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Some deny the claim that blame is harmful (e.g., Peter Graham, “A Sketch of a Theory of Moral Blameworthiness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88, no. 2 (2014): 388-409), while others see the harm of blame as a mere side-effect of a fitting emotional response (e.g., David Shoemaker, “Response-Dependent Responsibility,” Philosophical Review 126, no. 4 (2017): 481-527). For the purposes of this paper I will remain neutral on whether blame is necessarily harmful.
Proposals along these lines are in developed by Randolph Clarke (“Some Theses on Desert,” Philosophical Explorations 16, no. 2 (2013): 153-64; “Moral Responsibility, Guilt, and Retributivism,” Journal of Ethics 20, nos. 1-3 (2016): 121-37) and Douglas Portmore (“Control, Attitudes, and Accountability,” in Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Volume 6, ed. David Shoemaker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7-32).
Prominent skeptics of desert include Derk Pereboom (“Free Will Skepticism, Blame, and Obligation,” in Blame: Its Nature and Norms, eds. D. Justin Coates and Neil Tognazzini (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 189-206; Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)) and Victor Tadros (The Ends of Harm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Wrongs and Crimes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)). Unsurprisingly, much of the recent literature on this topic has focused on whether desert-based accounts entail that the harm in blaming is noninstrumentally good. Noteworthy examples include Clarke (2013, 2016), Portmore (2019), Dana Kay Nelkin, “Guilt, Grief, and the Good,” Social Philosophy and Policy 36, no. 1 (2019): 173-91, and Coleen Macnamara, “Guilt, Desert, Fittingness, and the Good,” Journal of Ethics 24, no. 4 (2020): 449-468.
One might perhaps think of Manuel Vargas' revisionism (Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)) as a kind of instrumentalism, or find instrumentalism represented in recent work by Victoria McGeer (“Co-reactive Attitudes and the Making of Moral Community,” in Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning, eds. Robyn Langdon and Catriona Mackenzie (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012), 299-326; “Civilizing Blame,” in Blame: Its Nature and Norms, eds. D. Justin Coates and Neil Tognazzini (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 162-188; “Building a Better Theory of Responsibility,” Philosophical Studies 172, no. 10 (2015): 2635-649). Although these authors have more sophisticated positions than the instrumentalism discussed in this paper, as I’ll suggest in section 5, many of the arguments I develop can be plausibly read as complementing McGeer’s views.
Despair over the prospects of overcoming these difficulties has led some philosophers to argue that we should abandon legal punishment altogether (e.g., David Boonin, The Problem of Punishment (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008)).
R.A. Duff, Punishment, Communication, and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 107.
Ibid., 108.
Tadros, The Ends of Harm, 38.
Ibid., 93.
Duff, 81.
Tadros, The Ends of Harm, 103. Complicating matters here is Duff’s tendency to equate consequentialism with instrumentalism, an equation that Tadros rightly rejects. It thus may be that Duff is really resisting consequentialism in these passages and is then mistakenly drawing a noninstrumentalist conclusion. I will not take a stand on whether Duff is making this mistake, and later in the paper, I will show that Duff’s resistance to instrumentalism can be understood in a way that does not require equating instrumentalism with consequentialism.
P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 72-93.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 80.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid., 90-91.
Michael McKenna, “Basically Deserved Blame and Its Value,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 15, no. 3 (2019): 255-282.
Ibid., 264.
Ibid., 266.
Ibid., 273.
Ibid., 271.
Christine Korsgaard, “Two Distinctions in Goodness,” Philosophical Review 92, no. 2 (1983): 169–95.
Ibid., 273.
Ibid., 272.
Ibid., 275.
Ibid., 276.
For example, Michael McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Pereboom, Free Will, Agency, and Meaning in Life, 137.
The phrase he actually uses is “one-eyed utilitarianism,” but the passage makes clear that he is concerned with an overly simplistic instrumentalism.
Strawson, 93.
McKenna, “Basically Deserved Blame and Its Value,” 271.
This does not imply that harming is the only way to generate care and commitment, of course, but insofar as the blaming practices are efficacious, the instrumentalist explains this in terms of the motivating force of the harm, i.e., the harm in blaming gets the blamed person to care.
The example McKenna considers is grief, but the points he makes about grief can be applied fairly straightforwardly to a host of reactive attitudes, including guilt.
Ibid., 276.
Ibid., 277.
McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility, 68-69.
Tadros, The Ends of Harm, 48.
Conative theories of blame stress the motivational aspects of blame, and because I also stress motivational aspects, the view I am endorsing has some affinity with those theories. However, extant conative theories typically focus more on the motivations of the blamer, not the blamed (e.g., George Sher, In Praise of Blame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); T.M. Scanlon, Moral Dimensions: Permissibility, Meaning, Blame (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008)).
Pereboom, “Free Will Skepticism, Blame, and Obligation,” 196.
On this point, recall McKenna’s claim that the harm in blaming is aimed at preserving a moral community, and this is good even if the harm in blaming is not an effective instrument for doing so.
The instrumental might counter this by insisting that it would be similarly misguided to say that it is good to harm by blaming if blaming never motivated people to live up to morality’s counsel. In reply, I offer a thought experiment. Consider two communities, one populated with psychopaths only and one populated with akratics only. A stranger visits each community and notices in each community what appear to be blameworthy acts. The stranger (naively?) starts blaming people in these respective communities, but in each community, blaming is ineffective at motivating people to live up to morality’s counsel: the psychopaths are utterly indifferent to the blame, and while the akratics respond to blame with guilt and remorse, these reactions prove powerless. While the instrumental value of blaming is the same in both communities (none), the fact that the akratics express a concern for morality makes the community of akratics better than the community of psychopaths (all else being equal).
McKenna, Conversation and Responsibility, 69.
Strawson, 76.
McGeer, “Co-reactive Attitudes and the Making of Moral Community,” 304.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 316.
Ibid., 303.
Ibid., 303-304.
Philip Pettit, Rules, Reasons, and Norms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Ibid., 183.
T.M. Scanlon, “Structural Irrationality,” in Common Minds: Themes from the Philosophy of Philip Pettit, eds. Geoffrey Brennan, Robert Goodin, Frank Jackson, and Michael Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 84-103.
Ibid., 86.
Scanlon himself makes a similar point when discussing the role that demands of rationality play in explaining the behavior of rational agents. He writes:
The behavior of a rational agent will exhibit (at least to a significant degree) the regularities described by requirements of rationality. But this is not because the agent sees this way of behaving as required by principles that she must be guided by. A rational agent who believes that p does not accept arguments relying on p as a premise because she sees this as required by some principle of rationality to which she must conform. Nor does she generally do it “in order not be irrational.” Rather, she will be willing to rely on p as a premise simply because she believes that p (2007, 85-86).
On this point, recall McKenna’s claim that “the relationship between blamer and blamed in the practice of blaming is itself part of an activity whose aim is to ameliorate and sustain the bonds of moral community. That also is good” (2019, 271).
Of course, if I am truly indifferent to morality, then it is not just the recognition of the scaffolding function of reactive attitudes that won’t have normative force for me; the reactive attitudes themselves won’t have normative force for me either.
McGeer, “Co-reactive Attitudes and the Making of Moral Community,” 304.
Ibid., 315-316.
More cautiously, even if there is a way to finesse the concept of instrumental goodness such that reactive attitudes turn out to be instrumentally good on their own, the instrumental goodness of reactive attitudes may end up straying so far from widely entrenched, paradigmatic cases of instrumental goodness that it would still be misleading to call the goodness ‘instrumental.’
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Roth, M. Blame, Harm, and Motivational Value. J Value Inquiry 57, 111–129 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09807-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-021-09807-z