not settled in advance whether some wrongdoing is or is not the business of a would-be blamer. Thinking about the grounds of anti-meddling norms—privacy, (...) intimacy, and respect for the victim—shows that it is sometimes up to those involved to set these boundaries. Rather than pointing out violation of a pre-established anti-meddling norm, charges of meddling may be aiming to put such a norm or boundary in place. An important upshot is that anti-meddling norms, and norms of blame more generally, are often up for negotiation. This has important implications for the ethics of blame. In addition, it helps us understand a common source of conflict in interpersonal relationships. (shrink)

Blaming (construed broadly to include both blaming-attitudes and blaming-actions) is a puzzling phenomenon. Even when we grant that someone is blameworthy, we can still sensibly wonder whether we ought to blame him. We sometimes choose to forgive and show mercy, even when it is not asked for. We are naturally led to wonder why we shouldn’t always do this. Wouldn’t it be a better to wholly reject the punitive practices of blame, especially in light of their often undesirable (...) effects, and embrace an ethic of unrelenting forgiveness and mercy? In this paper I seek to address these questions by offering an account of blame that provides a rationale for thinking that to wholly forswear blaming blameworthy agents would be deeply mistaken. This is because, as I will argue, blaming is a way of valuing, it is “a mode of valuation.” I will argue that among the minimal standards of respect generated by valuable objects, notably persons, is the requirement to redress disvalue with blame. It is not just that blame is something additional we are required to do in properly valuing, but rather blame is part of what that it is to properly value. Blaming, given the existence of blameworthy agents, is mode of valuation required by the standards of minimal respect. To forswear blame would be to fail value what we ought to value. (shrink)

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)

The distinction between propositional and doxastic justification is the distinction between having justification to believe P (= propositional justification) versus having a justified belief in P (= doxastic justification). The focus of this paper is on doxastic justification and on what conditions are necessary for having it. In particular, I challenge the basing demand on doxastic justification, i.e., the idea that one can have a doxastically justified belief only if one’s belief is based on an epistemically (...) appropriate reason. This demand has been used to refute versions of coherentism and conservatism about perceptual justification as well as to defend phenomenal “conservatism” and other views besides. In what follows I argue that there is virtually no reason to think there is a basing demand on doxastic justification. I also argue that even if the basing demand were true, it would still fail to serve the dialectical purposes for which it has been employed in arguments concerning coherentism, conservatism, and phenomenal “conservatism”. I conclude by discussing the fact that knowledge has a basing demand and show why this needn’t raise the same sort of problems for coherentism and conservatism that doxastic justification’s basing demand seemed to. (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)

In the Book of Common Prayer’s Rite II version of the Eucharist, the congregation confesses, “we have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed”. According to this confession we wrong God not just by what we do and what we say, but also by what we think. The idea that we can wrong someone not just by what we do, but by what think or what we believe, is a natural one. It is the kind of wrong we feel (...) when those we love believe the worst about us. And it is one of the salient wrongs of racism and sexism. Yet it is puzzling to many philosophers how we could wrong one another by virtue of what we believe about them. This paper defends the idea that we can morally wrong one another by what we believe about them from two such puzzles. The first puzzle concerns whether we have the right sort of control over our beliefs for them to be subject to moral evaluation. And the second concerns whether moral wrongs would come into conflict with the distinctively epistemic standards that govern belief. Our answer to both puzzles is that the distinctively epistemic standards governing belief are not independent of moral considerations. This account of moral encroachment explains how epistemic norms governing belief are sensitive to the moral requirements governing belief. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe contemporary debate over responsibility for belief is divided over the issue of whether such responsibility requires doxastic control, and whether this control must be voluntary in nature. It has recently become popular to hold that responsibility for belief does not require voluntary doxastic control, or perhaps even any form of doxastic ‘control’ at all. However, Miriam McCormick has recently argued that doxastic responsibility does in fact require quasi-voluntary doxastic control: “guidance control,” a complex, compatibilist (...) form of control. In this paper, I pursue a negative and a positive task. First, I argue that grounding doxastic responsibility in guidance control requires too much for agents to be the proper targets for attributions of doxastic responsibility. I will focus my criticisms on three cases in which McCormick's account gives the intuitively wrong verdict. Second, I develop a modified conception of McCormick's notion of “ownership of belief,” which I call Weak Doxastic Ownership. I employ this conception to argue that responsibility for belief is possible even in the absence of guidance control. In doing so, I argue that the notion of doxastic ownership can do important normative work in grounding responsibility for belief without being subsumed under or analyzed in terms of the notion of doxastic control. (shrink)

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 is that skeptics need to show that it can be appropriate (or less inappropriate) to respond with this kind of disappointment to people’s conduct if it is inappropriate to respond with blame. The paper argues that current blame-skeptical views fail to meet this challenge. (shrink)

This book is about our practice of criticizing one another for epistemic failings. We clearly evaluate and critique one another for forming unjustified beliefs, harboring biases, and pursuing faulty methods of inquiry. But what is the nature of this criticism? Does it ever rise to the level of blame? The question is puzzling because there are competing sources of pressure in our intuitions about “epistemic blame,” ones not easy to reconcile. The more blame-like a response is, the (...) less at home in the epistemic domain it seems—but the more at home in the epistemic domain a response is, the less blame-like it seems. These competing sources of pressure constitute a puzzle about epistemic blame. The most promising solution to this puzzle focuses on the interpersonal side of epistemic normativity. Members of an epistemic community stand in an “epistemic relationship,” and epistemic blame is a way of modifying this relationship. Understanding epistemic blame as a distinctive kind of relationship modification locates a response that is both robustly blame-like, and entirely at home in the epistemic domain. Epistemic relationships can also illuminate a unique set of issues in the “ethics of epistemic blame,” ones that mirror corresponding issues in the ethics of moral blame. The book examines the scope of appropriate epistemic blame, standing to epistemically blame, and the value of epistemic blame in our social and political lives. Throughout the investigation, a better understanding of the parallels and points of interaction between the epistemic and other normative domains emerges. -/- **Front matter, ToC, and Introduction uploaded here**. (shrink)

Defenders of doxastic voluntarism accept that we can voluntarily commit ourselves to propositions, including belief-contravening propositions. Thus, defenders of doxastic voluntarism allow that we can choose to believe propositions that are negatively implicated by our evidence. In this paper it is argued that the conjunction of epistemic deontology and doxastic voluntarism as it applies to ordinary cases of belief-contravening propositional commitments is incompatible with evidentialism. In this paper ED and DV will be assumed and this negative result (...) will be used to suggest that voluntary belief-contravening commitments are not themselves beliefs and that these sorts of commitments are not governed by evidentialism. So, the apparent incompatibility of the package views noted above can be resolved without ceding evidentialism with respect to beliefs. (shrink)

Following the social conception of moral agency, this paper claims that many beings commonly exempted from moral responsibility, like young children, adults with late-stage dementia, and nonhuman animals, may nevertheless qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices. Blame and other moral responsibility responses are understood according to the communicative emotion account of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone means having an emotion episode that acts as a vehicle for conveying a particular moral content. Therefore, moral agency is argued (...) to be manifested in communicative exchanges between a claimant and a defendant. While many human and nonhuman agents are justifiably exempted from ascriptions of moral responsibility, this does not necessarily exclude such agents from the community of moral agents altogether. Toddlers and dogs, for instance, seem capable of other-directed reactive attitudes, like resentment, and could, therefore, qualify as participants in moral responsibility practices with respect to the claimant position. Therefore, we may have reason to adopt a distinct claimant-directed participant stance to some beings, even if they fail to qualify as apt targets of blame. This expanded theoretical room for moral agency is argued to make explicit further normative considerations. (shrink)

Blame is fascinating yet elusive, and it is both of these things because it is so complex. It seems to have a cognitive aspect (the belief that someone has done wrong, perhaps), but it also seems to have an emotional aspect (resentment at being disrespected, perhaps). And then of course there is the outside-of-the-head aspect of blame, which manifests itself in rebukes and reprimands, accusations and distrust, cold shoulders and estrangement. Still, accounts of blame that identify it (...) with beliefs or emotions seem inadequate. In this paper I draw on the work of Harry Frankfurt to suggest an alternative account, according to which blame most centrally involves changes in the structure of the will. (shrink)

When someone blames you, you might accept the blame or you might reject it, challenging the blamer’s interpretation of the facts or providing a justification or excuse. Either way, there are opportunities for edifying moral discussion and moral repair. But another common, and less constructive, response is to simply dismiss the blame, refusing to engage with the blamer. Even if you agree that you are blameworthy, you may refuse to engage with the blame—and, specifically, with blame (...) coming from this particular person. This is a common response if the blamer is being hypocritical or meddlesome in blaming the wrongdoer. This paper aims to make sense of this kind of response: What are we doing when we dismiss blame? A common thought is that we dismiss demands issued by blame, but we still must identify the content of the relevant demands. My proposal is that when we dismiss blame, we dismiss a demand to respond to the blame with a second-personal expression of remorse to the blamer. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Many important theorists – e.g., Gary Watson and Stephen Darwall – characterize blame as a communicative entity and argue that this entails that morally responsible agency requires not just rational but moral competence. In this paper, I defend this argument from communication against three objections found in the literature. The first two reject the argument’s characterization of the reactive attitudes. The third urges that the argument is committed to a false claim.

In this paper I take up the question of the nature of the doxastic attitudes we entertain while inquiring into some matter. Relying on a distinction between two stages of open inquiry, I urge to acknowledge the existence of a distinctive attitude of cognitive inclination towards a proposition qua answer to the question one is inquiring into. I call this attitude “hypothesis”. Hypothesis, I argue, is a sui generis doxastic attitude which differs, both functionally and normatively, from suspended (...) judgement, full belief, credences, and acceptance. In closing, I point to the epistemological significance of hypothesis. More specifically, I contend that holding an attitude of hypothesis enables us to respond rationally to peer disagreement, and I suggest that such an attitude offers a suitable articulation of the view, originally put forward by Philip Kitcher, that cognitive diversity in inquiry has epistemic benefits. (shrink)

1. We sometimes angrily confront, pointedly ostracize, castigate, or denounce those whom we think have committed moral offences. Conduct of this kind may be called blaming behaviour. When genuine,...

‘Reasonable wrongdoers’ reasonably, but wrongly, take themselves to act permissibly. Many responsibility theorists assume that since we cannot reasonably expect these wrongdoers to behave differently, they are not blameworthy. These theorists impose a Reasonable Expectation Condition on blame. I argue that reasonable wrongdoers may be blameworthy. It is true that we often excuse reasonable wrongdoers, but sometimes this is because we do not regard their behavior as objectionable in a way that makes blame appropriate. As such, these cases (...) do not support the proposition that wrongdoers are excused just because they reasonably take themselves to act permissibly. For the relevant support, we should consider cases in which a reasonable wrongdoer’s behavior is unambiguously objectionable by our moral lights. But here again we fail to find decisive support for the Reasonable Expectation Condition since it is not obvious—independent of a prior commitment to this condition—that such wrongdoers are not blameworthy. After laying out the above argument, as well as offering a positive account of why reasonable wrongdoers are sometimes blameworthy, I turn to consider objections. The most important of these is that it is simply unfair to blame those who reasonably take themselves to behave unobjectionably and who cannot be expected to behave otherwise. (shrink)

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 think that this goal is not achievable. Another goal is to provide the tools for solving or clarifying important social or philosophical problems. The chapter suggests that this is what theories of blame should focus on. (shrink)

In this article, I will consider whether, and in what way, doxastic states can harm. I’ll first consider whether, and in what way, a person’s doxastic state can harm her, before turning to the question of whether, and in what way, it can harm someone else.

Philosophers writing on moral responsibility inherit from P.F. Strawson a particular problem space. On one side, it is shaped by consequentialist accounts of moral criticism on which blame is justified, if at all, by its efficacy in influencing future behavior in socially desirable ways. It is by now a common criticism of such views that they suffer a "wrong kind of reason" problem. When blame is warranted in the proper way, it is natural to suppose this is because (...) the target deserves blame – thus opposing to consequentialist views of blame desert-based views. The latter, however, raise worries that blame is a form of retributive sanction whose justificatory burdens cannot be met. I evaluate T.M. Scanlon's recent attempt to maneuver this space. In doing so, I argue that although Scanlon’s relationship-impairment model of blame has clear advantages over consequentialist and desert-based alternatives, it fails: (1) to adequately appreciate the significance of person-focused emotional attitudes in constituting persons as agents subject to a nexus of normative expectations and demands, and (2) to recognize that a victim may owe nearly nothing *to* a blameworthy agent while nonetheless retaining unconditional moral obligations to act in certain ways (and forego acting in other ways) toward him. (shrink)

Continuing prior work by the author, a simple classical system for personal obligation is integrated with a fairly rich system for aretaic (agent-evaluative) appraisal. I then explore various relationships between definable aretaic statuses such as praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and deontic statuses such as obligatoriness and impermissibility. I focus on partitions of the normative statuses generated ("normative positions" but without explicit representation of agency). In addition to being able to model and explore fundamental questions in ethical theory about the connection between (...) blame, praise, permissibility and obligation, this allows me to carefully represent schemes for supererogation and kin. These controversial concepts have provided challenges to both ethical theory and deontic logic, and are among deontic logic's test cases. (shrink)

In this chapter, we argue for three theses: (1) we lack the power to form beliefs at will (i.e., directly); at very least, we lack the power to form at will beliefs of the kind that proponents of doxastic voluntarism have in mind; but (2) we possess a propensity to form beliefs for non-epistemic reasons; and (3) these propensities—once we come to know we have them—entail that we have obligations similar to those we would have were doxastic voluntarism (...) true. Specifically, we will argue that we have obligations to avoid triggering these propensities to form beliefs that are unwarranted or even immoral. (shrink)

This paper will be broken down into four sections. In §1, I try to assuage a worry that intellectual humility is not really an intellectual virtue. In §2, we will consider the two dominant accounts of intellectual humility in the philosophical literature—the low concern for status account the limitations-owing account—and I will argue that both accounts face serious worries. Then in §3, I will unpack my own view, the doxastic account of intellectual humility, as a viable alternative and potentially (...) a better starting place for thinking about this virtue. And I’ll conclude in §4 by trying to defend the doxastic account against some possible objections. (shrink)

Doxastic involuntarists, as I categorize them, say that it’s impossible to form a belief as an intentional action. But what exactly is it to form a belief, as opposed to simply getting yourself to have one? This question has been insufficiently addressed, and the lacuna threatens the involuntarists’ position: if the question isn’t answered, their view will lack any clear content; but, after considering some straightforward ways of answering it, I argue that they would make involuntarism either false or (...) insignificant. I also examine several involuntarist arguments, and find them faltering at just this point: inadequate attention to belief-formation results in unsound arguments or insignificant conclusions. The viability of involuntarism as a meaningful position, I conclude, turns on whether the notion of belief-formation can be further developed. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to challenge what is often called the “Uniqueness” thesis. According to this thesis, given one’s total evidence, there is a unique rational doxastic attitude that one can take to any proposition. It is sensible for defenders of Uniqueness to commit to an accompanying principle that: when some agent A has equal epistemic reason both to believe that p and to believe that not p, the unique epistemically rational doxastic attitude for A to (...) adopt with respect to whether p is the suspension of judgment. In this paper, I offer a case wherein the agent has equal epistemic reason both to believe that p and to believe that not p, but the agent is not epistemically required to suspend judgment about whether p. Furthermore, the case is such that there seems to be no uniquely rational attitude for the agent to adopt. (shrink)

How does character information inform judgments of blame? Some argue that character information is indirectly relevant to blame because it enriches judgments about the mental states of a wrongdoer. Others argue that character information is directly relevant to blame, even when character traits are causally irrelevant to the wrongdoing. We propose an empirical synthesis of these views: a Two Channel Model of blame. The model predicts that character information directly affects blame when this information is (...) relevant to the wrongdoing that elicits blame. Further, the effect of character information on blame depends on judgments about the true self that are independent of judgments of intentionality. Across three pre-registered studies (N = 662), we found support for all three predictions of the Two Channel Model. We propose that this reflects two distinct functions of blame: a social regulatory function that encourages norm compliance and a pedagogical function that encourages personal improvement. (shrink)

This is the first chapter to our edited collection of essays on the nature and ethics of blame. In this chapter we introduce the reader to contemporary discussions about blame and its relationship to other issues (e.g. free will and moral responsibility), and we situate the essays in this volume with respect to those discussions.

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 resulting emotion account of blame. (shrink)