Abstract
Elinor Mason's Ways to be Blameworthy offers an interesting and potentially-fruitful distinction between varieties of blame and, correspondingly, between varieties of blameworthiness. The notion of "Grasping" Morality is central to her picture, distinguishing those who act subjectively wrongly and can be blamed in the ordinary way from those who only act objectively wrongly and can only be blamed in a detached way. Here I request more information about this central notion and pose a puzzle for Mason's account; I argue that the various things Mason says about agents who grasp Morality appear inconsistent once we recognize that people can count as grasping Morality overall despite significant gaps in their understanding of it.
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Notes
The final chapter before the conclusion also introduces a third type of blameworthiness: “extended” blameworthiness. I will not discuss that here.
The example is based on Susan Wolf’s (1987) example of “JoJo”, but Mason adds some twists of her own.
It might be that Mason thinks that Huck’s good instincts compensate for his deeply-ingrained racist beliefs, pushing him into borderline territory. If so, one wants to hear more about how compensation works. I see no compensating factor in Mason’s example of homophobia.
In our session at the Pacific APA Mason suggested to me that Morality is basically all about doing right by sentient beings. But some Kantians reject this; they think it’s all about doing right by rational beings. What “doing right by” amounts to will be fundamentally different depending on whether it’s sentience or rationality that you have in mind.
This example is drawn from the work of Nomy Arpaly (2002), though again Mason adds some twists of her own.
Mason might say that the stipulations that someone (a) grasps Morality and (b) acts wrongly jointly suffice to show that, deep down, she does know that what she is doing is wrong. This would mean that the agent does act subjectively wrongly and that our blame is a mere reminder. But it is incorrect. When someone has a gappy grasp of Morality, her moral beliefs do not encompass the bits of Morality that evade her grasp. That’s what it is for there to be a gap.
References
Arpaly, N. (2002). Unprincipled virtue: An inquiry into moral agency. Oxford University Press.
Mason, E. (2019). Ways to be blameworthy: Rightness, wrongness, and responsibility. Oxford University Press.
Wolf, S. (1987). Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. In Schoeman (ed.), Responsibility, character, and the emotions. Cambridge University Press (pp. 44–62).
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Johnson King, Z. “Grasping” Morality. Philos Stud 181, 929–938 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01985-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01985-9