Trauma and Compassionate Blame (original) (raw)

Blame in the Aftermath of Excused Wrongdoing

Public Affairs Quarterly, 2020

Control accounts of moral responsibility argue that agents must possess certain capacities in order to be blameworthy for wrongdoing. This is sometimes thought to be revisionary, because reflection on our moral practices reveals that we often blame many agents who lack these capacities. This paper argues that Control accounts of moral responsibility are not too revisionary, nor too permissive, because they can still demand quite a lot from excused wrongdoers. Excused wrongdoers can acquire duties of reconciliation, which require that they improve themselves, make reparations for the harm caused, and retract the meaning expressed in the original wrong. Failure to do these things expresses a lack of regard for the victims, and can make those wrongdoers appropriate targets of blame.

Giving Responsibility a Guilt-Trip: Virtue, Tragedy, and Privilege

2012

In this paper, I argue for the ethical importance of the retributive emotion of ‗tragic-guilt,‘ namely, the feeling of self-recrimination for doing harm even if it could not be prevented. Drawing on empirical evidence concerning the phenomenology of such guilt, as well as thought-experiments concerning moral responsibility for inherited privilege, I distinguish tragic-guilt from the closelyrelated retributive emotions of regret, remorse, shame, and non-tragic guilt. I attempt to understand the emotion of tragic-guilt in light of an ethics of virtue, and I argue that sensitivity to tragic-guilt has significant theoretical, ethical, and motivational benefits. The reality of such tragic-responsibility reveals an uncomfortable, but undeniable messiness in the moral domain. The virtuous person is characterized by a deep emotional responsiveness to this messiness.  Earlier versions of this paper were presented at Ghent University and to the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology....

Responsibility, Failure, and Punishment

Some sort of freedom is a pre-condition for moral responsibility. If we are not free in some such fundamental way, then moral responsibility is unintelligible and its associated categories become inapplicable or dispensable. Not all sorts of practices become dispensable when their key concepts become unintelligible. Arguably, there may be good reasons to keep practices of holding each other responsible even when the pre-conditions of applicability of their key concepts have been denied. The issue of dispensability of concepts may be not thoroughly or completely conceptual; that is, it may be determined by considerations that have nothing to do with the nature of concepts. But I will not be concerned with such external considerations. I am interested in elucidating the concept of moral responsibility, where an agent is responsible for x if he is appropriately held accountable and it is answerable for x.

The Nature and Ethics of Blame

Philosophy Compass, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2012

Blame is usually discussed in the context of the free will problem, but recently moral philosophers have begun to examine it on its own terms. If, as many suppose, free will is to be understood as the control relevant to moral responsibility, and moral responsibility is to be understood in terms of whether blame is appropriate, then an independent inquiry into the nature and ethics of blame will be essential to solving (and, perhaps, even fully understanding) the free will problem. In this article we first survey and categorize recent accounts of the nature of blame – is it action, belief, emotion, desire, or something else? – and then we look at several proposed requirements on appropriate blame that look beyond the transgressor himself, considerations that will form part of a full account of the ethics of blame.

Regaining the 'Lost Self': A Philosophical Analysis of Survivor's Guilt

Altered Self and Altered Self Experience, 2014

Although there has been much discussion regarding shame and guilt, not enough has been said about the complexities of the relationship between the two. In this paper, I examine one way in which I take shame and guilt to interact – namely in cases of so-called “survivor’s guilt” among victims of trauma. More specifically, I argue that survivor’s guilt may represent a kind of response to feelings of shame – one which is centrally tied to the central philosophical notions of autonomy and integrity.

Responsibility for Wrongdoing Without Blameworthiness: How It Makes Sense and How It Doesn't

Some writers, such as John Fischer and Michael McKenna, have recently claimed that an agent can be morally responsible for a wrong action and yet not be blameworthy for that action. A careful examination of the claim, however, suggests two readings. On one reading, there are further conditions on blameworthiness beyond freely and wittingly doing wrong. On another innocuous reading, there are no such further conditions. Despite Fischer and McKenna's attempts to offer further conditions on blameworthiness in addition to responsibility for wrongdoing, I argue that only the innocuous reading is plausible. Once we distinguish between blame being deserved and blame being all-things-considered appropriate, we need not appeal to further conditions on blameworthiness. This discussion has important upshots regarding how compatibilists respond to certain manipulation arguments and how proponents of derived responsibility respond to criticism that agents are responsible even for outcomes that are not reasonably foreseeable.

Consequentialism and the ethics of blame, Draft version

Instrumentalism seeks to justify praise and blame by their instrumental value. Previously considered moribund, instrumentalist approaches to responsibility and blame have recently seen a revival. This article makes two contributions to this revival. First, I defend a new, complex structure for an instrumentalist ethics of blame ('Complex Instrumentalism'). Drawing on sophisticated consequentialism and relational theories of blame, Complex Instrumentalism is dispositional in its structure and content, and pluralist and relational in its justification. Second, I argue that Complex Instrumentalism makes consequentialism more plausible. Several ethicists, including Sidgwick and Parfit, have drawn on praise and blame to defend consequentialism, for example against the charge that consequentialism is too demanding and leaves insufficient room for partiality. Those traditional arguments become far more effective, if they adopt Complex Instrumentalism. To this end, I also develop a 'multi-level' dispositional account of blameless wrongdoing. I conclude that Complex Instrumentalism is a promising compatibilist approach to blame and adds plausibility to consequentialism.

Blame, deserved guilt, and harms to standing

Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility, ed. Andreas Brekke, Cambridge UP, 2022

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.