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Blameworthiness and the Affective Account of Blame

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Abstract

One of the most influential accounts of blame—the affective account—takes its cue from P.F. Strawson’s discussion of the reactive attitudes. To blame someone, on this account, is to target her with resentment, indignation, or (in the case of self-blame) guilt. Given the connection between these emotions and the demand for regard that is arguably central to morality, the affective account is quite plausible. Recently, however, George Sher has argued that the affective account of blame, as understood both by Strawson himself and by contemporary Strawsonians, is inadequate because it cannot make sense of blameworthiness. In this paper I defend the affective account of blame against several of Sher’s arguments for this conclusion. In the process, I clarify the Strawsonian account of moral responsibility, and I discuss how the affective account of blame ought to be understood and articulated.

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Notes

  1. In calling this ‘the affective account’, I do not mean to imply that resentment, indignation, and guilt can be understood as pure affect.

  2. All subsequent references to Strawson will be to this essay.

  3. All subsequent references to Sher will be to this book.

  4. For a useful collection of essays on Strawson’s essay, see McKenna and Russell 2008.

  5. For further elaboration, see Tognazzini 2013.

  6. The Strawsonian view dominates the contemporary literature, but there are non-Strawsonian views out there. See, for example, Zimmerman 1988; Oshana 1997; and Nelkin 2011. Another view that is not quite Strawsonian, but not quite non-Strawsonian either, is McKenna 2012.

  7. Perhaps Strawson does not leave these notions out entirely, but he does try to domesticate them in a way that Sher thinks they cannot be domesticated. Strawson says, for example: “Only by attending to this range of attitudes can we recover from the facts as we know them a sense of what we mean, i.e. of all we mean, when, speaking the language of morals, we speak of desert, responsibility, guilt, condemnation, and justice” (p. 91, original emphasis). See also Sher, p. 83, n. 23.

  8. It’s worse than that, actually. Strawson famously says that the intuition of fittingness is “a pitiful intellectualist trinket for a philosopher to wear as a charm against the recognition of his own humanity” (p. 92).

  9. The text here actually says ‘unreasonable’, but this must be a typographical error.

  10. I believe this line of thought is in the same spirit as Pamela Hieronymi’s suggestion (2004, p. 125) that the judgment of ill will itself “capture[s] a central and essential part of the characteristic force of blame”.

  11. Note that I borrowed some of Sher’s wording here to articulate the Strawsonian account of blameworthiness in the previous paragraph.

  12. Of course, the parallel only goes so far. For example, whereas Strawson wants to say that the demand for regard issues from the members of one’s moral community, Sher wants to say that the demand for conformity to the requirements of morality issues from those requirements themselves. Still, it’s hard to see why that difference would preclude Strawson from giving an account of blameworthiness along the lines I’ve suggested. Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify this.

  13. On the significance of this distinction, see Fischer and Tognazzini 2011.

  14. Always keeping in mind, of course, that part of the way these particular facts become relevant in the first place, for the Strawsonian, is via their connection to our practices of holding one another responsible.

  15. For more on the ways in which facts about the blamer might affect the propriety of blame, see Coates and Tognazzini 2012, and several of the essays in Coates and Tognazzini 2013.

  16. For a nice discussion of the standing to blame, see Cohen 2006.

  17. It’s an open question why one’s standing to blame is undermined when the wrongdoing in question is “not one’s business”, but we don’t need a detailed explanation to acknowledge the intuitive force of the point.

  18. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pushing this worry.

  19. In fact, one can imagine this sort of objection being directed against T. M. Scanlon’s recent account of blame, according to which blaming is modifying one’s relationship with someone in response to one’s judgment that the person has done something to impair that relationship (2008, pp. 128–129). One worry for this account is that there are many different ways to modify one’s relationship in response to an impairment, only some of which seem to have anything to do with blame.

  20. See Wallace 1994, chapter 2. Alternatively, as Justin Coates suggested to me in personal correspondence, we might say that the emotion of resentment simply represents the wrongdoer as having disregarded moral demands. Belief itself may not even be necessary. See also Hurley and Macnamara 2010.

  21. Sher (2006, ch. 7) makes a similar point about his own account of blame, and I’m merely pointing out that the same move seems to be available to the contemporary Strawsonian.

  22. Thanks to Justin Coates for helping me to articulate this point.

  23. Formulations similar to this one can be found in Fischer and Ravizza 1998 and Wallace 1994. I am not claiming, however, that these theorists are guilty of the confusion mentioned in the text.

  24. For helpful comments on this paper, thanks very much to Justin Coates, John Fischer, and an anonymous referee. Thanks, too, to George Sher for his pioneering work on the topic of blame.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, The College of William & Mary, Williamsburg, VA, USA

    Neal A. Tognazzini

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Tognazzini, N.A. Blameworthiness and the Affective Account of Blame. Philosophia 41, 1299–1312 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9428-3

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