Shame and Attributability

In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility Volume 6. Oxford University Press (2019)
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Abstract

Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame oneself in the attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. The different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X.

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Author's Profile

Andreas Brekke Carlsson
Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Citations of this work

The paradox of self-blame.Patrick Todd & Brian Rabern - 2022 - American Philosophical Quarterly 59 (2):111–125.
Guilty Confessions.Hannah Tierney - 2021 - In Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 182-204.

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References found in this work

Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life.Derk Pereboom - 2014 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments.R. Jay Wallace - 1994 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Responsibility From the Margins.David Shoemaker - 2015 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
Conversation and Responsibility.Michael McKenna - 2011 - , US: Oxford University Press USA.

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