Why does someone, S, deserve blame or reproach for an action or event? One part of a standard answer since Aristotle: the event was caused, at least in part, by S’s bad will. But recently there’s been some insightful discussion of cases where the event’s causes do not include any bad will from S and yet it seems that S is not off the hook for the event. Cheshire Calhoun, Miranda Fricker, Elinor Mason, David Enoch, Randolph Clarke, and (...) others include in this category some cases of glitches, forgetfulness, inattentiveness, the actions of one’s children or one’s country, and certain instances of explicit bias and implicit bias. Enoch and Mason argue that in these cases S should extend the realm of S’s responsibility. Drawing on Aristotle’s emphases on retrospective attitudes and the non-voluntary, this paper attempts to clarify the relation between quality of will and blameworthiness. I analyze cases where (1) S is clearly not morally responsible for an action or event, E, yet (2) S deserves reproach for E unless S has the appropriate retrospective attitudes (such as regret) or the absence of inappropriate attitudes toward E. (shrink)

In the study reported in their rich article, Brandenburg and Strijbos investigate the attitudes of clinicians, in a facility for adults with autism, to norm transgressions by service users. In doing so they interrogate Hanna Pickard’s responsibility without blame approach to therapy and ask whether it applies across different clinical settings.Pickard draws a distinction between responsibility for an action in the sense of being the agent of the action and so, by definition, having some control over it, and moral (...) responsibility for an action which includes being blameworthy for it. For Pickard, you can be responsible for a harmful action without being morally responsible and therefore blameworthy. You might... (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.

Benjamin Bagley ('Properly Proleptic Blame', Ethics 127, July 2017) sets out a dilemma for addressed blame, that is, blame addressed to its targets as an implicit demand for recognition. The dilemma arises when we ask whether offenders would actually appreciate this demand, via a sound deliberative route from their existing motivations. If they would, their offense reflects a deliberative mistake. If they wouldn't, addressing them is futile, and blame's emotional engagement seems unwarranted. Bagley wants to resolve (...) the dilemma in such a way that addressed blame's distinctive elements of hostility and emotional engagement can be accounted for. I argue that Bagley's focus on the proleptic character of addressed blame helps to avoid the dilemma, but that Bagley has difficulties accounting for the element of hostility in addressed blame. I suggest that an alternative account of addressed blame makes better sense of Bagley's paradigm example, avoids Bagley's dilemma in the way Bagley's original solution does, because it preserves addressed blame's proleptic character, and can account for addressed blame's elements of emotional engagement and hostility. (shrink)

In her commentary, Kennett helpfully reiterates Pickard’s criticism of Strawsonian theories of blame. Angry forms of blame like resentment are, according to Pickard, characterized by a sense of entitlement and are counterproductive to therapy. Some disagree that entitlement is a necessary condition for emotional blame, but also more permissive understandings of Strawsonian emotional blame have been considered inappropriate and counterproductive in a therapeutic relationship and on a psychiatric ward.We proposed to bracket definitional issues about the meaning (...) of emotional blame and instead looked at the possible therapeutic role of negative affect in clinical settings. Our paper conceptualizes... (shrink)

Individuals unvaccinated against COVID-19 (C19) experienced prejudice and blame for the pandemic. Because people vastly overestimate C19 risks, we examined whether these negative judgements could be partially understood as a form of scapegoating (ie, blaming a group unfairly for an undesirable outcome) and whether political ideology (previously shown to shape risk perceptions in the USA) moderates scapegoating of the unvaccinated. We grounded our analyses in scapegoating literature and risk perception during C19. We obtained support for our speculations through two (...) vignette-based studies conducted in the USA in early 2022. We varied the risk profiles (age, prior infection, comorbidities) and vaccination statuses of vignette characters (eg, vaccinated, vaccinated without recent boosters, unvaccinated, unvaccinated-recovered), while keeping all other information constant. We observed that people hold the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated) more responsible for negative pandemic outcomes and that political ideology moderated these effects: liberals (vs conservatives) were more likely to scapegoat the unvaccinated (vs vaccinated), even when presented with information challenging the culpability of the unvaccinated known at the time of data collection (eg, natural immunity, availability of vaccines, time since last vaccination). These findings support a scapegoating explanation for a specific group-based prejudice that emerged during the C19 pandemic. We encourage medical ethicists to examine the negative consequences of significant C19 risk overestimation among the public. The public needs accurate information about health issues. That may involve combating misinformation that overestimates and underestimates disease risk with similar vigilance to error. (shrink)

The Culpable Control Model assumes that causal judgments are irrational: a negative evaluative reaction to an agent would lead individuals to overestimate his causal contribution to a harm. However, the extent to which these judgments deviate from criteria of rationality remains unclear. The two present studies aimed at investigating conditions under which this effect occurs. Participants red a vignette in which the evaluative reaction was operationalized through the agent’s motives (blameworthy, laudable). We also varied the causal link between the agent’s (...) action and the outcome (strong, weak, preempted). In both studies, we found that negative motives influenced causal judgments when a strong action-outcome link could be established. In Study 2, we replicated the effect of motives on causal judgment in the weak link condition. However, participants consistently judged the agent as less causal when the link was weak (vs. strong), regardless of the agent’s motives. These findings show that both the presence and the strength of the actual causal link between the action and the outcome moderate the detrimental effect of negative evaluative reactions on causal judgments. Thus, common sense causal judgments seem to deviate relatively little from the criteria of rationality. (shrink)

What should we believe if epistemic and practical reasons for belief point in different directions? I argue that there’s no single answer, but rather a Dualism of Theoretical and Practical Reason is true: what we epistemically ought to believe and what we practically ought to believe may come apart, and both are independently authoritative. I argue in particular against recently popular views that subordinate the epistemic to the practical: it’s not the case that epistemic reasons bear on what we ‘just (...) plain ought’ to believe just to the extent we have practical reason to believe epistemically correctly. Why? Because epistemic reasons give rise to authoritative demands independently of the practical pay-off of believing accordingly. This is shown in particular by the fact that it can be fitting to epistemically ‘blame’ us just because we fail to believe as we epistemically ought, even if we don’t have sufficient practical reason to believe so. I also argue that we don’t need to come up with what we ‘just plain ought’ to believe, because contrary epistemic and practical responsibility responses can be simultaneously fitting in conflict cases, and because epistemic and practical ought judgments give rise to different enkrasia requirements, among other things. (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).

Several philosophers think that we do not have duties to believe but that we can nevertheless sometimes be held to blame for our beliefs, since duties relevant to belief are exclusively duties to critical reflection. One important line of argument for this claim goes as follows: we at most have influence over our beliefs such that we are not responsible for belief, but responsible for the acts of critical reflection that influence them. We can be blameworthy not just for (...) violating a duty but also for the obtaining of a state of affairs that would not have obtained had we not violated a duty. We can thus also be blameworthy for our beliefs even though we have no duties to believe. The chapter levies several objections to this argument, and then defends an alternative argument for the same conclusion. Roughly stated, the argument goes: if S has a duty to believe that p, then S has a duty to reflect on whether p. But duties to reflect on whether p always undercut duties to believe that p. Thus, the duties relevant to belief are always duties to critical reflection. (shrink)

Antisemitism is on the rise. Recently, discussions have considered so-called “no-go zones for Jews” (city areas Jews should avoid to reduce the likelihood of being attacked). In this context and drawing from attribution theory, we examined if news consumers perceive a Jewish hate crime victim as partly responsible for being attacked when news coverage explicitly emphasizes that the victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) in a certain inner-city location. We conducted a quota-based survey experiment (N = 392) in Germany (4 groups, (...) between-subjects design) and randomly exposed participants to news coverage about an anti-Semitic attack. The article either emphasized that the Jewish victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) or not, and highlighted the specific location of the attack (Berlin synagogue vs. deprived inner-city district of Berlin). Moderated mediation analysis suggested that participants perceived the victim’s behavior to be more provocative when the news article highlighted that the victim displayed religious symbols and when the attack occurred in a deprived Berlin district. Yet, effects were only detected for individuals with low (vs. high) levels of education. Perceived provocativeness in turn increased victim blaming indicating that some individuals indirectly regarded the Jewish victim to be partly responsible for being attacked. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Sartre's biography of Jean Genet, Saint Genet Actor and Martyr, can serve as an instrument of liberation for pariahs living today. Like Sartre, I define the word "pariah" to mean people who have suffered trauma in their lives and who are internally and socially oppressed as a consequence. Saint Genet's power to free us arises paradoxically out of the conservative aspects for which it has been criticized in the last few years. I am referring (...) especially to reproaches that Sartre makes things up about Genet's childhood just to suit his theories. In this paper, I also broaden the use of the term "pariah" to include some people who have only recently begun receiving respectful recognition such as survivors of domestic violence and child abuse, as well as female sufferers of depression. My views are inspired by research done in Sartre and Genet studies and also, by information provided so generously by fellow-pariahs and supporters in the medical field. (shrink)

We extend attribution and stakeholder theory in the context of crisis reputation management by examining differences in stakeholder perceptions in the form of organization-related blame. We presented eight stakeholder groups with factual information surrounding the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and asked them to indicate the extent to which they blamed the leaders and organizations associated with the event. Stakeholders also completed a survey assessing their attribution styles. Results indicated that perceptions of blame were affected by the interaction of (...) stakeholder role (i.e., active vs. passive) with attribution style (i.e., optimistic vs. pessimistic). Our results suggest that organizational leaders’ understanding of their stakeholders may be an important aspect in managing stakeholders’ sensemaking during crises. (shrink)

We examine the British newspapers' coverage of the death of Princess Diana and its immediate aftermath. Our main focus is on how the press dealt with the issue of their own potential culpability, as a feature of news reporting itself. The press deployed a series of descriptive categories and rhetorical oppositions, including regular press vs paparazzi; tabloid vs broadsheet; British vs foreign; supply vs demand ; and a number of general purpose devices such as a contrast between emotional reactions and (...) considered judgments. The study has two major aims: to analyse the textual workings of the press, as a medium of factual reportage operating within a range of normative requirements for factual objectivity, public concern, responsible journalism, meeting readers' demands, etc.; and to contribute to a generally applicable discourse analytic approach to how factual reports are assembled, used, and undermined, in an interplay of description and accountability. (shrink)

Workplace ostracism is a prevalent and painful experience. The majority of studies focus on negative outcomes of ostracism, with less work examining employees’ potential adaptive responses to it. Further, scholars have suggested that such responses depend on employee attributions, yet little research has taken an attributional perspective on workplace ostracism. Drawing on sociometer theory and attribution theory we develop and test a model that investigates why and under what circumstances ostracized employees engage in adaptive responses to ostracism. Specifically, we argue (...) that ostracized employees feel greater levels of shame and, in turn, are motivated to engage in greater ingratiation behavior toward their ostracizers. However, we predict that perceptions of ostracizers’ competence and warmth shape different attributional processes, which influence the degree to which the ostracized employee experience shame and, in turn, is motivated to engage in ingratiation behavior. Results of a three-wave, time-lagged survey support our prediction that shame mediates the relationship between coworker ostracism and ingratiation behavior. Moreover, results support our three-way interaction, such that coworkers who report higher levels of ostracism and who perceive their coworkers as more (vs. less) competent and more (vs. less) warm report higher shame, and, in turn, ingratiation behavior. Theoretical and practical implications, as well as avenues for future research, are discussed. (shrink)

Gerald Odonis and Francis of Marchia, both Franciscan masters of theology active in the early fourteenth century, played an important role in the controversies that split the Franciscan Order as a result of Pope John XXII's decisions concerning the theory of religious poverty. They fought on opposite fronts: Odonis was elected Minister General after the deposition of Michael of Cesena, whom Francis supported in the struggle against the pope. This paper reconstructs the different stages at which Francis became a target (...) of Odonis' repressive actions against his dissident former confreres, from the first mention of Francis' name in the lists of rebels to the letter Quid niteris, where Odonis reproaches Francis for his purported violations of the Franciscan Rule. Odonis most probably intentionally avoided entering the slippery ground of the poverty controversy and preferred attacking Francis on ecclesio-political issues. (shrink)

Gerald Odonis and Francis of Marchia, both Franciscan masters of theology active in the early fourteenth century, played an important role in the controversies that split the Franciscan Order as a result of Pope John XXII's decisions concerning the theory of religious poverty. They fought on opposite fronts: Odonis was elected Minister General after the deposition of Michael of Cesena, whom Francis supported in the struggle against the pope. This paper reconstructs the different stages at which Francis became a target (...) of Odonis' repressive actions against his dissident former confreres, from the first mention of Francis' name in the lists of rebels to the letter Quid niteris, where Odonis reproaches Francis for his purported violations of the Franciscan Rule. Odonis most probably intentionally avoided entering the slippery ground of the poverty controversy and preferred attacking Francis on ecclesio-political issues. (shrink)

This paper questions the moral foundations of the equal war-right to kill in international law. Although there seems to be a moral difference between fighting a just and unjust war, this need not reflect on our moral assessment of soldiers, since unjust combatants can be non-culpable by virtue of excuse. Under the aspect of immunity from blame, an equal war-right to kill is upheld, and belligerent equality restored among innocents. It must therefore be proven that innocent threats can be (...) justifiably killed. If this fails, there is nothing about the people who kill and are killed in war that justifies their killing. This leads to a strong presumption against war and to question the notion of just war. Further, there should be an incentive to increase protection of combatants in war. (shrink)

This paper argues for a comprehensive conception of empathy as comprising epistemic, affective, and motivational elements and introduces the ancient Stoic theory of attachment as a model for describing the embodied, emotional response to others that we take to be distinctive of empathy. Our argument entails that in order to provide a suitable conceptual framework for the interdisciplinary study of empathy one must extend the scope of recent “simulationalist” and “enactivist” accounts of empathy in two important respects. First, against the (...) enactivist assumption that human mindreading capacities primarily rely on an immediate, quasi-perceptual understanding of other’s intentional states, we draw on Alfred Schutz’ analysis of social understanding to argue that reflective types of understanding play a distinct, but equally fundamental role in empathic engagements. Second, we insist that empathy also involves an affective response toward the other and their situation. We suggest analyzing this response in terms of the Stoic concepts of attachment, concern, and a fundamental type of prosocial motivation, that can best be described as an “extended partiality.” By way of conclusion, we integrate the above concepts into a comprehensive conceptual framework for the study of empathy and briefly relate them to current debates about empathic perception and prosocial motivation. The result, we argue, is an account that stays neutral with regard to the exact nature of the processes involved in producing empathy and can therefore accommodate discussion across theoretical divides—e.g., those between enactivist, simulationalist, and so-called theory-theorist approaches. (shrink)

Moral judgment depends critically on theory of mind, reasoning about mental states such as beliefs and intentions. People assign blame for failed attempts to harm and offer forgiveness in the case of accidents. Here we use fMRI to investigate the role of ToM in moral judgment of harmful vs. helpful actions. Is ToM deployed differently for judgments of blame vs. praise? Participants evaluated agents who produced a harmful, helpful, or neutral outcome, based on a harmful, helpful, or neutral (...) intention; participants made blame and praise judgments. In the right temporo-parietal junction, and, to a lesser extent, the left TPJ and medial prefrontal cortex, the neural response reflected an interaction between belief and outcome factors, for both blame and praise judgments: The response in these regions was highest when participants delivered a negative moral judgment, i.e., assigned blame or withheld praise, based solely on the agent's intent. These results show enhanced attention to mental states for negative moral verdicts based exclusively on mental state information. (shrink)

We sometimes blame persons, and we sometimes give them credit for the emotions they feel. We could, for example, speak of feeling hatred, resentment or envy as “reprehensible” in suitable circumstances, or say “He's to blame for feeling that way.” We could speak of feeling sympathy, affection or indignation as “commendable” in suitable circumstances, or say “He deserves credit for feeling that way.” And it is not just that we are assessing such emotion as somehow good or bad (...) — in addition we may reproach or censure a person for the emotions he feels, or we may regard it as a credit to him that he feels as he does. In short, we apportion or impute responsibility to persons sometimes for the emotions they feel, and one important indication of this fact is in the sorts of judgments we can make about emotions. (shrink)

This paper argues that the Encomium of Helen must be seen as a speech about the value and importance of wisdom in human life and not as much as one as about logos. Gorgias sustains his vision based on a certain intellectualism which reduces moral faults to intellectual errors. This intellectualist program comprises a rationalization of emotions and a commitment with a certain tradition that discriminates between a minority with knowledge and a majority with only opinion. The consequence for Helen (...) is that she can be excused from her action at the expense of being reproached for her lack of wisdom and is thus relegated to the ignorant majority. Therefore, what is initially praise and an apology turns into severe blame. For this, I argue, the encomium can be qualified as an amusement (paignion). For the Encomium’s listeners the amusement becomes a challenge that demands they decipher the speech’s paradoxical character and appeal to their own wisdom to not be reproached like Helen. Thus the Encomium cannot be seen as a treaty nor as mere joke but rather as an intellectual agôn between the speech and the listener, which serves them “to arm the soul for contests of excellence”, as the epigram dedicated to Gorgias in Delfos says. (shrink)

Communication and cultivation accounts of responsibility argue that blaming has an important communicative and agency-cultivating function when addressed at someone we consider to be deserving of blame. On these accounts, responsible agents are agents who can understand negative reactive attitudes and are sensitive to their moral-agency cultivating function. In this paper I examine our reproachful engagements with agents whose moral agency is underdeveloped or compromised. I discuss how these engagements compare to blaming on CC accounts and argue reproachful engagements (...) can have an important communicative and agency-cultivating pointe. I then go on to propose an addition to CC-accounts that explains how underdeveloped and compromised agents can be held responsible. I will show how this addition resolves ambiguities in accounts from McKenna, Vargas and McGeer. I conclude the paper by anticipating an objection CC accounts could raise: that reproach and blame are co-extensive. (shrink)

We often hold people morally responsible for their emotions. We praise individuals for their compassion, think less of them for their ingratitude or hatred, reproach self-righteousness and unjust anger. In the cases I have in mind, the ascriptions of responsibility are not simply for offensive behaviors or actions which may accompany the emotions, but for the emotions themselves as motives or states of mind. We praise and blame people for what they feel and not just for how they (...) act. In cases where people may subtly mask their hatred or ingratitude through more kindly actions, we still may find fault with the attitude we see leaking through the disguise. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest that there is a way to make sense of blameworthiness for morally problematic actions even when there is no bad will behind such actions. I am particularly interested in cases where an agent acts in a biased way, and the explanation is socialization and false belief rather than bad will on the part of the agent. In such cases, I submit, we are pulled in two directions: on the one hand non-culpable ignorance is usually an (...) excuse, but in the case of acting in a biased way we feel some pull to find the agent blameworthy. I argue that agents are sometimes blameworthy, (where I really mean that they are blameworthy, and not just that it is permissible to reproach them), even if they do not have any bad will. I argue that although the paradigmatic account of blameworthiness is based on quality of will, we can and should be willing to allow that there are non-paradigmatic cases. I argue that the zone of responsibility can be extended to include acts that we are not fully in control of, and acts whose moral status we are non-culpably ignorant about at the time of acting. This extension of responsibility happens through a voluntary taking of responsibility. I argue that there are certain conditions under which we should take responsibility, and that when we do so, we genuinely are responsible. (shrink)

The writer purports to be conversing with the door of a house, now owned by a man named Caecilius, which is alleged to have harboured a scandal in the time of its previous occupants. For this the speaker reproaches the door, as having through negligence been partly responsible. The door replies that it is wholly innocent in the matter; but people lay blame on it for everything that is done amiss. Line 12, in the door's speech, is obviously corrupt, (...) and the greater part of it is obelized by editors accordingly. (shrink)