Moral, Cognitive and Social: The Nature of Blame (original) (raw)

Moral, cognitive, and social: The nature of blame (2012)

Blame is a moral judgment that has a cognitive and a social nature. In this paper we first focus on the cognitive side and introduce a new theoretical model of blame that integrates insights and evidence from extant research. Within this model, we demonstrate the critical role of such concepts as agent, intentionality, and obligation—all of which are grounded in people’s theory of mind. We then contrast two views on the ordering of blame and theory of mind based inferences: blame-late models, which claim that blame follows mental state inferences; and blame-early models, which claim that the opposite order holds. After integrating these two views within our model, we turn to two eminently social questions on moral judgment: blaming as a social act; and blaming of group agents. We suggest that our model of blame provides a fruitful framework for both of these questions, thus highlighting the intimate connection between blame as a cognitive phenomenon and blame as a social phenomenon.

A theory of blame (2014)

A theory of blame, 2014

We introduce a theory of blame in five parts. Part I addresses what blame is: a unique moral judgment that is both cognitive and social, regulates social behavior, fundamentally relies on social cognition, and requires warrant. Using these properties, we distinguish blame from such phenomena as anger, event evaluation, and wrongness judgments. Part II offers the heart of the theory: the Path Model of Blame, which identifies the conceptual structure in which blame judgments are embedded and the information processing that generates such judgments. After reviewing evidence for the Path Model, we contrast it with alternative models of blame and moral judgment (Part III) and use it to account for a number of challenging findings in the literature (Part IV). Part V moves from blame as a cognitive judgment to blame as a social act. We situate social blame in the larger family of moral criticism, highlight its communicative nature, and discuss the darker sides of moral criticism. Finally, we show how the Path Model of Blame can bring order to numerous tools of blame management, including denial, justification, and excuse.

Interconnections Between Perceptions of Blame, Mind, and Moral Abilities

2016

Theories of blame, mind, and moral attribution consider an individual’s perceived agency, operationalized in part as perceived intentionality and self-control. People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may display social deficits and a greater tendency to engage in problem behavior (PB; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) than neurotypical (NT) people, which may lead people to perceive that individuals with ASD act less agentically. Study 1 shows that the mitigated perceived agency of people with ASD leads to mitigated blame attribution. In addition to perceived agency, theories of mind and moral attribution account for perceptions of an individual’s capacity to experience emotions, pleasure, and suffering. Based upon these forms of perception, Gray et al.’s (2007) theory of mind perception (TMP) states that minds are perceived along the dimensions of agency and experience. Similarly, Gray, Young, and Waytz’s (2012) theory of dyadic morality (TDM) states that a person’s moral s...

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.

Information-Acquisition Processes in Moral Judgments of Blame

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

When people make moral judgments, what information do they look for? Despite its theoretical and practical implications, this question has largely been neglected by prior literature. The recent Path Model of Blame predicts a canonical order in which people acquire information when judging blame. Upon discovering a negative event, perceivers consider information about causality, then intentionality, then (if the event is intentional) reasons or (if the event is unintentional) preventability. Three studies, using two novel paradigms, assessed and found support for these predictions: In constrained (Study 1) and open-ended (Study 2) information-acquisition contexts, participants were most likely, and fastest, to seek information in the canonical order, even when under time pressure (Study 3). These findings indicate that blame relies on a set of information components that are processed in a systematic order. Implications for moral judgment models are discussed, as are potential roles of emotion and motivated reasoning in information acquisition.

People Systematically Update Moral Judgments of Blame

2018

Six experiments examine people's updating of blame judgments and test predictions developed from a socially-regulated blame perspective. According to this perspective, blame emerged in human history as a socially costly tool for regulating other’s behavior. Because it is costly for both blamers and violators, blame is typically constrained by requirements for “warrant”— evidence that one’s moral judgment is justified. This requirement motivates people to systematically process available causal and mental information surrounding a violation. That is, people are relatively calibrated and even-handed in utilizing evidence that either amplifies or mitigates blame. Such systematic processing should be particularly visible when people update their moral judgments. Using a novel experimental paradigm, we test two sets of predictions derived from the socially-regulated blame perspective and compare them with predictions from a motivated-blame perspective. Studies 1-4 demonstrate (across...

A Comprehensive Account of Blame: Self-Blame, Non-Moral Blame, and Blame for the Non-Voluntary

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms. For one, it can account for the fact that one’s having had control over whether one was to φ is a necessary condition for one’s being fittingly blamed for having φ-ed. For another, it can account for why, unlike fitting shame, fitting blame is always deserved, which in turn explains why there is something morally problematic about ridding oneself of one’s fitting self-blame (e.g., one’s fitting guilt).

Blame and Fault: Toward a New Conative Theory of Blame

Bernáth, László, Blame and Fault: Toward a Conative Theory of Blame. Disputatio: International Journal of Philosophy, 12 (59). pp. 371-94. , 2020

This paper outlines a new conative theory of blame. I argue that the best-known conative approaches to blame (Scanlon 1998, 2008, Sher 2006a) misrepresent the cognitive and dispositional components of blame. Section 1 argues, against Scanlon and Sher, that blaming involves the judgment that an act or state is the fault of the blamed. I also propose an alternative dispositional condition on which blaming only occurs if it matters to the blamer whether the blamed gets the punishment that she deserves. In Section 2, I discuss objections to judgment-based accounts of blame (that they cannot tell the difference between blaming and judging to be blameworthy, that they cannot explain why blame is often accompanied by emotion, and that they cannot make sense of irrational blame), and I argue that my proposal can handle all of them.

Review of Blame: Its Nature and Norms

Blame: Its Nature and Norms, edited by D. Justin Coates and Neal A. Tognazzini, is a vital resource for those interested in moral responsibility, especially its normative aspects. The book includes fourteen new essays-all of excellent quality-as well as a valuable and substantial introductory essay, "The Contours of Blame," by the editors.

A Unified Empirical Account of Responsibility Judgments

Skeptical worries about moral responsibility seem to be widely appreciated and deeply felt by laymen. To address these worries—if nothing else to show that they are mistaken— theories of moral responsibility need to relate to whatever concept of responsibility underlies the worries. Unfortunately, the nature of that concept has proved hard to pin down. Not only do philosophers have conflicting intuitions; numerous recent empirical studies have suggested that both prosaic responsibility judgments and incompatibilist intuitions among the folk are subject to a number of surprising factors, sometimes yielding apparently contradictory judgments. In this paper, we show how an independently motivated hypothesis about responsibility judgments provides a unified explanation of the more important results from these studies. According to this ‘Explanation Hypothesis’, to take an agent to be morally responsible for an event is, roughly, to take a relevant motivational structure of the agent to be part of a significant explanation of the event. We argue that because of how explanatory interests and perspectives affect what we take as significant explanations, this analysis accounts for the puzzling variety of empirical results. If this is correct, the Explanation Hypothesis also provides a new way of understanding debates about moral responsibility.