Abstract
It is often assumed that we are only blameworthy for that over which we have control. In recent years, however, several philosophers have argued that we can be blameworthy for occurrences that appear to be outside our control, such as attitudes, beliefs and omissions. This has prompted the question of why control should be a condition on blameworthiness. This paper aims at defending the control condition by developing a new conception of blameworthiness: To be blameworthy, I argue, is most fundamentally to deserve to feel guilty. Being blamed by someone else is not necessarily harmful to the wrongdoer. The blame might not be expressed, or the wrongdoer might not care. But to blame oneself necessarily involves suffering. This conception of blameworthiness explains why the control condition should obtain: We are morally blameworthy for A only if A was (directly or indirectly) under our control because (a) to be blameworthy is to deserve to feel guilty, (b) to feel guilty is to suffer, and (c) one deserves to suffer for A only if A was under one’s control.
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Notes
Sometimes one is blameworthy even though one lacks direct control over one’s action. If I drive while being drunk I am not in direct control of my actions. But suppose I was in control when I started drinking and knew that I would drive the car home. Hence I might be blameworthy for my drunk driving in virtue of having indirect control over that action.
For a critical discussion of other ways of justifying CONTROL, see Sher (2009: ch.4).
There are other notions of blame that are even less supportive of CONTROL. Arpaly (2003) takes blame to be a judgment about quality of will, Sher (2006) understands blame as a belief- desire pair and Scanlon (2008) gives an account of blame as a modification of the intentions and expectations that constitute a relationship. All of these accounts capture important aspects of what we call blame. But I am interested in the notion of blame that is at issue in the debate about free will and that can be challenged by sceptical arguments. As Pereboom (2013: 191) has pointed out concerning Scanlon’s account: a free will sceptic can accept that an action often shows something about the agent’s attitudes that impairs the relations others can have with him or her. Similar points can be made about the notions of blame developed by Arpaly and Sher.
Scanlon (2008: 198) raises a similar criticism.
See Smith (2007) for an interesting discussion of such cases.
Of course, there can be other justifications for expressing the reactive attitudes. Blame also has a forward-looking aspect, and scolding and reproaching may sometimes have beneficial consequences. We sometimes express blame in order to make people understand that they have done something wrong. This might inspire a change of heart, new moral insights, and regret. Even when the prospects of moral reform appear dim, blame might be justified as a form of moral protest. As Matthew Talbert (2012: 105–107) has argued, blame can be a way of affirming one’s moral standing. When confronted by the ill will of a committed racist or a psychopath, your expression of blame may not influence the wrongdoer, but it may still be valuable as a “defiant declaration” of moral standing and moral standards for “the protestor and his fellow sufferers” (107). There are thus several plausible justifications for expressing blame. But these justifications are independent of the wrongdoer’s status as blameworthy. We may have reasons to influence or to affirm our moral standing towards people who are not blameworthy at all. Of course, one could construct consequentialist versions of blameworthiness according to which agents are blameworthy to the extent that blaming them would produce good consequences or affirm the victim’s moral standing. But such accounts would be highly revisionary and a far cry from AE.
Watson (1996/2004) famously distinguishes between two faces of responsibility: responsibility as accountability and responsibility as answerability. I will only be discussing his comments on responsibility in the accountability sense. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this clarification.
It is not quite clear whether this is a formulation that Watson and Wallace would accept. They sometime emphasize that reactive attitudes come with a disposition to sanctioning behaviour. Watson claims that “blaming attitudes involve a readiness to adverse treatment” (1996/2004: 275). Wallace argues that blame “involves a disposition to engage in a variety of sanctioning activities” (1994: 94). This might very well be true as an empirical fact. But there is no necessary connection between blame and sanctions. Even though having the blame emotions involves a disposition to treat the wrongdoer in a certain way, this disposition need not be manifested (Graham 2014: 391; Nelkin 2013: 124). I therefore focus on the expression of the reactive attitude.
One might also individuate resentment, indignation, and so forth in terms of their common behavioural expressions without identifying these attitudes with the expressions. A functionalist account of them would do this. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out to me.
For a criticism of McKenna’s account of blame, see Russel (forthcoming).
Wallace might not object to this. He suggests that “desert” might be one way of specifying what we mean by “fairness” (1994: 106–108).
DS is a slightly modified version of the account of blameworthiness found in Pereboom (2013: 189).
This problem will also affect FS.
See Nelkin (2013: 124) for a similar example.
Note that this cognitive content does not need to be identified with a belief. That would have made these accounts vulnerable to the problem of recalcitrant emotions: situations in which we feel guilty without believing we have done anything wrong or acted with ill will. Instead they may be understood as seemings. It can seem to you that you have acted wrongly, although you do not believe you acted wrongly (Rosen 2015: 71).
Is it possible to enjoy the feeling of guilt, in a way parallel to how people might enjoy other intrinsically painful emotions such as fear or even sadness? I think it is possible to imagine a moral masochist who takes pleasure in the pain of guilt. This possibility would not undermine the claim that guilt necessarily involves suffering. The moral masochist would still suffer when he feels guilt. Unlike most people, however, he would enjoy this suffering. I thank an anonymous reviewer for this observation.
Here I adopt Rosen’s (2015) general structure of a theory of responsibility.
Rosen (2015: 82–83) makes a related point: “The wrongdoer who responds to outward blame with a sincere and cheerful promise to do better next time but without a hint of guilt or remorse palpably frustrates a desire implicit in resentment”.
In developing an in some respects similar view, Gideon Rosen (2015: 75) points out that the propositional content of “resentment must be framed in terms that everyone capable of resentment understands”. He calls this the naivety constraint. It is not easy to find a propositional content that can satisfy this constraint and, at the same time, make sense of all the commonly accepted exemptions and excuses.
I owe this point to Knut Olav Skarsaune.
A proponent of AE might reply by arguing that the content of the blame emotion is simply that the wrongdoer deserves to suffer for what she has done. Rosen (2015: 83) has recently made this suggestion. This thought would not be too complex and it would explain why the representational content of the blame emotion matches the conditions under which someone deserves to suffer. There are two problems with this suggestion. First, it is phenemenologically dubious. It is not obvious that one cannot blame another agent without thinking that she deserves to suffer. Second, it is too course-grained to explain the common excuses and exemptions. Whether an agent deserves to suffer would depend crucially on what kind of suffering we mean. One might make this representational constraint more specific, but this would run the danger of making it unduly complex.
Clarke (2016: 134–135) considers this possibility. “Might it be said that although her thought that she is blameworthy is correct, the unpleasant affect that partly constitutes her feeling of guilt is inappropriate—she should not feel at all bad about the matter? I am skeptical that there is any kind of moral blameworthiness with respect to which this is so.” Clarke does not elaborate on why he is skeptical about this. But earlier in the same paper he writes that poor quality of will: “does not suffice for one’s being blameworthy, and a warranted thought with this content does not suffice to warrant a feeling of guilt” (Clarke 2016: 123). This suggests that Clarke finds accounts of moral blameworthiness which do not operate with at least some control conditions implausible on independent grounds. But it also suggests that if such accounts were true, he would be reluctant to the idea that agents should feel the pain of guilt, merely because they acted with ill will.
There is a third possibilty. The cognitive content of guilt might not merely be the thin notion that I am blameworthy, but rather a more specific (and sophisticated) thought about control. If this could be established, I believe we would have an informative explanation of why there are control conditions on blameworthiness. However, this more specific cognitive content seems less plausible than Clarke’s suggestion. First, this idea might seem to violate what Gideon Rosen (2015) calls the naivety constraint: the propositional content of guilt propositional content of guilt must be framed in terms that everyone capable of guilt understands. It seems possible for someone to feel guilt without understanding the notion of control. Second, people (across different times and cultures) tend to feel guilty for a wide variety of things. The thought of being blameworthy might be sufficiently thin to cover this variety, but the thought of being in control does not. Third, it is natural to assume that guilt has some biological bases, as well as being the product of cultural input. But neither biology nor culture gives us reason for confidence in this propositional content. It would be major coincident if the propositional content of guilt matches up perfectly with the correct control conditions. The alternative picture, on which we determine whether an agent is blameworthy by asking whether the painful feeling of realizing one’s own wrongdoing is deserved, avoids this worry. In effect, it reduces the question of blameworthiness to the ethics of emotions. We have less reason to be afraid of debunking explanations of this kind of ethical reasoning.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for asking me to address this implication of my account.
Clarke (2016: 123) writes: “An appealing understanding of the warrant for a sentiment or emotion is epistemic warrant for its constitutive thought. (Compare: what warrants fear when one sees a tiger is the warranted thought that the animal is dangerous.) This consideration supports the suggestion I have offered.” This is an appealing understanding for most emotions (and as we have seen, this view of warrant motivates Graham’s account of blameworthiness). However, as I argued above, it is far less appealing when the emotion in question is also constituted by an intrinsically painful affect.
See footnote 10 for a discussion of these views.
One might worry that this way of justifying expressed blame would open the door for the problem of contingent harm. Even if the expressed blame is proportional to the deserved guilt, equally blameworthy agents might, because of their different psychologies, suffer different amounts of harm as a result of expressed blame. But there is an important difference. On DG, the fairness of expressing blame plays no role in determining whether, or to what extent, an agent is blameworthy. An agent is blameworthy to the extent that she deserves to feel guilt. Equally blameworthy agents will deserve the same amount of guilt. So on DG, it will still be the case that equally blameworthy agents deserve to suffer the same amount of harm.
Thanks to Jakob Elster and Torfinn Huvenes for pressing me to clarify this point.
I owe this example and the objection to Gideon Rosen.
Clarke (2013) also suggests that desert can be understood in terms of noninstrumental goodness.
Dana Nelkin (2016: 178) makes the opposite argument. She takes desert to be a special kind of fittingness. Because fittingness in general does not entail noninstrumental goodness, she rejects the claim that desert entails noninstrumental goodness. She uses the example of a racist joke. It may be fitting to laugh of it, although it is not in any way good. Similarly, she argues against the claim that “X being deserving of sanction provides a reason to sanction.” A spontaneous smile or an expression of surprise may be fitting, but does not provide reasons. However, none of these examples seems to be instances of desert. While it may be fitting to laugh of a racist joke, smile when seeing a child for the first time after a long trip, or show an expression of surprise in response to a carefully planned surprise party, it would be odd to say that one deserves any of these reactions. I take this to indicate that desert and fittingness are different notions of appropriateness.
To argue that a amusement is not fitting because it would be immoral is an example of what D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) call “the moralistic fallacy”.
Miranda Fricker (2016) has recently developed an account of blame, according to which the illocutionary point of blame is to inspire remorse: ”it aims to bring the wrongdoer to see or fully acknowledge the moral significance of what they have done or failed to do” (Fricker 2016: 173). For similar claims about the purpose or function of blame, see Rosen (2015: 82–83) and Shoemaker (2015: 110–111).
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for asking me to elaborate on the differences between guilt and grief.
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Acknowledgments
Versions of this paper was presented at the Nordic Network for Political Philosophy and at the PPPE Club, Centre for Mind and Nature, University of Oslo. I would like to thank the audiences on each of these occasions for helpful discussion. For written comments or discussion I am very grateful to Marcia Baron, Einar Duenger Bøhn, Lars Christie, Anna Drozdzowicz, Jakob Elster, Christel Fricke, Robert Huseby, Torfinn Huvenes, Neil Levy, Jon Anstein Olsen, Gideon Rosen, Knut Olav Skarsaune, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal.
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Carlsson, A.B. Blameworthiness as Deserved Guilt. J Ethics 21, 89–115 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9241-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9241-x