The Standing To Blame, or Why Moral Disapproval Is What It Is
Dialectica 73 (1-2):183-210 (2019)
Abstract
Intuitively, we lack the standing to blame others in light of moral norms that we ourselves don't take seriously: if Adam is unrepentantly aggressive, say, he lacks the standing to blame Celia for her aggressiveness. But why does blame have this feature? Existing proposals try to explain this by reference to specific principles of normative ethics – e.g. to rule‐consequentialist considerations, to the wrongness of hypocritical blame, or principles of rights‐forfeiture based on this wrongness. In this paper, I suggest a fundamentally different approach. Employing Timothy Williamson's idea of ‘constitutive rules’ of speech acts, I argue that this feature of blame is simply constitutive of any essentially moral form of disapproval. So if Adam had the standing to disapprove of Celia's aggressiveness in some form, necessarily, this disapproval couldn't be blame. If I'm right, this proposal thus not only answers our main question, but also sheds an interesting novel light on the very nature of blame. If we didn't have a form of disapproval with that feature, we wouldn't have our practice of holding each other to moral norms.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1111/1746-8361.12262
My notes
Similar books and articles
When Hypocrisy Undermines the Standing to Blame: a Response to Rossi.Kyle G. Fritz & Daniel J. Miller - 2019 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 22 (2):379-384.
The Commitment Account of Hypocrisy.Benjamin Rossi - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (3):553-567.
Manipulation Arguments and the Standing to Blame.Matt King - 2015 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 9 (1):1-20.
Hypocritical Blame, Fairness, and Standing.Cristina Roadevin - 2018 - Metaphilosophy 49 (1-2):137-152.
Hypocrisy and the Standing to Blame.Kyle G. Fritz & Daniel Miller - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99 (1):118-139.
Resisting Todd’s Moral-Standing Zygote Argument.Michael McKenna - 2018 - Philosophical Quarterly 68 (273):657-678.
Blame: Its Nature and Norms.D. Justin Coates & Neal A. Tognazzini (eds.) - 2013 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Epistemological contextualism and the problem of moral luck.Berit Brogaard - 2003 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (4):351–370.
Analytics
Added to PP
2019-07-23
Downloads
100 (#125,586)
6 months
16 (#64,395)
2019-07-23
Downloads
100 (#125,586)
6 months
16 (#64,395)
Historical graph of downloads
Author's Profile
Citations of this work
Don’t make a fetish of faults: a vindication of moral luck.Stefan Riedener - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (3):693-711.
A Standing Asymmetry between Blame and Forgiveness.Kyle G. Fritz & Daniel J. Miller - 2022 - Ethics 132 (4):759-786.
Moral criticism, hypocrisy, and pragmatics.Y. Sandy Berkovski - 2023 - Philosophical Studies 180 (1):1-26.
Two Problems of Self-Blame for Accounts of Moral Standing.Kyle G. Fritz & Daniel J. Miller - forthcoming - Ergo.
References found in this work
Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame.Thomas Scanlon - 2008 - Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Dispositional Theories of Value.Michael Smith, David Lewis & Mark Johnston - 1989 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 63 (1):89-174.
What's the Point of Blame? A Paradigm Based Explanation.Miranda Fricker - 2016 - Noûs 50 (1):165-183.