A Comprehensive Account of Blame: Self-Blame, Non-Moral Blame, and Blame for the Non-Voluntary
In Andreas Brekke Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. Cambridge: (forthcoming)
Abstract
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).Author's Profile
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Citations of this work
Don't Suffer in Silence: A Self-Help Guide to Self-Blame.Hannah Tierney - forthcoming - In Andreas Brekke Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. Cambridge University Press.
Deserved Guilt and Blameworthiness over Time.Andreas Brekke Carlsson - forthcoming - In Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility.
Forgiveness, Repentance, and Diachronic Blameworthiness.Andrew C. Khoury - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (4):700-720.
Morality and Practical Reasons.Douglas W. Portmore - 2021 - Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
The Kind of Blame Skeptics Should Be Skeptical About.Leonhard Menges - 2021 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 51 (6):401-415.
References found in this work
What's the Point of Blame? A Paradigm Based Explanation.Miranda Fricker - 2016 - Noûs 50 (1):165-183.
The Rationality of Emotional Change: Toward a Process View.Oded Na'aman - 2021 - Noûs 55 (2):245-269.
The force and fairness of blame.Pamela Hieronymi - 2004 - Philosophical Perspectives 18 (1):115–148.
Moral torch fishing: A signaling theory of blame.David Shoemaker & Manuel Vargas - 2019 - Noûs:online.