Abstract
This commentary on Elinor Mason’s Ways to be Blameworthy considers Mason’s proposed reflexivity constraint on ordinary blame- and praiseworthy action. I argue that the reflexivity constraint leaves too many intuitively apt targets of praise and blame out of the reach of those attitudes, and the availability of their detached counterparts does not make up for this. I also suggest that Mason’s case for the constraint is open to question. This gives us reasons to prefer a moral concern account of ordinary or communicative praise- and blameworthiness, an account that does not include a reflexivity constraint. Finally, I argue that the moral concern view has more resources to explain some of the nuances and complexities of our practice of moral judgment than Mason allows—nuances Mason turned to pluralism to capture.
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Notes
I defend a version of this view in “Acting for the Right Reasons” Markovits (2010). Other defenders of moral concern views include Nomy Arpaly and Tim Schroeder, George Sher, and Angela Smith.
Mason suggests that some politicians who act wrongly—she gives Tony Blair as an example—might not be trying to do well by Morality, but are instead engaged in a thinly veiled (to themselves, as well as to their constituents) attempt to promote their own interests. She diagnosis Blair with “self-deception” instead of “deep ignorance.” (pp. 72–73)) But whatever we think of the case of Blair, it seems to me a stretch to suggest that all politicians of whose actions we disapprove are actually motivated just to promote their own interests, and none of them genuinely take themselves to be trying to do good. Nor does Mason suggest this.
References
Markovits, J. (2010). Acting for the Right Reasons. Philosophical Review, 119(2), 201–242.
Mason, E. (2019). Ways to be Blameworthy. OUP.
Williams, B. (1995). Internal Reasons and the Obscurity of Blame. In Making Sense of Humanity: and Other Philosophical Papers 1982–1993. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (pp. 35–45).
Acknowldegement
Thanks to Zoë Johnson King, Joseph Orttung, and David Shoemaker for helpful comments and conversations, and to Elinor Mason for her reply.
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Markovits, J. On who may be blameworthy, and how: Comments on Elinor Mason’s Ways to be Blameworthy. Philos Stud 181, 939–949 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01999-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-023-01999-3