What is that makes an act subject to either praise or blame? The question has often been taken to depend entirely on the free will debate for an answer, since it is widely agreed that an agent’s act is subject to praise or blame only if it was freely willed, but moral theory, action theory, and moral psychology are at least equally relevant to it. In the last quarter-century, following the lead of Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) seminal article “Freedom (...) of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the interdisciplinary nature of the question has been emphasized by various authors. Going beyond the boundaries of the traditional free will debate, they have attempted to describe the requirements for agent accountability by appeal to theories of personality, rational agency, and ethical choice. The approach has been a breath of fresh air in the often-stagnant free will debate, bringing new considerations to bear and provoking new lines of argument, and it is an approach that we will adopt in this paper. In the following pages, we hope to show that an under-noticed phenomenon of moral psychology, inverse akrasia, exemplified by Huckleberry Finn, has something to contribute to the understanding of agency and accountability. After presenting the phenomenon in section I, we will move in section II to a quick survey of a family of Frankfurt-inspired views and a critique of them based on the phenomenon in sections III and IV. A new theory will be offered in section V, and potential objections addressed in the final section of the paper. (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)

Consequentialism has been challenged on the grounds that it is too demanding. I will respond to the problem of demandingness differently from previous accounts. In the first part of the paper, I argue that consequentialism requires us to distinguish the justification of an act \ from the justification of an act \, where \ is an act of praise or blame. In the second part of the paper, I confront the problem of demandingness. I do not attempt to rule (...) out the objection; instead, I argue that if certain plausible empirical claims about moral motivation are true, we morally ought not to blame people for failing to meet certain very demanding obligations. With this theory, we create a space in consequentialism for intuitions questioning the plausibility of demanding obligations. I conclude the paper by showing that separate justifications for \ and \ may also give us a theoretical niche for intuitions about supererogation. (shrink)

Recently David Widerker argued that from the widely accepted ought implies can principle one can deduce the controversial and much discussed principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). Actually, he argues that this result is true only of the part of PAP which deals with moral blame. Because there are acts of supererogation, he maintains that it does not apply to the part which deals with moral praise. What Widerker says about supererogation seems true, and I develop and expand upon this (...) idea in the first half of the paper. Then I argue that Widerker's argument regarding moral blame fails. (shrink)

Recent empirical research by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in judgements about intentional action and moral responsibility. First, people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Secondly, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These findings suggest that the notion of intentional action (...) has a normative component. I propose a theory of intentional action on which one acts intentionally if one fails to be motivated to avoid a bad effect. This explains the asymmetry concerning intentional action. The praise–blame asymmetry is explained in terms of the claim that praise depends on being appropriately motivated, whereas blame does not. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Listening to Reason”:The Role of Persuasion in Aristotle’s Account of Praise, Blame, and the VoluntaryAllen SpeightAristotle connects praise and blame closely to the voluntary, but the question of how his discussion of these terms should be construed more broadly in the context of a theory of responsibility has been much disputed. There are some well-known difficulties with the coherence of Aristotle's views in this regard: animals and (...) children, for example, are said to be voluntary agents, but are not held to be responsible;1 moreover, praise and blame seem to be important for what might be thought to be incompatible purposes—on the one hand, for behavioral improvement and correction (a usually prospective concern) and, on the other hand, for assessment of moral responsibility in terms of what an agent merits or deserves for what he or she has done (a retrospective concern).2One of Aristotle's first examples of the use of praise and blame in the Nicomachean Ethics captures some of the difficulty commentators have found in trying to understand his position. In drawing an analogy to illustrate the difference between parts of the soul, Aristotle comments that "in morally strong and morally weak men we praise (epainoumen) the reason that guides them and the rational element of the soul, because it exhorts them to follow the right path and to do what is best" (NE 1102b13-15). There is, he thus claims, an appetitive part of the soul thatpartakes of reason insofar as it complies with reason and accepts its leadership (hē(i) katēkoon estin autou kai peitharchikon); it possesses reason in the sense that we say it is "reasonable" to accept the advice of a father and of friends, not in the sense that we have a "rational" understanding of mathematical propositions. That the irrational element can be persuaded (peithetai) by the rational is shown by the fact that admonition (nouthetēsis) and all manner of rebuke (epitimēsis) and exhortation (paraklēsis) are possible. If it is correct to say that the appetitive part, too, has reason, it follows that the rational element of the soul has two subdivisions: the one possesses reason in the [End Page 213] strict sense, contained within itself, and the other possesses reason in the sense that it listens to reason as one would listen to a father.(NE 1102b31-1103a)I will argue that this image of listening and persuasion is more significant for Aristotle's conceptions of voluntariness and responsibility than is often thought. The image suggests not only that Aristotle is interested in both prospective moral education and retrospective assessments of responsibility, but that a crucial (and, in the literature to this point, quite neglected) term that he offers as a gloss for understanding his conception of the voluntary—the notion of peithō or persuasion—is in fact central to his employment of the categories of praise and blame in both prospective and retrospective senses. Aristotle's use of the concept of persuasion is not merely a casual gloss, but gives him instead an unusually helpful category for understanding the range of types of action within his philosophy of agency and how they fit within the larger scheme of parts of the soul in the Ethics and the distinctions among actions that stem from virtue, vice, moral weakness, and moral strength.In what follows, I will first examine how Aristotle uses peithō to explain the related notions of the voluntary (as to hekousion is usually translated) and the noncompulsory in the Nicomachean Ethics, III.5, and the Eudemian Ethics, II.8. I will then explore how Aristotle appeals to peithō and its cognates to address one of the most vexing problems his theory of voluntary agency must work out—the problem of akrasia and enkrateia (moral weakness and moral strength)—and, next, more widely how these related concepts become relevant for his account of the parts of the soul and gradations of action.I. Persuasion and the Voluntary (EE II.8 and NE III.5)Aristotle appears to link closely the notions of voluntariness (to hekousion)and persuasion (hē peithō).Bonitz's Index takes the two terms straightforwardly... (shrink)

We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal that the (...) blameworthy artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. We can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, from lip-synching to long division, from murders to meringues, but the relation involved, what author Matt King calls the basic responsibility relation, is the same in every case. We are responsible for the things we do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they're good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Why is this a radical proposal? Firstly, because so much of the contemporary literature on moral responsibility has moralized its nature. According to most accounts, moral responsibility is either a special species of responsibility or else depends on moralized capacities. In contrast, King argues that we get a more complete and unifying picture of responsible agency from a more general theory of responsibility. Secondly, the proposal is radical due to its drastic simplicity. King foregoes many of the complications that feature in other accounts of responsibility, arguing that we can make do with less demanding theoretical elements. (shrink)

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseperable from morality itself - that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation (...) of those who violate the principles. Properly understood, blame and morality must stand or fall together. (shrink)

In his In Praise of Blame, George Sher aims to provide an analysis and defense of blame. In fact, he aims to provide an analysis that will itself yield a defense by allowing him to argue that morality and blame "stand or fall together." He thus opposes anyone who recommends jettisoning blame while preserving morality. In this comment, I examine Sher's defense of blame. Though I am much in sympathy with Sher's strategy of defending (...) class='Hi'>blame by providing an analysis that shows its connection to our commitment to morality, I question his execution of this strategy. Sher hopes to defend our blaming practices by showing our dispositions to them to be a merely contingent consequence of a belief-desire pair that is itself justified by whatever justifies our commitment to morality. I doubt our blaming practices can be defended in this way. In explaining my doubts, I provide a short comparison of Sher's approach with that of P. F. Strawson in "Freedom of Resentment." I suggest that we might do better by exploring the connection between our commitment to morality and our blaming practices themselves. (shrink)

Introduction -- The beginnings of human judgment -- The chemistry, economics, and psychology of praise -- Blame: the necessity and devastation of guilt and shame -- Family judgments, family systems -- Just friends: praise and blame between peers -- Intimate judgments: praise and blame within couples -- Professional dues: praise and blame in the workplace -- Social media and the new challenges to our judgment meter -- Lifelong judgments.

We praise people for morally good things: giving to charity, being generous, having compassion for the needy. We blame for morally bad things: cheating on one’s spouse, being selfish, harboring ill will towards others. What are praise and blame, though? When are they appropriate? This essay reviews influential answers to these questions.

Recent writers in feminist ethics have been concerned to find ways to reclaim and augment women's moral agency. This essay considers Sarah Hoagland's intriguing suggestion that we renounce moral praise and blame and pursue what she calls an "ethic of intelligibility." I argue that the eschewal of moral blame would not help but rather hinder our efforts to increase our sense of moral agency. It would, I claim, further intensify our demoralization.

Daniel Robinson suggests that much of the civil and criminal law "serves as the institutionalized form of praise and blame". Indeed it does. Pulling at this thread of Robinson's tapestry leads the reader straightaway to a host of truths about how law and morality not only intersect, but work together in harmony. "[L]aw", Robinson says, is a "vivid expression of deeper and impenetrably complex moral theories". This essay explores several of these harmonies, but focuses on two. One is that (...) political society must be seen as the cooperation of free persons according to law, which persons hold common moral understandings. The second has to do with retribution as the moral justifying aim of punishing criminals. The author goes beyond Robinson's limited praise of retribution, and shows that some central features of our practice of punishment are understandable only within the retributive framework. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This encyclopedia entry contrasts three influential philosophical accounts of our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might be justified. On the one hand, a broadly Kantian approach sees responsibility for actions as relying on forms of self-control that point back to the idea of free will. On this account praise and blame are justified because a person freely chooses her actions. Praise and blame respond to the person as the chooser of her (...) deed; they recognise her dignity as a rational agent, as Kantians tend to put it. This approach sharply contrasts with two further ways of thinking about the issues. One is utilitarian, where praise and blame are justified in terms of their social benefits. Another, more complex approach is roughly Aristotelian. This approach situates practices of praise and blame in terms of our on-going relationships with one another. This approach stresses the importance of mutual accountability, moral education, and assessments of character in terms of the many vices and virtues. (shrink)

L. C. Holborow; V*—Blame, Praise and Credit, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 85–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

In this article I try to refute the so-called "libertarian" theory of free will, and to examine how our conclusion ought to modify our common attitudes of praise and blame. In attacking the libertarian view, I shall try to show that it cannot be consistently stated. That is, my dscussion will be an "analytic-philosophic" one. I shall neglect what I think is in practice an equally powerful method of attack on the libertarian: a challenge to state his theory in (...) such a way that it will fit in the modern biology and psychology, which are becoming increasingly physicalistic. (shrink)

"This book is a significant contribution to the analytic study of ethics, to the history of ethics, and to the growing field of philosophical psychology.

The article presented a panegyric reading of the Sermon on the Plain in the Malawian context. It observed that, unlike its Matthean counterpart, the Sermon holds an insignificant place in African hermeneutics. Based on the Sermon’s structure and content the article proposed the Greco-Roman panegyric, whose function was to inculcate commonly held values, as a framework for reading of the Sermon. It argued that when read in its original context as a Greco-Roman panegyric, the Sermon’s radical stance on poverty and (...) riches had significant implications for African and Malawian socio-economic realities. It brought into light the complicated relationships between the poor and rich both among Luke’s original audience and the contemporary Malawian context. The panegyric reading of the Sermon also had a significant bearing on the application of the ubuntu philosophy in socio-economic interrelationships in Malawi. The article posited that the socio-economic inequalities in Malawi caused by corrupt, cronyism and nepotism not only challenge the majority Christian status of the nation but also the foundations of the African values of ubuntu. As a panegyric, the Sermon therefore challenges Malawian Christians to rethink their values and the relationship between the rich and the poor.Contribution: The article provides a new perspective to the interpretation of the Sermon on the Plain in African context. Against the background of its apparent neglect in African hermeneutics, the article underscores the relevance of the Sermon on the Plain to -socio-economic discourse in Malawi in particular and Africa in general. (shrink)

Women's underrepresentation in leadership positions in scientific and business life has been explained in organizational theory from several perspectives, all of which agree that women nowadays are highly qualified for leadership posts. Women are a relatively new phenomenon in this particuler sphere of work life. But long-term figurational approaches provide an explanation for the persistence of women's underrepresentation. Being an outsider in leadership positions implies ambiguity and an ambivalent fluctuation between stigmatization and counter-stigmatization. The present study uses Norbert Elias's Established (...) and Outsiders model to understand the complex polyphony in the movement of ascending and descending groups in leading positions, which are traditionally constructed as a `Man's World'. Referring to 18th-century books on etiquette through to present-day career guides, the author traces behavioural codes in gender and business life. (shrink)

We frequently praise or blame people for what they believe or fail to believe as a result of their having investigated some matter thoroughly, or, in the case of blame, for having failed to investigate it, or for carelessly or insufficiently investigating. for instance, physicists who, after years of toil, uncover some unknown fact about our universe are praised for what they come to know. sometimes, in contrast, we blame and may even despise our friends for being (...) ignorant of certain ecological facts as a result of their refusing to countenance the evidence. the purpose of this paper is to explore what underlies the legitimacy of this practice—the praise or blame of people for what they know or fail to know as a result of investigation or otherwise—namely, the ability to exercise control over one’s doxastic states, and, in particular, as i will argue, one’s ability to exercise indirect generic control over one’s doxastic states. (shrink)

A summary of the major arguments of PRAISE AND BLAME, both critical and constructive, is offered. The overarching objectives of the book are set forth, making clear the radical form of moral realism defended. Additional material is presented to justify the attention paid to historical vs. contemporary alternatives to moral realism, the latter found to be at once indebted to the former but often less developed. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

In his recent book, In Praise of Blame, George Sher argues (among other things) that a bad act can reflect negatively on a person if that act results in an appropriate way from that person's "character," and defends a novel "two-tiered" account of what it is to blame someone. In these brief comments, I raise some questions and doubts about each of these aspects of his rich and thought-provoking account.

Robinson brings to his defense of moral realism credentials in both philosophy and psychology, honed over a lifetime of learning. The former chairman of the Psychology Department and Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Georgetown University, he is currently a Member of the Philosophy Faculty, Oxford University, and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University. At once at home in classical antiquity and contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, Robinson has among his many published works books entitled Aristotle’s Psychology, Intellectual History of Psychology, Psychology and Law: (...) Can Justice Survive the Social Sciences, and Wild Beasts and Idle Humors: The Insanity Defense from Antiquity to the Present. (shrink)

There is little work of a systematic nature in ethical theory or deontic logic on aretaic notions such as praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, despite their centrality to common-sense morality. Without more work, there is little hope of filling the even larger gap of attempting to develop frameworks integrating such aretaic concepts with deontic concepts of common-sense morality, such as what is obligatory, permissible, impermissible, or supererogatory. It is also clear in the case of aretaic concepts that agency is central to such (...) appraisal, so some agential notions must be integrated with aretaic concepts as well. The current paper takes the first step in a larger project aimed at the closure of these gaps. Here I sketch a simple framework for the aretaic appraisal of an agent's performance, layered on top of a simple framework for agency and predetermination. In Part I, I develop the framework for agency, ability, and inevitability, combining elements of work by Brown, Elgesem, Carmo, Santos, and Jones. In Part II, drawing on work by Chisholm and Sosa on intrinsic preferability, I sketch and explore a framework for defining aretaic superiority, praiseworthiness, blameworthiness, neutrality, and indifference, etc., retaining proper links to agency. (shrink)

Through critical examination of three main contemporary approaches to describing moral responsibility, this book illustrates why philosophers must take into account the relationship between retrospective moral responsibility and desert of praise or blame. The author advances the moral attitude account, whereby desert of praise and blame depends on the agent’s moral attitudes in response to moral reasons, and retrospective moral responsibility results from expressions of those attitudes in overt behavior.

This chapter introduces readers to the view that praise is a form of address, or is communicative in the sense of seeking uptake from its target. The proposal that praise is communicative will seem counterintuitive if we take blame to be our paradigm of what it is for a responsibility-response to be communicative. This is because blame is communicative in a manner that intuitively presupposes some normative failure; it involves calling its target to account (or answer) for some (...) wrongdoing. But, the ‘rightdoer’ already properly regarded the relevant reasons in acting praiseworthily. So, there is nothing for which the praiseworthy agent must similarly account or answer for. How then could praise be communicative in sense of seeking uptake from its target? This chapter develops the view that praise is communicative in that it invites the praiseworthy agent to accept credit by co-valuing their action in the evaluative terms supplied by the praiser. This proposal is defended against three objections, namely that it is descriptively inadequate regarding our actual practices, that it is morally mistaken about when we owe others a response, and that it implies redundant communication. (shrink)

In a celebrated experiment, Joshua Knobe showed that people are much more prone to attribute intentionality to an agent for a side effect of a given act when that side effect is harmful than when it is beneficial. This asymmetry has become known as ‘the Knobe Effect’. According to Knobe's Moral Valence Explanation, bad effects trigger the attributions of intentionality, whereas good effects do not. Many others believe that the Knobe Effect is best explained in terms of the high amount (...) of blame attributed in the harm condition, and the low amount of praise attributed in the help condition. This Blame Hypothesis explains the high number of intentionality attributions in the harm condition in terms of the high degree of blame people ascribe, and the low number of intentionality attributions in the help conditions in terms of the low degree of praise people attribute. We replicated Knobe's original experiment and conducted a logistic regression on the results to probe more deeply into the relationship between attributions of intentionality and responsibility. The statistical analysis revealed a hitherto unknown interaction effect: intentionality correlates with blame, but not with praise. This interaction effect is consistent with the Moral Valence Hypothesis, but inconsistent with the Blame Hypothesis, as well as with two of the three other hypotheses discussed here. (shrink)

Praise and blame are the two currents that wend their way through writings about women from antiquity to modern times. Is woman Eve or Mary, “virtue or venom”? This unresolvable question gave rise to a debate structure that governs many texts dealing with women. Indeed, as Monique Engel observed, this structure points to an ideological impasse, a fundamental contradiction within Christian doctrine on women and marriage. One late-fourteenth-century writer who inscribes himself into this structure is Jean le Fèvre de (...) Ressons, who translated the Lamentations by the misogynist Matheolus and wrote its counterpart, the Livre de Leesce which he designed as a refutation of Matheolus. The Livre de Leesce forms part of the tradition of the praise of women, represented in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by such texts as Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours and Le livre de la cité des dames, and Martin le Franc's Champion des dames. (shrink)

Presentation and discussion of two new experimental studies surveying intuitions about cases of moral ignorance due to childhood deprivation. Discussion of resulting asymmetry between negative and positive cases and proposal of speculative hypothesis to explain results, The Difficulty Hypothesis.

This paper argues that praise is governed by a norm of standing, namely the evaluative commitment condition. Even when the target of praise is praiseworthy and known to be so by the praiser, praise can be inappropriate owing to the praiser’s lacking the relevant evaluative commitment. I propose that uncommitted praisers lack the standing to praise in that, owing to their lack of commitment to the relevant value, they have not earned the right to host the co-valuing that is the (...) communicative aim of praise. (shrink)

This essay discusses how Confucianism can deal with two related issues of virtue ethics and moral responsibility: praise and blame. We normally praise a person because the person has done something difficult, but a virtuous person does the virtuous things effortlessly, delightfully, and with great ease. Thus the question arises regarding whether such actions are indeed praiseworthy. We can blame a person for doing something wrong only if the person does it knowingly. However, according to virtue ethics, anyone (...) who has genuine moral knowledge acts virtuously, and anyone who does not act virtuously, or acts viciously, only because the person does not have the genuine moral knowledge. Thus the question arises regarding whether such actions are blameworthy. (shrink)

Philosophers have had a lot to say about blame, much less about praise. In this paper, I follow some recent authors in arguing that this is a mistake. However, unlike these recent authors, the reasons I identify for scrutinising praise are to do with the ways in which praise is, systematically, unjustly apportioned. Specifically, drawing on testimony and findings from social psychology, I argue that praise is often apportioned in ways that reflect and entrench existing structures of oppression. Articulating (...) what is going wrong here helps us to see what to do about it. (shrink)