Nikolaj Moeller

14-02-2013

When, if ever, is blame justified?

1. Introduction
In this essay, I argue that blame is sometimes justified. Before stating the conditions under which I think ascriptions of blame are justified, I shall outline the structure of my essay. Section 2 is concerned with the relation between moral responsibility on the one hand, blame and praise on the other. I argue that the two notions are relevantly different although closely related. In section 3, I discuss the nature which justification of blame must take, focussing on Strawsons (1964) Freedom and Resentment. I am largely in agreement with Strawsons view and reject a consequentialist as well as an external justification of blame. This leads me to consider the question of how the nature of blame is best understood in section 4. I look at Scanlons account of blame which is contractualist in nature, Williams view which connects blame tightly with reasons and last what I shall call the character view of blame associated with Taylor and Aristotle, amongst others. I think each theory has its merits and demerits; instead of defending one account, I object to all three on different grounds. Trying to retain insights from all three accounts through this dialectic, I propose a view of when blame is justified in section 5. Briefly: let B abbreviate a person blaming another person, abbreviated P, for an action A. I argue that B is justified in blaming P for doing A iff (1) (2) (3) (4) P is an ethical agent capable of an appropriate level of ethical reflection, P or B have reasons relevantly related to the ascription of blame, A is morally wrong P does A because of an attitude which is deemed bad

I wish to explain my account of blame in section 5 instead of immediately clarifying the various terms involved in the above formulations and explaining my reasons for holding these conditions jointly sufficient and necessary for justified ascriptions of blame. By then, my discussion of the various views of blame will, I hope, have helped to make my account of justification of ascriptions of blame clearer.

2. Blame and moral responsibility

One account of moral responsibility says that to hold a person P morally responsible is to hold P accountable for his or her actions in such a way that ascriptions of praise and blame are justified. This leads to the view that blaming P is justified iff P is morally responsible, from which it follows that giving a justification of blame and praise amounts to giving an account of when a person is morally responsible. There is good reason to resist this line of thought: these notions are, at least 1 of 6

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prima facie, different ethical notions, so there are prima facie reasons for thinking that their applications differ. In particular, there are plausible cases where we hold P morally responsible without blame thereby being justified. Imagine a person who gets very angry with a friend and the friend, because of this, is hurt. While the person certainly is morally responsible for his action, the circumstance may make an ascription of blame unjustified: he has been under a lot of stress lately, his grandmother recently passed away and so on. So holding a person morally responsible for an action is not a sufficient condition for being justified in blaming the person for that action. This is not to say that blame and moral responsibility are not connected to each other at all; however, they relate to each other in complex ways. The connection between these notions will become clear in section 5 when I propose an account for when ascriptions of blame are justified.

3. Justifying our ascriptions of blame

In his essay Freedom and Resentment, P. F. Strawson argues that the thesis of determinism is irrelevant to our employment of what he calls reactive attitudes: the appropriateness of using ethical notions such as resentment, gratitude and blame towards each other is not or at least not directly dependent on the truth or falsity of the metaphysical thesis of determinism. For Strawson, employing reactive attitudes is essential to treating other people as human beings. This is to be contrasted with adopting an objective stance; roughly, the kind of stance we adopt towards children and the mentally ill. This does not mean that ascribing blame to other people in our dealings with them ipso facto justifies those ascriptions. Rather, Strawson holds that questions of justification are internal to the structure [i.e. our practice of employing reactive attitudes] or relate to modifications internal to it. We should not look for an external viewpoint what one metaphorically might think of as Gods point of view from which we justify our ethical vocabulary. Closely related to this is the point that we should not justify ascriptions of blame based on their being efficacious. As Williams (1985) aptly puts it, the idea of blames justification is not the same as the idea of its efficacy, adding that blame is efficacious precisely because we think it is justified. Instead of thinking that Strawsons account of the reactive attitudes makes the justification of blame too easy, one might worry that the non-cognitive nature of the reactive attitudes makes the question of their justification inapplicable. It is hard to make sense of the question, for example, how does one justify feeling pleasure? Although I shall not argue the point, I do not think that our ascriptions of blame are completely non-cognitive; even if they are, there is an important difference between ethical notions related to our sentiments and feelings such as pleasure. The former are inherently 2 of 6

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interpersonal in nature, meaning that the question of their justification inevitably arises. For example, I take it that any account of the notion of blame as an ethical notion will make ascriptions of blame to animals unjustified. I might say, I blame the cat for ruining my sofa, m eaning merely that the cat ruined my sofa. This does not mean that I think that I am justified in blaming my cat: to do so would be to distort the meaning of our ethical vocabulary. Further, even if we think reactive attitudes essentially are based on our sentiments we can still change these sentiments; one cannot merely say I cannot help but feel this way and thereby sidestep the question of whether he or she ought to feel this way. The upshot is that even though a justification of our ascriptions of blame should not employ consequentialist or considerations that are entirely external to human practices, the question of justification arises all the same.

4. Understanding the nature of blame

a. Scanlons account of blame
In his Moral Dimensions (2008), Scanlon says, to claim that a person is blameworthy for an action is to claim that the action shows something about the agents attitudes towards others (italics in text). He then proposes an account of blame by which to blame a person is to judge him or her to be blameworthy and to take your relationship with him or her to be modified in a way that this judgment of impaired relations holds to be appropriate. (italics in text) The focus on relationships which is part of Scanlons contractualist view is misguided: why can one not be justified in ascribing blame to another person without being in any substantive relation to that person? Further, one does not have to take ones relationship to another person to be modified in any significant way by an ascription of blame. On the contrary, I might say that precisely because I take you to be a responsible, ethical agent who is capable of change, my ascription of blame to your action does not change our relationship. Often our being justified in ascribing blame to another person consists in the fact that that person has a reason to change because he or she is receptive to ethical criticisms; that is the fundamental insight of Williams (1989) account of blame to which I turn next.

b. Williams account of blame

In the essay Internal reasons and the obscurity of blame, Williams argues that to ascribe blame to a person P for doing an action A, P must have an appropriate motivational set S desires, say which makes him have a reason for not doing A if he had the chance to reconsider. Williams reaches this view in two steps: first, he argues that to blame P for an action is to give P an advice in the sense of suggesting that P had reason to do otherwise. Second, because Williams is an internalist 3 of 6

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about reasons for action, any reason P has for not doing A must bear an appropriate relation to his motivational set S. I shall not discuss whether internalism about reasons for actions is correct as I think the problematic step of Williams argument is the first. As an extension of his claim that reasons need to have an explanatory dimension, Williams seems to think that when someone, B, blames a person P for an action A, this act of blaming must admit of an explanation in terms of Ps, rather than Bs, motivational set. Otherwise, blame becomes obscure, for Williams thinks that the idea of a shared set of reasons within a community is a fiction. There are plausible counterexamples to the view that blaming P for some act must be explained with reference to the motivational set of P, although presumably, if internalism about reasons for actions is correct, it must be explained with reference to the motivational set of some relevantly involved individual. Suppose that A asks B if he may borrow Bs pen, promising that he will give it back in a day. Knowing that their relationship is strained, B reluctantly says yes. A does not care about his relationship to B and does not care much about keeping his promises and so does not return the pen in time. Consequently, B blames A for not doing so. Suppose that As motivational set is such that he has no reasons for returning pen. This does not make the blame obscure or unjustified. Recall Strawsons point about reactive attitudes: blaming A is a matter of B treating A in an interpersonal way and may explained with reference to the fact that B, rather than A, holds that promises ought to be kept. Thus, Williams is wrong to think that any sensible act of blaming for an act A assumes, tacitly or otherwise, that the person being blamed has reasons not to do A. I now turn to the character view of blame.

c. The character view of blame

A number of philosophers such as Taylor and Aristotle hold that whether an agent is responsible or not depends on the question of whether that agent is responsible for his or her character. Some, such as Taylor and Watson, go further and require that the agent is capable of reflecting upon his own ethical character to evaluate strongly him or herself, in Taylors words. By parallel reasoning, one might think that what is crucial in assessing whether blame is justified is the question of what the moral quality of the character being blamed is. Intuitively this seems right: we seem to blame a person less if he or she meant well, acted out of ignorance or even merely displayed weakness of the will. Similarly, we would not hold a person praiseworthy for doing a good action if that person acted out of a thoroughly bad character. The problem with the character view of blame is that it is incapable of explaining cases of moral luck. Scanlon (2008) mentions Nagels case of a truck driver who out of negligence does not check his brakes. In one case, nothing happens and the truck driver

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is not blamed. In another case, through no fault of the truck driver, a child runs out in front of the truck and is hit by the truck because the truck driver is unable to hit the brakes in time. The truck driver is blamed for not checking his brakes, but as Scanlon points out, his negligence is the same in both cases. Further, it does seem that while it was not within the reach of the truck driver to prevent the child from running in front of the truck, he would justifiably be blamed for not checking his brakes in this scenario. The point to take away is that while we do hold character to be a necessary component for ascriptions of blame being justified, it is not in itself sufficient.

5. Building an account of the justification of blame

Through the discussions of the various account of the nature of ascriptions of blames as well as the general discussion of what a justification of blame must take, a number of valuable points have emerged. First, while blame and moral responsibility are closely connected notions, the one cannot be treated solely by giving an account of the other. Second, the justification of blame should be neither consequentialist nor externalist in nature. Rather, it should be internal to our moral practices in the sense that ascriptions of blame are one of our reactive attitudes in Strawsons sense of the word. Third, the discussion of Scanlons account of blame shows that blame need not be based on the notion of a relationship between the person being blamed and the person blaming. Fourth, Williams account made clear that blame is connected with one of the parties involved having reasons of a relevant kind. Fifth, the character view of blame showed that blame is not merely dependent on the character of the person being blamed. This leads me to suggest that the following give jointly sufficient and individually necessary conditions that capture when we take ascriptions of blame to be justified. To recap what I said in the introduction, let B abbreviate a person blaming another person, abbreviated P, for an action A. B is justified in blaming P for doing A iff (5) (6) (7) (8) P is an ethical agent capable of an appropriate level of ethical reflection, P or B have reasons relevantly related to the ascription of blame, A is morally wrong P does A because of an attitude which is deemed bad

Condition (1) captures the thought that ascriptions of blame are never justified in the case of e.g. children or persons who are mentally ill. Condition (2) captures the thought that blame has an explanatory dimension, in relation to either P or B. Condition (3) reflects the fact that we do not blame acts when we consider good, or morally indifferent. Condition (4) is of particular importance: on the one hand, it captures the grain of truth in the character view of blame that we do not merely

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take actions to be blameworthy because they are wrong: the agent may have had good intentions or acted out of ignorance. At the same time, it reflects the thought emphasized by Scanlon that we also blame actions and not character alone. Character is a relatively stable notion: I may have an ethically good character yet do something bad intentionally, but that does not make my ethical character bad all of a sudden. Further, the bad action which I did intentionally could be done by me because of a bad attitude, making an ascription of blame justified in some cases. The motivating thought is that an attitude is an intermediate notion between character and actions: the former is stable whilst the latter is fluent. Condition (4) thus accounts for cases of moral luck on the one hand, and cases where the agent has a relevant excuse on the other.

6. Concluding remarks
Someone might object that my presentation of the account of when blame ascriptions are justified given in section 5 is fundamentally flawed because I have not really defended against counterexamples. Such an objection is, I think, misguided: while there may be counter-examples to the account given, I have defended the account against counter-examples indirectly by constructing it out of the points that arose in section 2-4. If my endeavours have been successful, this is reflected in conditions (1)-(4) and the explanations I have given for proposing them. I therefore conclude that ascriptions of blame sometimes are justified.

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