1 On Blame Skepticisms
Blame is widely acknowledged to be a fitting and justified response to culpable wrongdoing. It is how a victim holds her offender responsible for what he has done and, if communicated to him, it is intended to convey that she will not passively accept being treated in this way. It also frequently has an ameliorative purpose: when communicated to the offender, it aims to make him feel sorry or remorseful for his offense, not necessarily because it is thought to be a good thing to make him suffer full stop but in order to bring him to understand the wrongness of what he has done and to resolve not to repeat his offense. Of course, blame is not always either expressed publicly or communicated directly to the offender. There may be strong prudential, even moral, reasons for not doing so, at least temporarily. But it is an additional feature of blame that the following counterfactual holds of it: the victim would want to express and communicate it, were it not for these considerations militating against doing so. As Miranda Fricker has argued, the basic, paradigm form of blame is communicative.1
Indeed, the vast majority of contemporary philosophers regard blame as an indispensable moral tool for managing and regulating interpersonal relationships. Here are just a few examples to make the point. P.F. Strawson, whose account is widely accepted, holds that reactive attitudes, a class of attitudes that respond in a self or other-directed way to the qualities of will that people show toward one another, and some of which serve the same functions as blame, are a fundamental component of human relations so cannot be eliminated.2 George Sher defends the practice of blame on the ground that a world without blame is also a world in which there is no rational basis for adherence to moral principles.3 Blame, T. M. Scanlon argues, goes hand-in-hand with holding others to standards of interpersonal conduct, and holding others to moral standards makes possible different valuable forms of human relationship.4 Finally Barbara Houston argues that blame is a fundamental expression of our moral self and confidence in our moral agency, and its availability is a prerequisite of mutually respectful relationships.5 Of course, blame may have its disagreeable side and may be unpleasant to those on the receiving end. But for these philosophers and many others as well, the price we would have to pay for dispensing with it would be unacceptably high and so revolutionary as scarcely to be conceivable.
However, there are criticisms of blame as well, and these occur on different levels. There are, to begin with, its various well-known pathologies. Like the emotion with which it is most often associated, namely, vengeful anger, it sometimes overreaches, finding fault with offenders out of proportion to their initial offense or even when there is no offense at all. It is sometimes irrational, carried away by emotion and unresponsive to reason. It can degenerate into cruelty, inflicting suffering on others for the sheer pleasure of doing so. It can be self-serving, a way of avoiding having to address oneâs own shortcomings and denying oneâs own culpability. And it can morph into self-righteousness and moral preening. These are criticisms of blameâs psychological tendencies, but they do not justify forgoing blame entirely as long as it is realistically possible to resist them.
There are also criticisms that cut deeper since they put pressure on the very practice of blame as a response to wrongdoing, and some defenders of blame have felt the need to respond to them. Following Peter Graham, we can call a person who comes to bury blame, not to praise it, a âblame skeptic.â6 Blame skepticism has a long and notable history. Among the Stoics, criticism of blame is of a piece with their denunciation of anger. Epictetus, for example, says this:
When then we are impeded or disturbed or grieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves, that is, our opinions. It is the act of an ill-educated man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.7
Blame, on the Stoic view, has no place in a life virtuously and wisely lived, whether it is blame of oneself or others. Blame of oneself is acceptable as a stage on the way to virtue and wisdom, but that too should finally be relinquished, for it reflects a failure to properly distinguish between those things that are within oneâs control and those that arenât. Blame, in short, results from holding false beliefs (opinions) and engaging in faulty reasoning.
Echoes of the Stoic view can be found in some contemporary skepticisms about blame, but these have multiple roots. Some are what John Gardner calls âresponsibility skeptics.â8 Derk Pereboom is an example. He argues that a revision of our moral practices is required in accordance with the dictates of hard determinism, because this undercuts the claim to moral responsibility that blame presupposes.9 Some, like Nicola Lacey and Hanna Pickard, are âefficacy skeptics.â10 They argue that blame is typically self-defeating and counterproductive because it does not secure the desired moral improvement of the offender. There are other sorts of skeptics as well, what Gardner calls âjudgment skepticsâ and âstanding-to-blame skeptics.â11 Judgment skeptics may start from the premise that there are only internal reasons for action, that is, reasons that are dependent on the motivation of the person for whom they are reasons. Since the offender who is blamed evidently does not share the same reasons for action as the one who is blaming him, the latterâs accusation simply falls on deaf ears. Standing-to-blame skeptics doubt that persons have the standing to blame others for their misdeeds, perhaps because we are all guilty of the same flaws that we criticize others for possessing, or because we are rarely in a position to understand the motives of others, or because we should be reticent to interfere in the affairs of others.
As will become apparent later on, I have considerable sympathy with Lacey and Pickardâs efficacy-based criticism of blame. Like them, I believe that blame is often met with defensiveness and resistance to change on the part of wrongdoers rather than increased moral understanding and moral improvement, and I will say more about this in Chapter 4. But their skepticism about blame expressly targets angry blame, or what they call âaffective blame,â which they argue is likely to be non-therapeutic for the wrongdoer, and this leaves open the possibility that there are other ways of blaming that are more therapeutically productive. The skepticism about blame that I want to explore in this part is more far-reaching because it forecloses this possibility. It contends that blame essentially consists of or is typically accompanied by a range of hostile, negative emotions, all of which have the idea of payback as a conceptual part. This association of blame with hostility gives rise to a number of moral criticisms, the set of which constitutes what I call the Hostility Critique of blame. The idea in a few words is that blame is hostile and hostility is morally objectionable, consisting of attitudes and their attendant emotions and actions that we should not on reflection endorse.
2 Organization of Chapters
The topic of Chapter 2 is the Hostility Critique. Section 1 begins to set out the Critique by clarifying what I mean by hostility. Here I emphasize that the idea of payback or getting even is conceptual of hostility and that the Hostility Critique conceives of blame in this way. Vengeful anger is the umbrella term I use to refer to negative person-directed emotions that have this feature in common. I also distinguish between blame that is (only) confrontational and blame that is hostile. Section 2 discusses two sorts of cases in which the association of blame with hostile blame seems to fail and shows how the Hostility Critique can handle them. Section 3 addresses the objection that the Hostility Critique is merely attacking a strawman and offers some considerations supporting this association. Section 4 then presents a number of arguments purporting to show that blame, so construed, has been given a kind of moral importance that is exaggerated and unwarranted. The arguments are these: hostility with its attitude of payback cannot, contrary to its defenders, undo the injury that was inflicted nor restore the victim to a position of moral equality with the offender; it is not essential, as some philosophers have argued, for the maintenance of self-respect; it is prone to generate cycles of retaliation and counter-retaliation; it interferes with sound judgment; and it easily collapses into enjoying cruelty. These arguments together constitute the Hostility Critique and I will briefly comment on them in rebuttal. The arguments, and most of my responses, should be familiar to readers of the philosophical literature on anger and its cousins, but its lack of originality does not concern me. For it is not the morally problematic character of anger that is my chief concern anyway. My chief concern is rather to present and argue for a conception of blame that is not as closely tied to hostility as is the Hostility Critiqueâs conception of blame. And once I have done this, I want to consider whether the Hostility Critique, even if successful against blame as it conceives of it, might not be as successful when other kinds of blame are taken into account.
The earlier objections to the close association of blame with hostility or vengeful anger did not pose a problem for the Hostility Critique. In Chapter 3, I begin a more serious and arguably more damaging response to it. I argue in Section 1 that regardless of what one thinks about the merits of the Hostility Critique, it construes blame and its emotions too narrowly. There are emotions of blame that the Hostility Critique does not account for and the introduction of these emotions casts doubt on its skepticism about blame. The typology of blame emotions I present consists of two general negative emotion types â hostile and non-hostile or blended blame emotions â only one of which, the first, is the blame emotion type targeted by the Hostility Critique.
However, the distinction between hostile and non-hostile blame emotions raises a problem that threatens the success of my critical response to the Hostility Critique. The problem, in short, is that even apparently non-hostile blame emotions, when they are communicated to the offender, seek to make the offender suffer for what he has done, which is just what the hostile blame emotions do. The distinction between hostile and non-hostile therefore collapses. I take this objection seriously and spend considerable time responding to it in Section 2. I present several responses, the gist of which is that communicating blame with the intention of getting the offender to feel remorse for what he has done and communicating blame with the intention of paying the offender back for what he has done are not equivalent ways of deploying blame. The conclusion is the bridge to the next chapter.
1 How the Hostility Critique Understands Hostility
Blame can be punitive, but it is not necessarily so. What is the difference between blame that is and blame that is not punitive?
Blame, when it is directed at a wrongdoer, aims to make him feel bad for what he has done, so let me begin by discussing how this might be done. One way to get a wrongdoer to feel bad is by presenting him with the considerations he is blamed for neglecting in the hope that he will come to appreciate their legitimacy. An example of this is when a wife complains to her husband that he is taking advantage of her because he is not doing enough to help with household chores. She doesnât just want him to start being more helpful. Rather she wants this to be a consequence of his appreciating the reasons for her complaint and feeling sorry for not giving them greater weight in deciding how to participate in household chores. Another way to get a wrongdoer to feel bad is by taking advantage of the offenderâs interest in avoiding the unpleasantness of being the target of blame. The former seeks recognition from the offender of the reasons that failed to weigh with him appropriately; the latter exploits the undesirability, for the offender, of being blamed or, alternatively, the desirability of avoiding blame. An example of the latter is when a physician scolds his patient for his high fat diet and excessive smoking and threatens to terminate his relationship with him if he doesnât change his unhealthy lifestyle. The physician resorts to this approach because the medical reasons he has given the patient for why he should do this have fallen on deaf ears. The health-related considerations that ought to carry weight with him just fail to do so. So knowing how much the patient values his relationship with him, the physician hopes that blaming the patient in this threatening way will frighten him into compliance.
Both the wife and the physician aim to make the other feel bad for his uncooperative behavior. In the former case, the wife aims to make her husband feel guilty for not having contributed to the household chores by getting him to appreciate its unfairness. In the latter, the physician has given up on trying to get the patient to give due weight to the medical reasons for changing his lifestyle and instead attempts to use fear as the vehicle for bringing about the desired change.
Benjamin Bagley draws attention to the difference between these two kinds of blame, calling the first âaddressed blameâ the second âpunitive blame.â1 In the latter, the wronged party intends the offender to feel bad for having offended her, where this does not entail accepting the legitimacy of her complaint. The offender feels bad because being blamed is unpleasant, distressing, or burdensome. It creates an attitudinal barrier between persons that the offender wants to remove. In the example, the barrier is erected by the physicianâs threat of rejection if the patient persists and does not change his lifestyle choices. The former, which Bagley calls âaddressed blame,â (866) is not manipulative in the way of punitive blame, but it is confrontational, and confrontation, according to Bagley, âconsists in an active, emotionally vulnerable concern that the offender be presented with the considerations they are blamed for neglecting in a form they are in a position to appreciateâ (857). When one confronts an offender typically one wants the offender to feel bad because it will serve as evidence that he has given due weight to the reasons for the wronged partyâs grievance. The confrontation need not be angry or aggressive or hostile, and the blame need not be punitive. Indeed, punitive blame might interfere with the offender appreciating the considerations he is blamed for not treating as weighty reasons for not acting as he did. A disappointed wife may confront her uncooperative husband with sadness or disappointment rather than anger because this is the form in which he is in a position to appreciate the considerations he has neglected. But this is still a way of making him feel bad, albeit a milder and possibly less âright in your faceâ way of doing so.
Different painful emotions can show that the offender feels bad for what he has done. In addressed blame, the emotions testify to the offenderâs appreciation of the moral wrong he has done. Remorse is usually taken to be the paradigmatic bad feeling that flows from a wrongdoerâs understanding of the reasons for the victimâs condemnation of his behavior, but shame is another self...
