Abstract
‘Reasonable wrongdoers’ reasonably, but wrongly, take themselves to act permissibly. Many responsibility theorists assume that since we cannot reasonably expect these wrongdoers to behave differently, they are not blameworthy. These theorists impose a Reasonable Expectation Condition on blame. I argue that reasonable wrongdoers may be blameworthy. It is true that we often excuse reasonable wrongdoers, but sometimes this is because we do not regard their behavior as objectionable in a way that makes blame appropriate. As such, these cases do not support the proposition that wrongdoers are excused just because they reasonably take themselves to act permissibly. For the relevant support, we should consider cases in which a reasonable wrongdoer’s behavior is unambiguously objectionable by our moral lights. But here again we fail to find decisive support for the Reasonable Expectation Condition since it is not obvious—independent of a prior commitment to this condition—that such wrongdoers are not blameworthy. After laying out the above argument, as well as offering a positive account of why reasonable wrongdoers are sometimes blameworthy, I turn to consider objections. The most important of these is that it is simply unfair to blame those who reasonably take themselves to behave unobjectionably and who cannot be expected to behave otherwise.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See, e.g., Gideon Rosen’s claim that ‘[i]t is unreasonable to expect people not to do what they blamelessly believe they are entitled to do, and it is unreasonable to subject people to sanctions [i.e., blame] when it would be unreasonable to expect them to have acted differently’ (2003, pp. 74−75). For similar views, see FitzPatrick (2008 and 2017), Fricker (2010), Levy (2003), Wolf (1987), and Zimmerman (1997).
The view derives from Strawson (1962). Resentment is the blaming attitude that A takes up toward B on A’s own behalf; indignation is the blaming attitude that A takes up toward B on someone else’s behalf.
I have said that whether an agent is actually blameworthy depends on the actual moral quality of her behavior. But my focus will be on the way that our judgments about this quality make blame fitting from our moral perspective, and also on the way that the judgments of those with whom we morally disagree can make their blame intelligible even when we regard it as mistaken. It is worth keeping in mind that there may be no judgment-independent facts about whether behavior is objectionable, and so no judgment-independent way in which people are blameworthy. But even in this case we can still make sense, along the lines I suggest, of why we blame others (because we judge certain behaviors objectionable) and of why we sometimes reject others’ blame (because they blame—intelligibly, from their perspective—for behavior that we do not find objectionable).
See Talbert (2017) for my objections to FitzPatrick’s account.
There is no shortage of examples. Staying within the American context, an obvious one is the politically popular genocide of the native population; see Madley (2016) for the case that ‘genocide’ is the correct term. Another obvious example is the institution of slavery in the southern United States. Many southerners regarded slavery as permissible. I will cite only Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederate States of America, who claimed that the Confederacy’s ‘cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery … is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is … based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth’ (Harrold 2008, p. 61).
For discussion of a victim-centered approach to blame (in the context of sexual violence in war) see Talbert and Wolfendale (2019, pp. 105–108).
Assuming Varo’s account is accurate, it is possible that the Comanche practice he described could be explained or interpreted in such a way that it comes to seem less objectionable in our eyes than it initially appears. Whatever the historical merit of such an account, it should be avoided in the present context so that the case is not open to the reading I gave to Fricker’s schoolmaster example.
The point here is related to Hieronymi’s (2004, p. 135) suggestion that blaming attitudes ‘are simply reactions to … the importance of a display of ill will or disregard’ and are shown to be unfair only on a showing of the absence of these properties.
For this sort of argument, directed against views related to the one defended here, see Levy (2005).
Reasonable wrongdoers may have difficulty avoiding false moral beliefs, but I assume that they can fulfill the conditions on blameworthiness just mentioned. These agents may have moral blind spots, but they are not generally insensible to moral considerations. The average slaveowner or Nazi was not literally a psychopath.
I thank Robert Pál-Wallin for bringing D’Arms’s recent paper to my attention and for discussing the fittingness of emotions with me. D’Arms admits that it is not unreasonable to read his and Jacobson’s 2000 paper as giving an account of fittingness in terms of representational accuracy; he notes that D’Arms and Jacobson (2023) aim at avoiding this mis interpretation (D’Arms 2022, p. 123, n. 27).
This account is carried over to D’Arms and Jacobson (2023) where they describe resentment as ‘an emotion that by definition requires thinking oneself to have been morally wronged’ (p. 109, n. 6).
An anonymous reviewer for this journal wonders whether there is merely a verbal dispute between me and Rosen. Rosen thinks resentment is not fitting in the case of reasonable wrongdoers, and I think that something else, resentment*, is fitting. But since these things are not identical, perhaps there is no real conflict between us. I take the disagreement to be more substantial since I regard resentment* as a serious form of moral blame characterized by a type of morally offended anger that I assume Rosen would find inappropriate in the case of reasonable wrongdoers. In addition, I suspect that what I call resentment* is the fundamental form of the emotion in question (and thus the more basic form of moral blame), and that Rosen’s ‘resentment’ is a derivative cognitive sharpening (to use D’Arms and Jacobson’s phrase) of this more basic form.
For my account of blame as moral protest, see Talbert (2012).
I wrote the first draft of this paper ten years ago; I presented versions of it around that time and also in the last couple of years. I would like to thank participants at these events for their questions, and I would also like to thank Shane Gronholz and Santiago Amaya for presenting comments on the paper at events in 2013 and 2014 respectively. For written comments, I am very grateful to Dan Miller, Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, Justin Snedegar, Steven Sverdlik, and András Szigeti. Finally, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal as well as one of the editors of the journal, Sune Lægaard, for their helpful comments.
References
D’Arms, J. 2022. Fitting emotions. In Fittingness: Essays in the philosophy of normativity, ed. C. Howard, and R. A. Rowland. 105–129. New York: Oxford University Press.
D’Arms, J., and D. Jacobson. 2000. The moralistic fallacy: On the appropriateness of emotions. Ethics 61: 65–90.
D’Arms, J., and D. Jacobson. 2003. The significance of recalcitrant emotion (or, anti-quasijudgmentalism). In Philosophy and the emotions, ed. A. Hatzemoysis. 127–145. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D’Arms, J., and D. Jacobson. 2023. Rational sentimentalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
FitzPatrick, W. 2008. Moral responsibility and normative ignorance: Answering a new skeptical challenge. Ethics 118: 589–613.
FitzPatrick, W. 2017. Unwitting wrongdoing, reasonable expectations, and blameworthiness. In Responsibility: The epistemic condition, ed. P. Robichaud, and J. W. Wieland. 29–46. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fricker, M. 2010. The relativism of blame and Williams’s relativism of distance. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 84: 151–177.
Graham, P. 2014. A sketch of a theory of moral blameworthiness. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 88: 388–409.
Hämäläinen, P. 2008. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Harrold, S. 2008. The civil war and reconstruction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Hieronymi, P. 2004. The force and fairness of blame. Philosophical Topics 18: 115–148.
Hieronymi, P. 2014. Reflection and responsibility. Philosophy and Public Affairs 42: 3–41.
Levy, N. 2003. Cultural membership and moral responsibility. The Monist 86: 145–163.
Levy, N. 2005. The good, the bad and the blameworthy. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 1: 1–16.
Madley, B. 2016. Understanding genocide in California under United States Rule, 1846–1873. The Western Historical Quarterly 47: 449–461.
Rosen, G. 2003. Culpability and ignorance, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103: 61–84.
Rosen, G. 2004. Skepticism about moral responsibility. Philosophical Perspectives 18: 295–313.
Rosen, G. 2015. The alethic conception of moral responsibility. In The nature of moral responsibility, ed. R. Clarke, M. McKenna, and A. M. Smith. 65–88. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rudy-Hiller, F. 2020. Reasonable expectations, moral responsibility, and empirical data. Philosophical Studies 177: 2945–2968.
Strabbing, J. T. 2019. Accountability and the thoughts in reactive attitudes. Philosophical Studies 176: 3121–3140.
Strawson, P. F. 1962. Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy 48: 1–25.
Talbert, M. 2012. Moral competence, moral blame, and protest. The Journal of Ethics 16: 89–109.
Talbert, M. 2014. The significance of psychopathic wrongdoing. In Being amoral: Psychopathy and moral incapacity, ed. T. Schramme. 275–300. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Talbert, M. 2017. Akrasia, awareness, and blameworthiness. In Responsibility: The epistemic condition, ed. P. Robichaud and J. W. Wieland. 47–63. New York: Oxford University Press.
Talbert, M. and J. Wolfendale. 2019. War crimes: Causes, excuses, and blame. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wolf, S. 1987. Sanity and the metaphysics of responsibility. In Responsibility, character, and the emotions, ed. F. Schoeman. 46–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zimmerman, M. 1997. Moral responsibility and ignorance. Ethics 107: 410–426.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
The author has no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
The author certifies that they have no affiliations with or involvement in any organization or entity with any financial interest or non-financial interest in the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript.
The author has no financial or proprietary interests in any material discussed in this article.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Talbert, M. Blaming Reasonable Wrongdoers. Res Publica (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09644-w
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09644-w