## 1. What is Blame?



To begin, note that almost all philosophical discussions of blame
ignore (or mention only to set aside) the form of blame sometimes
characterized as causal or explanatory responsibility (Kenner 1967;
Hart 1968; Beardsley 1969). It is this notion of blame that is at
stake when we say that Hurricane Hugo is to blame for the destruction
of Charleston's harbor, or that the cat is to blame for knocking over
the vase. Theorists contrast this sense of "blame" with
the sort of *interpersonal* blame that, for example, one gives
up when one forgives. (As Pamela Hieronymi (2001) has pointed out,
forgiveness in fact requires *not* giving up one's judgment
that the other person is *explanatorily* to blame.) But just
what the relation is between causal blame and interpersonal blame is
an important question that has not been well-explored. Nevertheless,
in this entry the focus will be on the latter form of blame, which is
a response to moral agents on the basis of their wrong, bad, or
otherwise objectionable actions, attitudes, or characters.



Theories of blame could be organized in a number of different ways,
depending on one's purposes. Consider three of these possible ways.
First, we could categorize theories of blame according to the
*content* of blaming attitudes. On this way of dividing up
things, the view put forth by Pamela Hieronymi (2004)--which
holds that the force of blame is located in judgments of ill
will--would be categorized with that of R. Jay Wallace (1994,
2011)--which holds that blame is an emotional response to ill
will displayed in others' actions. Alternatively, we could categorize
theories of blame according to those psychological states or
dispositions that are thought to *constitute* blame. This
second way of dividing things up emphasizes an important difference
between Hieronymi's and Wallace's theories: for Hieronymi, blame can
be identified primarily with a judgment, but for Wallace, blame is
primarily an emotion. A third way might instead focus on
*objects* of blaming attitudes and behaviors. Is blame directed
exclusively at actions? Or can it instead be directed at attitudes,
including beliefs, as in the case of epistemic blame (see, e.g.,
Rettler 2018)? Here a theory that emphasizes the significance of
emotions might opt for a more circumscribed account, since it's not
clear that indignation or other forms of blaming anger are really apt
responses to, say, culpable epistemic failures. By contrast, a theory
(like Hieronymi's or Angela Smith's (2005)) that has a more
minimal conception of blame can more easily account for blame for
attitudes. 



Of course, any scheme for categorizing theories has its advantages and
disadvantages, and by selecting one scheme over the other, one
necessarily emphasizes certain aspects of blame while ignoring other
aspects of blame that might be equally important. Nevertheless, the taxonomy to follow is consonant with much of the literature in classifying theories according to the
activity or mental state that is thought to constitute blame. According to this way of
carving things up, we get four categories: cognitive, emotional,
conative, and functional accounts of blame.


### 1.1 Cognitive Theories of Blame



Cognitive theories of blame hold that blame is fundamentally a
judgment or evaluation that we make about an agent in light of their
actions, attitudes, or character. One of the earliest cognitive theories of blame
is due to J. J. C. Smart (1961), who develops his analysis of blame
indirectly, since he begins by distinguishing between praise and
*dispraise* (rather than with the more natural distinction
between praise and blame). According to Smart, to praise or dispraise
an individual is simply to *grade* them as a member of a
particular kind. And as Smart says, this sort of grading is no
different than the sort of grading involved in judging one apple to be
better than the others at the supermarket. Crucially, Smart notes
that though you might dispraise a young philosopher for their poor
writing in a letter of recommendation, you are not thereby blaming
them for it. Thus for Smart, blame is distinct from dispraise. Unlike
dispraise, blame involves more than merely grading someone's actions
or character (morally), since blame carries with it the implication
that the person is responsible for their action or character. Blame,
then, is a negative evaluative judgment that implies
responsibility.



In a similar vein, Gary Watson (1996) has suggested that there is an
evaluative form of blame connected with what he calls the
"aretaic perspective". To blame someone in this way is to
judge that they have failed with respect to some standard of
excellence (*arete*). It is also to insist that the agent is
responsible for their action in the sense that the action is
*attributable* to the agent--it represents their
evaluative standpoint, their practical identity, what they
"stand for" (Watson 1996). Like Smart, Watson recognizes
that it is possible to make such a judgment dispassionately. Thus, on
the grading and evaluative theories of blame developed by Smart and
Watson, there is nothing about blame that requires a blamer to be
emotionally exercised in any way. However, unlike Smart--who
*identifies* blame with a form of grading that implies moral
responsibility--Watson does not take aretaic blame to be a
general *analysis* of blame. Rather, for Watson, aretaic blame
is just one way among many that we blame others for their actions.




Even though many have resisted thinking of blame as a form of grading,
a number of contemporary accounts of blame retain the core idea in
Smart's (and Watson's) account that blame is a kind of evaluative
judgment. But what sort of evaluative judgment will do? Many theorists
have identified blame with judgments that essentially implicate how
the blamed agent's *moral* or *practical* self was involved in the
production of action. This allows cognitive theories to explain the
special force of blame. After all, as T.M. Scanlon puts it,
"given that most people care about" their moral selves
(and others' opinions about their moral selves), judgments that
implicate these aspects of a person are not "*mere*
descriptions" (Scanlon 1986: 170). Michael Zimmerman (1988) and
Ishtiyaque Haji (1998) make this point more vividly when they argue
that to blame someone is to judge that in virtue of their attitudes,
actions, or character, they have a *stain* on their moral self
or a mark against their moral ledger. As Zimmerman puts it, when we
blame someone, we judge



> 
> 
> that there is a "discredit" or "debit" in his
> ledger ... that his "moral standing" has been
> "diminished" (Zimmerman 1988: 38).
> 
> 
> 



One need not endorse the idea of an actual moral ledger in
order to hold a cognitive theory of blame. Pamela Hieronymi (2004),
for example, articulates a cognitive account of blame, where the
judgment in question is a judgment that the blamed agent has shown the blamer (or
another) ill will. Since we care deeply about other people's judgments
about the quality of our wills, this judgment can also carry the
distinctive force of blame.



Despite a number of supporters, there are many who are less sanguine
about the prospects of a purely cognitive account of blame. One
potential problem for cognitive accounts is that they risk conflating
*blaming* with *judging blameworthy* (Kenner 1967;
Coates and Tognazzini 2012). After all, it seems quite possible to
judge, for example, that another has displayed ill will or that they
have a mark against their moral ledger (and so, judge that they are
blameworthy), without actually blaming that individual. The
co-conspirator's recognition of the wrongness of a partner's criminal
activity might, in fact, underlie admiration for the partner's
skillful execution of a heinous crime that most of us couldn't
stomach. The fact that the same judgment could elicit such different
responses (repulsion and resentment in those of us who are committed
to the values of morality and admiration in those who are not)
suggests that the judgment alone cannot constitute blame. More
recently, Hanna Pickard (2013) has argued that since it is possible to knowingly
blame others inappropriately (i.e., to blame others even when we know
that they are not really blameworthy for their actions), the judgment
that another is blameworthy, or that they have shown ill will or
disregard, is not necessary for blame. It looks, then, that judgments
of the sort discussed above are neither necessary nor sufficient for
blame.



A further problem for cognitive accounts is one suggested by Gary
Watson (1987). According to Watson, attempts to identify or reduce
blame *exclusively* to its cognitive components (recall that
although Watson thinks that aretaic blame takes the form of judgments,
it does not exhaust the phenomenon of blaming) make it seem 



> 
> 
> as though in blaming we were mainly moral clerks, recording moral
> faults ... from a detached and austerely "objective"
> standpoint (1987 as reprinted in Watson 2004: 226-27).
> 
> 
> 



Here Watson argues that blame issues from the perspective of a participant in human
relationships, one in which we are not merely observing the moral
order but are actively involved in a moral community. These sorts of
considerations form the basis for emotional theories of blame. 


### 1.2 Emotional Theories of Blame



Despite the fact that P. F. Strawson's "Freedom and
Resentment" (1962) contains little sustained discussion of blame
as such, many take it to be the contemporary genesis of emotional
theories of blame. According to Strawson, our status as morally
responsible agents is grounded in the non-detached attitudes and
emotions that are (in part) constitutive of ordinary interpersonal
relationships. Regarding others as morally responsible agents, for
Strawson, is not a matter of judgment but of emotional response. (Note that according to cognitivist theories of the emotions, emotional
states are identified with a suite of judgments (Solomon 1993;
Nussbaum 2001). Thus, if the cognitivist theory of emotions were
correct, there would be no fundamental difference between cognitive
and emotional theories of blame. However, cognitivist theories of the
emotions are very controversial, and so we will set this important
question aside.)



R. Jay Wallace (1994) has developed this idea into an account of
"holding responsible" according to which we hold others
morally responsible just in case we experience resentment,
indignation, or (in the self-regarding case) guilt as a response to
their actions, or judge that such a response would be appropriate.
Thus, for Wallace, (a specific subset of) Strawson's "reactive
attitudes" are essentially implicated in the stance we take up
when we hold others responsible. But though it is possible to take up
the stance of "holding responsible" without being
emotionally exercised, Wallace stresses (and reiterates this in
Wallace 2011) that to actually *blame* an agent, one must be
exercised emotionally. 



Of course, Strawson and Wallace are hardly alone in endorsing
emotional theories of blame. While these "Strawsonian"
accounts of blame focus on the reactive attitudes (particularly
resentment, indignation, and guilt), other emotional theories of blame
are more inclusive. Susan Wolf (2011), David Shoemaker (2015, 2017), and
Leonhard Menges (2017), for example, defend accounts of blame that
emphasize anger (in the case of Shoemaker, it's actually three
distinct species of anger). Similarly, Macalester Bell (2013a, 2013b)
argues for a "hostile attitudes" account of blame that
includes the attitude of contempt as a blaming attitude. Consequently,
what holds emotional theories of blame together is not widespread
agreement over which emotions constitute blame. Rather, it is a shared
commitment to thinking that to blame is to respond to others' actions
with a negative emotion.



Though it's very plausible that we blame others by responding to their
actions with anger, resentment, indignation, or even contempt, there
are a number of objections to emotional theories of blame. George Sher
(2006) argues that emotional responses are unnecessary for blame. For
example, Sher argues that we can blame a loved one without feeling
negative emotional reactions. So too, we can blame villains from whom
we are temporally distant without any emotional response. The thought
here is simply that it is possible to blame Nero for the burning of
Rome, even though we do not feel any resentment or indignation towards
Nero for his cruelty. In response, defenders of emotional theories
might simply argue that despite appearances, without the emotions, one
is simply not blaming Nero but instead merely judging blameworthy (see
Wallace 1994, 2011). Alternatively, a defender of emotional theories
could argue (plausibly, but by no means uncontroversially) that one
can be in an emotional state even if one does not experience any felt
affect.



A second objection to emotional theories of blame might be called the
"force objection". Pamela Hieronymi develops this
objection by noting that



> 
> 
> an affective accompaniment of a judgment would be a certain unpleasant
> emotional disturbance ... but, the force of blame seems deeper, more
> serious or weightier (Hieronymi 2004: 121).
> 
> 
> 



Thus, in Hieronymi's view, the normative force of blame must be grounded in the cognitive
elements of blaming emotions, since it is these elements that are
responsive to and reflect our concern for morality. But if the force
of blame is grounded in the cognitive elements of the emotion, then
why wouldn't a judgment with the same content constitute an instance
of blame? It seems that while emotions might be concomitant with
blame, it is the cognitive element--one that can be present even
if the blamer is not emotionally exercised--and not the emotion
itself that constitutes one's blame. In response to this sort of
objection, Wallace (2011) has argued that the reactive emotions are
not superfluous add-ons to the judgment, but instead they serve to
change the meaning of the judgment, imbuing the judgment with the sort
of expressive significance that is characteristic of blame and that
would otherwise be lacking from a mere judgment.



More recently, Miranda Fricker (2016) has argued that our blaming
practices evince too much internal diversity to be so neatly
identified with the narrow set of attitudes that emotion theorists
focus on. Because blame in one context can vary so significantly from
blame in another context--self-blame is different than direct
second-personal blame, and each of these forms of blame is importantly
different than third-party blame--there is very little that is
present in all instances of blame. And surely no specific emotional
experience will be present in all cases. In response to this, Leonhard
Menges (2017) has claimed that there is actually less diversity in our
blaming practices than Fricker supposes, and that to the degree there
is any diversity in how we blame, it does nothing to undermine the
rationale for emotional accounts of blame.


### 1.3 Conative Theories of Blame



Conative theories of blame emphasize motivational elements, like
desires and intentions, as essential to blame. Two of the most
developed extant theories of blame--those due to George Sher
(2006) and T. M. Scanlon (2008, 2013)--fall in this category. And
though we will focus on these two theories, other conative theories
are possible. 


#### 1.3.1 Dispositions Around a Belief-Desire Pair



As mentioned above, George Sher (2006) is skeptical of emotional
theories of blame. However, he is also skeptical about accounts of
blame that are merely cognitive. There is more to blame than a mere
judgment that an agent has acted wrongly, but one need not be
emotionally exercised in order to blame. Sher prefers a happy medium
between these two widely accepted alternatives.



According to Sher, what must be added to judgments of wrongness is a
backwards-looking desire "that the person in question not have
performed his past bad act" (2006: 112). But it's not enough
that the blamer simply wish that the bad action not have happened; the
desire must be one that issues from the blamer's general commitment to
morality, since what we really want is that the wrongdoer not have
"exercised his own decision-making capacities in a certain
way", and that "he have responded, or that he be disposed
to respond, to what we consider a compelling moral reason"
(2006: 105). On the resulting view, when the cognitive component of
judging blameworthy is accompanied by this desire, which reflects our
general commitment to morality, then we are blaming. (See also Arpaly
2006 and Arpaly & Schroeder 2014 for a similar view, according to
which blame requires having a conative orientation "against the
wrong or bad" (Arpaly & Schroeder 2014: 161).) Moreover,
Sher argues that the belief-desire pair in question is itself the
basis of those affective and behavioral dispositions that are commonly
associated with blame. For example, a blamer's disposition to feel
hostile attitudes like anger towards the agent and to also reprimand,
rebuke, and seek apology are to be explained by the presence of the
belief-desire pair.



Despite the elegance of Sher's view, it has generated a number of
critical replies. Pamela Hieronymi (2008) objects to the link between
the belief-desire pair and attendant affective and behavioral
dispositions. To her mind, the link is too weak: though she accepts
Sher's claim that the belief-desire pair is essentially implicated in
one's general commitment to morality, she does not think he has
adequately shown that the characteristic dispositions are implicated
in the same way. After all, "surely our commitment to morality
could be affirmed or clarified in ways that do not involve hostile
behavior or reproach" (2008: 25). But if this is correct, then
it looks like blame's characteristic dispositions need not be present, even in those who are genuinely and sincerely committed to moral
norms. As a result, Hieronymi concludes that Sher has failed to show
that *blame*--which must involve such
dispositions--is essentially tied to a more general commitment to
morality.



A second objection to Sher's view is due to Angela Smith (2008). Smith
rejects Sher's claim that a desire component is part of what
constitutes an attitude as blame. To defend this, she invites us to
consider an ordinary case of blame, say the blame we feel for a
politician who leads us into a disastrous war. While we no doubt
desire that the politician hadn't led us into the war because we are
generally committed to morality (and we therefore don't enjoy the
suffering of innocents), it is not clear how this desire is itself
part of our blame. By Smith's lights, the desire component of the
belief-desire pair, like the attendant affective and behavioral
dispositions, seems to be something that is above and beyond blame
itself. In more recent work, Smith has also argued that in some cases,
say in "the reactions of a mother whose son is blameworthy for
[a] crime" (Smith 2013: 35), the relevant belief-desire pair
might be present without blame. Other challenges to Sher's theory
include the worry that it is too "sanitized" because it
compromises psychological realism by "stripping away [blame's]
unsavory features" (McGeer 2013: 166).


#### 1.3.2 Attitude Adjustment in Response to Impairment



T. M. Scanlon (2008) has developed an influential account of blame
that represents something of a shift from his earlier, more cognitive,
account (see Scanlon 1986). In developing this new account, Scanlon's
initial motivation is similar to that of Sher, since Scanlon thinks
that an adequate account of blame must fit somewhere between a mere
*judgment* that another has acted in some objectionable way and
a *sanction* (of which expressed reactive emotions are but one
paradigm case). But unlike Sher, Scanlon does not think that we can
avoid these (putatively) unattractive alternatives simply by
supplementing the belief that another has acted wrongly or badly with
a desire that they did not so act. Indeed, for Scanlon, the belief
that another has acted wrongly is not part of blame at all. Instead,
the cognitive component of blame is provided by a judgment that
another has acted in a way that impairs meaningful interpersonal
relations; this is a judgment of blameworthiness. (For Scanlon, blame
is a response to the *meaning* of someone's actions, rather
than the *permissibility* of those actions. For more on this
distinction, see the first three chapters of Scanlon 2008.) But this
judgment itself is insufficient for blame (for reasons similar to
those that Sher gives), so in addition to judging that the agent is
blame*worthy*, blame requires you "to take your
relationship with him or her to be modified in a way that [a judgment
of blameworthiness] holds to be appropriate" (Scanlon 2008:
128-29). In other words, blaming someone involves not just the
belief that they have acted in a way that impairs your relationship
with them, but also, that you take yourself to have reasons to revise
your intentions and attitudes towards them, and accordingly that you
revise these intentions and attitudes on the basis of such reasons.




Like Sher, then, Scanlon has provided an initially plausible account
of what it is to blame. But also like Sher, his account has been
widely criticized. The most common line of criticism is best summed up
by R. Jay Wallace's (2011) slogan that Scanlon's account "leaves
the blame out of blame". More precisely, Wallace argues that



> 
> 
> blame has a quality of opprobrium that is not captured by the
> considerations about the normative significance of impaired
> relationships that are at the center of Scanlon's approach (Wallace
> 2011: 349; see also Mason 2011). 
> 
> 
> 



Susan Wolf (2011) has also argued that in some cases, such as the case
of a hot-headed but ultimately loving family, it seems that you can
blame another without taking yourself to have impairments in your
relationship or attendant reasons to revise your intentions or
attitudes towards that person. The characteristic features of
Scanlon's interpretation of blame, then, seem to be unnecessary. More
recently, Sher (2013) has argued that Scanlon's emphasis on
relationships is problematic. After all, many cases of wrongdoing
involve strangers--e.g., in most car thefts, the victim does not
know the criminal. Nevertheless, it still seems that it is possible to
blame those with whom we have no standing relationship. So blame
cannot essentially implicate interpersonal relationships. Scanlon, in
response (2008, 2013), insists that all rational agents stand in the
"moral relationship" to one another. However, whether this
kind of relationship is sufficient to explain the blame of strangers
is unclear. And indeed, as Sher points out, even if there is some
relationship between a victim and the stranger who victimizes them,
it's not clear that *this* relationship plays any role at all
in grounding the blame.


### 1.4 Functional Theories of Blame



Functional accounts of blame are analogous to functionalist theories
of mental states or properties. Instead of identifying blame with any
particular attitude (like a judgment or emotion) or combination of
attitudes (like a belief-desire pair), functional accounts of blame
identify blame by its functional role. This way of proceeding leaves
open the particular attitude or combination of attitudes that
constitute blame. In this way, functional accounts can be more
flexible.



According to one functional account of blame, the function of blame is
protest. In other words, what we're doing when we blame others is
protesting their actions or character. But this, of course, means that
any number of attitudes or combination of attitudes could be
present in blame. Pamela Hieronymi (2001), Matthew Talbert (2012), and
Victoria McGeer (2013) argue that reactive attitudes like resentment
(and the expressions of these attitudes) serve as powerful forms of
protest. Angela Smith (2013), on the other hand, argues that when we
modify our attitudes and intentions as Scanlon envisions, but do so
*as a form of protest*, then we are actually blaming. In other
words, for Smith, it's not enough that we modify our attitudes and
intentions; the modification in question must serve a particular
function, namely that of protest, to count as an instance of blame.
And in order to count as a protest, it need not involve any particular
emotional state. (See Franklin (2013) and Houston (1992) for more on
the way in which blame allows us to stand up for our values.)



There are at least two sources of concern for those theories that take
protest to be the function of blame. First, it's not clear that
protest is independent of blame, such that one could specify what it
is to protest without appealing to blaming attitudes. But if this is
so, it's not clear that appealing to the notion of protest will help
us clarify the nature of blame. Second, protest seems paradigmatically
*expressed*. Indeed, it's hard to make sense of unexpressed
protest. Do workers protest unfair labor conditions simply through
their beliefs or attitudes? Or must they make such beliefs and
attitudes known? And if it is the latter, then it's not clear that
protest could be the function of blame. After all, not all blame is
expressed. These objections are not decisive, of course, but they do suggest that there is more work to be done in defense of protest views to help us better understand what the nature of protest is, such that appeals to protest can provide a non-circular account of blame. 



Of course, there might be other functions of blame: to express or
communicate condemnation or disapproval, for example. Michael McKenna
(2012, 2013) has argued for such an account. In fact, he has claimed
that blame is *conversational*, and thus functions to continue
a conversation started by the blamee's wrongful action. In particular,
McKenna claims that the reactive attitudes and their expressions serve
this function. Antony Duff has proposed a similar understanding of the
aim of blame, according to which it is 



> 
> 
> an attempt to communicate to the wrong-doer a moral understanding of
> his wrong-doing; to bring him to recognize his guilt and repent what
> he has done (Duff 1986: 70).
> 
> 
> 



Along these lines Coleen Macnamara (2011, 2015) has also argued that
our practices of holding others morally responsible more generally (a
set of practices that includes blame) are communicative in their
function. In a similar vein, Christopher Bennett (2013) claims that
blame functions symbolically to express our disapproval. Like Smith,
he develops this account by supplementing Scanlon's theory of blame,
but it seems that one could adapt Bennett's expressive apparatus even
outside of a Scanlonian framework, since the distinctive aspect of it
is that it *expresses* something important about our stance
towards the blamee's actions. Most recently, Miranda Fricker (2016)
claims that communicative blame, which identifies and communicates
faults, is the paradigmatic case of blame.



Because of their relative newness to the scene, there is not much
criticism of these views. However, one potential problem with these
views is that many (perhaps most) instances of blame are not expressed
or communicated. In what sense are those instances of blame
communicative? And if they are not, how can blame be essentially
communicative in its nature? Gary Watson suggests that resentment is
"incipiently communicative" and says that "in some
elusive sense, resentment is 'meant to be
expressed'" (Watson 2011: 328). (That sense remains
elusive, but see McKenna (2012) and Macnamara (2015) for more discussion.)


## 2. When is Blame Appropriate?



Blame is easily abused and misused, so a complete understanding of the
phenomenon will require looking not just at what blame *is* but
also *when it's appropriate*. (We use 'appropriate'
as a broad normative term to cover all sorts of evaluations, such as
whether any particular instance of blame is fitting, warranted,
permissible, required, effective, and so on.) As Miranda Fricker puts
it: "Like most things in life, our practice of blame is
susceptible to the vices of being done from the wrong sort of motive,
in the wrong degree, in the wrong way, or with the wrong sort of
object" (Fricker 2016: 168). This list provides a nice initial
taxonomy of ways that blame can go awry: an ethics of blame will need
to take into consideration (a) facts about the blamer, (b) facts about
the blaming interaction itself, and (c) facts about the person being
blamed. (We're lumping "in the wrong degree" together with
"in the wrong way", since disproportionality will be one
way in which the blaming interaction can be problematic.) Keep in
mind, too, that how you answer the question of what blame *is*
will influence these ethical questions, since the propriety conditions
of a judgment are plausibly distinct from the propriety conditions of
a rebuke. Because we are not here endorsing a particular theory of
blame, our characterization of the norms in question will operate at a
level of abstraction that floats free of substantive commitments
concerning the nature of blame. (It's also worth noting that the
conditions on appropriate blame outlined below may perhaps be
legitimately ignored if the stakes are high enough and the likely
consequences of blame so valuable. In other words, there may be cases
where it is appropriate to blame for the 'wrong' sort of
reason. We set these cases aside for the purposes of our
discussion.)


### 2.1 Facts about the Person Being Blamed



Begin by considering potentially relevant facts about the person who
is being blamed. A natural answer to the question of when blame is
appropriate is to say that blame is only appropriate when the person
blamed is in fact blame*worthy*. This may sound at first like
an unhelpful tautology--after all, what could it mean to be
worthy of blame if not simply that you can be appropriately
blamed?--but the emphasis on *worthiness* is meant to draw
attention to the fact that it's only appropriate to blame a person
when they have *earned* it or when they *deserve* it.
That is, only when certain facts about *the person being
blamed* are in place. Which facts? What does one have to do to
earn blame?


#### 2.1.1 Moral Agency



As we noted in section 1 above, being *to blame* (i.e.,
causally responsible; see Beardsley 1969 and Kenner 1967) is not
sufficient for being *blameworthy* because often, the best or
most salient causal explanation doesn't even involve a moral agent at
all. Earthquakes and mosquitoes can be to blame for various negative
outcomes, but neither can be blameworthy because neither can, as Gary
Watson puts it, "act effectively and competently in moral
matters" (2013a: 3322). Only certain creatures are even
candidates for blame in the first place, and though it is a matter of
some controversy which precise capacities are required, the list
certainly includes the capacities for reflection, deliberation,
decision-making, and self-determination. But earthquakes and
mosquitoes are the easy cases; the harder cases are children and
psychopaths, individuals who haven't (or haven't yet) developed an
understanding of or an appreciation for moral norms. These
individuals, it seems, can still act in morally significant
ways--indeed, in ways we would naturally describe as cruel and
even evil--but whether they can earn moral blame (as opposed
merely to giving us good reason to protect ourselves from them) is a
vexed question (see Watson 2011 and Shoemaker 2015 for insightful
discussion). But regardless of how one answers that question, it is
widely accepted that potentially blameworthy agents must be capable of
reflecting upon, reasoning about, and executing a decision about how
to behave. If someone lacks these capacities, they are
*exempted* from blame.


#### 2.1.2 Freedom and Responsibility



In addition to having the general capacity for practical reasoning,
however, it is often thought that an individual is appropriately
blamed only if they had (and, on the occasion, exercised) free will.
The excuse "I couldn't help it" or "I was forced to
do it" is often sufficient to render blame inappropriate, so
it's a natural thought that someone can only be blamed for those
things that they *could* have helped, or *weren't*
forced into--in other words, for those things that they chose of
their own free will. (But note that this is primarily a condition applied
to *actions* for which one is thought to be blameworthy. Taking
seriously the possibility that we can be blameworthy for our attitudes
as well might naturally lead one to downplay the importance of free
will, or reconceive what it involves. See, for example, Smith 2005.)
Typically, free will is thought of as a sort of *control*: as
the ability to control (by selecting) which of two possible futures
obtains, for example, or as the ability to control (by guiding) one's
actions in light of one's considered judgments about what one ought to
do. (See van Inwagen 1983; Fischer 1994; Nelkin 2011; Franklin 2018.)
The question of whether control of the right
sort is compatible with determinism has proven to be a difficult one to answer; hence it's a difficult question
whether blame would ever be appropriate in a deterministic world.
There are less sweeping threats to freedom, however. We are all
vulnerable to coercion, manipulation, situational pressures, and
varying degrees of temptation or compulsion, and the extent to which
these factors rob us of our freedom is the extent to which we may not be deserving of blame.



If you add the capacity for practical reasoning to the right sort of
capacities for control (which will likely include not just volitional
capacities but cognitive capacities, too), you end up with a morally
responsible agent--that is to say, an individual who has the
capacities that render them a sensible target of blame (see Fischer
& Ravizza 1998; Vargas 2013). If, in performing a morally reprehensible action, they exercise those capacities, then they are morally
responsible *for* that action--that is to say, they are a
sensible target of blame for that action (they are neither exempted
nor excused from our blaming practices).



There are further subtleties here, but they are inessential to the
main point, which is simply that most theorists think that it is only
appropriate to blame someone if they have certain capacities for
control, practical reasoning, moral understanding, etc., and exercised
them on the occasion in question. (One of the subtleties is that even
if an agent satisfies all the relevant control conditions, they may
still fail to be responsible if they fail to meet an independent
epistemic condition. Non-culpable ignorance (perhaps even culpable ignorance) of the consequences of one's actions seems to excuse bad behavior as much as lack of control. See Ginet 2000, Mele 2011, and Robichaud & Wieland 2017.) Likewise, most
theorists think that if someone has and exercises these capacities,
then they are blameworthy--that is, they have *earned*
blame. But just because someone has earned blame doesn't mean that
blame is necessarily the right response. To see why, let's turn now to
facts about the blaming interaction itself.


### 2.2 Facts about the Blaming Interaction



Even if someone is blameworthy, not just *any* blaming
interaction is called for. If we think of blame as a
"move" made through moral space, or as a contribution to a
moral conversation (see McKenna 2012), then one dimension of normative
questions will concern the moves or messages that are called for. We
might think of these as *procedural* norms (Coates and
Tognazzini 2012).


#### 2.2.1 Proportionality



Analogous to the common thought that the punishment must fit the
crime, it is plausible to suppose that the blame must, in some
sense, fit the transgression. Perhaps it's legitimate to be annoyed at
your friend for forgetting your birthday one year, but you shouldn't (at
least in the absence of some special context) vow never to speak to
them again as a result of that one lapse. What will count as a
proportional blaming response to a transgression will no doubt vary
with different relationships and different transgressions, but there
will likely always be some responses that take the transgression too
seriously, and some that don't take it seriously enough.



What counts as a proportional blaming response won't depend just on
the nature of the transgression, though; it will likely also depend on
the way the wrongdoer has responded to their own transgression. As
Angela Smith puts it:



> 
> 
> If someone has an objectionable attitude toward me, for example, but
> is already reproaching herself for it and making efforts to change,
> then I may judge that I have no reason to adopt or express any blaming
> attitudes toward her at all. Her own self-reproach shows me that she
> already recognizes that I have moral standing and deserve better
> treatment, and therefore I may no longer see her attitude as posing a
> challenge to me or my status. In cases of this sort, the faulty
> attitude is still attributable to the agent and she is open to
> legitimate moral criticism for it; but the agent is already responding
> appropriately to this fact and therefore there may be no grounds for
> further criticism on the part of others (Smith 2007: 482).
> 
> 
> 



Relatedly, in the case of third-party blame--where your blame is
directed at someone who has wronged someone else--there are
procedural questions concerning how the intensity of your blame
matches up with the intensity of the blame from the person who was
wronged. If I suspect that your failure to blame someone who has
wronged you stems from a lack of self-respect or a lack of feeling
empowered, then perhaps I can appropriately be more outraged than you
are. But in other cases it seems as though I need to temper my blame
in light of how you yourself view the wrong that has been done to you.
For example, what if you have forgiven the wrongdoer? Does that by
itself render third-party blame out of order? Maura Priest (2016)
suggests that we distinguish between "Spectator Blame" and
"Associate Blame" to help deal with this issue. While
forgiveness might render blaming *on behalf of the victim*
inappropriate, there is still a more detached form of blame that could
be appropriately maintained. 


#### 2.2.2 Epistemic Considerations



Imaginary philosophical examples are always told by an omniscient
narrator, but of course real-life cases of blame are never like that,
and we have to rely on our fallible judgments about the obscure
motivations of other human beings. Sometimes we are confident that
someone has done wrong; other times we let our anger hamper our
imagination and our generosity in searching for possible excuses for
apparent wrongdoing. Having too quick a temper is itself something for
which one can be open to criticism, and what makes a temper count as
*too* quick is often that it outstrips the evidence for
wrongdoing. The realm of interpersonal blame is not perfectly
analogous to the realm of legal responsibility, of course, so
"beyond a reasonable doubt" may be too demanding a
requirement, but nevertheless there is some epistemic standard that
must be met before blame is appropriate, even if the potential target
of blame is in fact blameworthy (this point is developed in more
detail by D. Justin Coates (2016)).



Gideon Rosen has also appealed to epistemic considerations on blame,
except he uses them to argue for a general sort of skepticism about
moral responsibility:



> 
> 
> What must you think in order to judge that Bill, for example, is
> responsible for lying to his wife? You must think that at the time of
> action, either he knew that he had decisive reason not to lie, or if
> he did not know this, that his ignorance was the upshot of some prior
> bad action done in full knowledge of every pertinent fact or norm. You
> must think, in other words, that his bad action either is, or derives
> from, an episode of genuine, full-strength akrasia.
> 
> 
> 
> I suggest that given the opacity of the mind--of other minds and
> even of one's own mind--it is almost always unreasonable to place
> significant confidence in such a judgment (Rosen 2004: 308).
> 
> 
> 



Rosen's skepticism here relies on arguments presented earlier in his
article for the conclusion that the epistemic requirements on moral
responsibility are quite stringent (in order for ignorance to be
culpable, it must eventually trace back to clear-eyed akratic action;
see also Levy 2011), but for our purposes the important point is
simply that "the opacity of mind", as Rosen puts it, can
make it hard to tell when someone is genuinely blameworthy, and thus
can render unjustified the judgment of wrongdoing on which appropriate
blame rests. Of course, one need not accept Rosen's skeptical
conclusion to agree that blamers must not jump to conclusions about
wrongdoing.


### 2.3 Facts about the Blamer



Even if some agent is blameworthy, and even if no procedural norm
would be violated, it's not the case (or, at least, not
*always* the case) that everyone can blame. As Roger Wertheimer
points out,



> 
> 
> some matters--like other folks' intimate intrafamilial
> relations--may be none of your business, not your affair, no
> (proper) concern of yours, so, whatever your evidence and emotions, it
> is not your place to bear ill will (Wertheimer 1998: 499).
> 
> 
> 



G. A. Cohen echoes the sentiment from a different perspective:



> 
> 
> [Moral] admonition may be sound, and in place, but some may be poorly
> placed to offer it. When a person replies to a critic by saying:
> "Where do *you* get off criticizing *me* for
> *that*?", she is not denying (or, of course, affirming)
> the inherent soundness of the critic's criticism. She is denying her
> critic's right to make that criticism, in a posture of judgment (Cohen
> 2006: 118).
> 
> 
> 



The general idea here is that there may be facts about the person who
is expressing blame that make their blame inappropriate. It's not their place,
they aren't well positioned, they don't have the authority, and so on.
Marilyn Friedman (2013: 272) puts the point nicely by saying that not
everyone is *blamer*worthy. To continue with the legal analogy
from above: whereas the blaming interaction raises questions of
*procedure*, we might think of facts about the blamer as giving
rise to questions about *jurisdiction*. Granted that the
wrongdoer is blameworthy and that the blaming procedures would be in
order, who exactly can enact those procedures? 


#### 2.3.1 Standing



There has recently been an explosion of work on the so-called
*standing to blame*, which is often taken to be the primary
fact about the blamer that is relevant to whether an instance of blame
is appropriate. Hypocritical blame is usually treated as a paradigm
example, and the most basic thought is simply that there seems to be
something inappropriate about blame issued by a blamer who is guilty
of the same transgression to which they are reacting. The standard way
of talking about what's going wrong in this sort of case is to use the
label 'standing': the hypocritical blamer lacks the
standing to blame. But before we look closer at the notion of standing
in general, and hypocrisy in particular, it's worth making a brief
note about terminology.



Not everyone who writes about standing uses the term in the same way.
As best we can tell, there are three distinct usages of the term, and
this has resulted in theorists sometimes talking past each other.
Everyone seems to agree that 'standing' is a label to be
applied to some fact about the blamer that enables appropriate blame
(or, more modestly, that 'lack of standing' is a label to
be applied to some fact about the blamer that renders blame
inappropriate). But from that common foundation, usage diverges.



For some, 'standing' is a term that indicates *any
condition about the blamer that is relevant to appropriate blame*.
In this broad sense, the notion of standing serves as a way to mark a
contrast with *facts about the blamed person*, such as whether
the blamed person is blameworthy. To invoke Friedman's terminology
again: the notion of standing is sometimes applied broadly to anything
that pertains to whether a blamer is blamerworthy. But other theorists
use the term in a narrower way.



For others, standing is more specifically tied to *whatever it is
that makes hypocritical blame inappropriate*. We said above that
hypocritical blame is often treated as a paradigm case of standingless
blame, so it makes sense that some theorists would see the case of the
hypocrite as what provides content to the notion of standing. Other
instances of standingless blame would then be other scenarios that are
relevantly similar to whatever is happening in the case of the
hypocrite. This way of understanding standing leaves open the
possibility that there may be some facts about the blamer that are
independent of standing but which render blame inappropriate.



Finally, there are those who associate the notion of standing with a
particular *objection* that the blamed person can apparently
sometimes raise. In particular, in response to hypocritical or
meddlesome blame (to take two common examples), it seems like the
person being blamed can sometimes appropriately dismiss the blame (or,
perhaps better, silence the blamer) with the retort: "Who are
you to blame me for that?". In this sort of exchange, the
thought goes, the person being blamed is challenging the standing of
the blamer. For those who take this view of the notion of standing,
the only facts about the blamer that count as the standing facts are
those whose absence would underwrite the legitimacy of this "who
are you?" response.



It's clear that all three of these questions--(1) what
blamer-based facts are relevant to the propriety of blame and why, (2)
what goes wrong in cases of hypocritical blame, and (3) what
blamer-based facts are relevant to the legitimacy of the "who
are you?" charge--are worth asking, and will likely have overlapping
answers. But there's a serious risk of misunderstanding if we don't
distinguish among these questions. Since hypocrisy plays such a
central role in recent scholarship on these questions, we'll begin
there.


#### 2.3.2 Hypocrisy



At least sometimes, we blame others with the aim of getting them to
see the error of their ways and change their behavior in the future.
One sure way to fail at this is to be guilty of the very same (or a
relevantly similar) transgression as the one you are condemning. The
hypocritical blamer is perhaps the paradigm example of someone whose
blame somehow goes awry. For one thing, it's unlikely that
hypocritical blame will be effective (see Dworkin 2000; Roadevin
2018), but the problem seems to go deeper than that. (Another way to
put it: hypocritical blame would still be problematic even if it
*were* effective.) In line with the distinctions we made at the
end of the last section, let's separate two questions here: first,
what's wrong with hypocritical blame, and second, what is the nature
of the "who are you" rebuttal of hypocritical blame. 



So, first: what precisely is the *problem* with hypocritical
blame? (See Szabados and Soifer 2004 for a book length treatment of
the ethics of hypocrisy in general.) The answer to this question will
likely depend on the nature of blame. R. Jay Wallace, for example, who
advocates a Strawsonian account of blame, explains the problem with
hypocrisy by an appeal to the underlying commitments of the reactive
attitudes. For Wallace (2010: 326), "blame carries with it a
kind of practical commitment to critical self-scrutiny", a
commitment that the hypocritical blamer fails to live up to. Given
that "we all have an interest in being protected from the kind
of social disapproval and opprobrium that are involved in
blame", the hypocritical blamer--as long as they aren't
also blaming themselves, in which case they might not count as
hypocritical--treats their own interest in avoiding blame as more
important than the interest of the target of their blame. As Wallace
puts it (2010: 328): "This offends against a presumption in
favor of the equal standing of persons that I take to be fundamental
to moral thought". Thus, for Wallace, the problem with
hypocritical blame is that it is morally wrong (and thus inappropriate
even if the target is blameworthy). Kyle Fritz and Daniel Miller
(2018) also think that hypocritical blaming is morally objectionable
because it involves an unfair "differential blaming
disposition", which "contravenes the equality of
persons" (2018: 123). They argue that their account, unlike
Wallace's, can account not only for what's objectionable about
hypocritical moral *address*, but also for why even
*unexpressed* hypocritical blame is morally problematic.



T. M. Scanlon, on the other hand, takes blame to be an adjustment of
attitudes in response to an impaired relationship, so the problem with
hypocritical blame is that it distorts the facts. The adjustment of
attitudes and expectations that constitutes blame purports to be a
response to some way in which the blamed person has impaired their
relationship with the blamer. But, as Scanlon says (2008: 177),
"there is something false in [the hypocritical blamer's]
suggesting that it is [the blamee's] unwillingness to act in ways that
indicate untrustworthiness that impairs [their] moral
relationship," since the past attitudes and actions of the
hypocritical blamer *already* impaired the relevant
relationship. Thus, for Scanlon, we might say that the problem with
hypocritical blame is that it is unfitting (or untrue to the
facts).



Even if hypocritical blame is unfitting and/or unfair, it's not
obvious how that would help us to make sense of the "who are
you" charge that motivates so much recent work on standing. When
I challenge your credentials to cast blame by accusing you of
hypocrisy, I'm not simply trying to tell you that you are doing
something morally wrong, nor that you are making false assumptions.
Although those would presumably count as reasons to cease blaming, the
"who are you" charge is more pointed than the claim that
the blamer has a reason to stop. Instead, it seems like I am trying to
*silence* your blame in some way. (It's this further thought
that drives Macalester Bell's (2013a) skepticism about the idea of
standing.) Our second question, then, is how exactly to make sense of
the "who are you" charge when applied to a hypocritical
blamer.



There are two general proposals for making sense of the way in which
hypocrisy seems to make a blamer lose their moral voice, so to speak.
We saw above that Fritz & Miller largely agree with Wallace that
hypocritical blaming is unfair because the hypocrite harbors a
"differential blaming disposition". But they go a step
further by suggesting that the normative *upshot* of the
unfairness of hypocritical blame is that the blamer "forfeits
the right to blame others" for violations of the norm with
respect to which the hypocrisy arises (Fritz & Miller 2018: 125).
This thought fits quite naturally with some ways in which the
"who are you" charge tends to be formulated. When I ask
the rhetorical question, "Who are you to blame me?",
perhaps what I'm trying to say is that although *others* may
have the right to blame me for this transgression, *you* do not
have such a right. Your hypocrisy has taken it from you. However, even this might be too strong. Perhaps your hypocrisy doesn't mean you've forfeited your right to blame, but only that you have a distinctive *pro tanto* reason to refrain from blaming. Since blame-even hypocritical blame-can sometimes be morally imperative, this reason won't always be decisive. But its existence might suffice to explain the sense that the hypocrite is *in some sense* overstepping her bounds in many instances. 



Of course, you might worry about supposing that there is such a thing
as a general right or entitlement to blame in the first place. Matt
King (forthcoming) argues on these grounds in favor of skepticism
about the notion of standing. According to King, there is nothing
distinctive about the "who are you" charge, and he offers
an account of what goes wrong with hypocritical blame by appealing not
to the idea of *standing* but instead to the idea that the
hypocrite is violating norms of priority (or perhaps norms of
involvement) that specify where our critical focus ought to be. The
hypocrite's focus is in the wrong place, and this provides the
hypocrite with a weighty moral reason not to blame. 



The second proposal, recently developed by Ori Herstein, for making
sense of the "who are you" charge doesn't appeal to a
general right to blame, but instead begins from the insight that
blaming is, in part, an attempt to *give reasons* to the person
being blamed--reasons to stop what they are doing, to apologize,
to acknowledge wrongdoing. Even without being blamed, a wrongdoer
would presumably have these reasons, but what blame does is add
another type of reason to the mix--specifically, a *directive
reason*. This richer account of the blaming transaction opens up a
new way of understanding the "who are you" charge. In
Herstein's view, although a hypocritical blamer does still issue a
valid directive through their blame, that directive can nevertheless
be permissibly ignored "without substantive deliberation on
[its] merits" (Herstein 2017: 3110). 


#### 2.3.3 Other Blamer-Based Worries



Although hypocrisy is the most frequently discussed blamer-based fact
that would render blame problematic, there are certainly others worth
exploring. Here we'll briefly discuss four: complicity, meddling,
moral luck, and claimant injustice.



To charge someone with blaming hypocritically is to allege that they
are blaming (or, at least, pretending to blame) in response to
transgressions similar to those (or perhaps type-identical to those)
that they have committed in the past. A somewhat related charge, but
worth distinguishing, is the claim that the blamer is somehow
objectionably involved in the very act that they are, at this very
moment, condemning. This is to charge the blamer with
*complicity*, and such a charge might take many forms. G. A.
Cohen (2006: 126) gives a nice sample: "you ordered me to do it,
you asked me to do it, you forced me to do it, you left me with no
reasonable alternative, you gave me the means to do it". The
superior officer who orders a subordinate to do something morally
reprehensible is not in a position to blame the subordinate for
carrying out the order, even if civilians are. And this is not
necessarily because the superior officer has done similar things in
the past, but instead because they are too closely involved in the
very act they are purporting to condemn.



The issue of complicity has recently been discussed in connection with
whether the *state* has the standing to blame certain
criminals. Gary Watson (2015) and Gustavo A. Beade (forthcoming) each
raise worries about the fact that criminality is correlated with
certain social disadvantages that the state itself may be responsible
for. If complicity in wrongdoing undermines the standing to blame, and
if the state is--as seems plausible--at least partly
responsible for the social conditions that partly explain criminal behavior,
then it suddenly becomes unclear that the state is in a position to
punish certain law-breakers. (Watson also considers the more worrisome
conclusion that certain disadvantaged criminals aren't even bound by
the laws in the first place, due to the structural disadvantages in
which the state is complicit.)



Although it is helpful for some purposes to distinguish hypocrisy from
complicity, it may be that at a more fundamental level they are
problematic for the same reason. This is the view that Patrick Todd
(2012, forthcoming) advocates. According to Todd, the reason we can
raise the "who are you" charge against both hypocrites and
those who are complicit in our wrongdoing is that in both cases, the
blamer's own behavior demonstrates a lack of commitment to the
relevant moral norm.



Even if a blamer isn't a hypocrite and isn't involved in the action
they are condemning, their blame can nevertheless be inappropriate if
the wrong in question is just *none of their business*. Linda
Radzik gives a nice description of our common moral attitudes toward
these situations:



> 
> 
> For example, a group of co-workers will often insist that the romantic
> infidelity of one of their members is none of their business (and then
> feel a bit ashamed when they continue to gossip about it). Neighbors
> and teachers hesitate to interfere with a parent's treatment of her
> child although they judge the treatment to be wrongful, unless the
> wrong reaches a certain level of severity. Even within close
> relationships, we are sometimes uncertain whether we should express
> our negative moral judgment of a friend's behavior. True, the
> hesitancy to sanction in these cases is sometimes based on laziness,
> self-interest, cowardice or uncertainty about the moral judgments at
> issue, none of which contradict the claim that we have the standing to
> sanction. But, at other times, our hesitancy seems to be based on the
> sense that it would be *wrong* to sanction. We say, "It
> isn't my place to interfere even though I can see what she is doing is
> wrong". We do not feel entitled to sanction every wrongdoer for
> every wrong (Radzik 2011: 582).
> 
> 
> 



And the thought, of course, is that we do not *feel* entitled
to sanction every wrongdoer for every wrong because we *aren't*
so entitled. Radzik describes three situations in which only a limited
group of individuals could appropriately blame: (1) cases where agents
wrong themselves, (2) cases where the wrong is "committed within
special relationships, such as romantic partnerships, familial bonds,
and friendships" (2011: 593), and (3) cases where third-party
blame "would interfere with the victim's ability to find
vindication in the aftermath of wrongdoing" (2011: 597).



It's a good question exactly *why* appropriate blame would be
restricted only to certain individuals in these sorts of case. Perhaps
there are norms of privacy at play (Smith 2007; Nagel 1998), or
perhaps there's an illuminating analogy to be made here with the
notion of standing in the law (Sabini and Silver 1982, though see also
Bell 2013a and King forthcoming), or perhaps if we see blame as a
response which presupposes that the person blamed is in some way
accountable *to* the members of their moral community, then we
can distinguish between several (overlapping) moral communities, only
some of which any one person belongs to, and thus only some of which
underwrite one's ability to blame appropriately (Duff 2010: 126). If
we adopt Scanlon's recent account of blame (2008), then perhaps we can
say that some wrongs are none of our business because they don't
impair any of *our* relationships, and hence don't render
appropriate any blame-constituting modifications in those
relationships. (The so-called "Business Condition" on appropriate
blame--that blame is inappropriate if the wrong is none of your business--is another place where it is helpful to distinguish the question
of why meddlesome blame is problematic from the question of the
precise nature of the "who are you" charge that might be raised by the
person being blamed.)



*Moral luck* (in all its forms) provides another perspective from
which to see how blame might be inappropriate. Consider Gary Watson's
(1987) influential discussion of Robert Harris, who is at once an
unequivocally cruel murderer and also, in a real sense, a victim of
his tragic formative circumstances. It's a legitimate question, given
his history, whether Harris is even the sort of creature who is a
sensible target of blame - that is, whether Harris is even a morally
responsible agent in the first place - but even if we grant that he
is, there's another potential obstacle to blame at work here. Watson
expresses it like this:



> 
> 
> The fact that Harris's cruelty is an intelligible response to his
> circumstances gives a foothold not only for sympathy, but for the
> thought that if *I* had been subjected to such circumstances, I
> might well have become as vile. What is unsettling is the thought that
> one's moral self is such a fragile thing. One tends to think of one's
> moral sensibilities as going deeper than that (though it is not clear
> what this means). This thought induces not only an ontological
> shudder, but a sense of equality with the other: I too am a potential
> sinner (Watson 1987, as reprinted in Watson 2004: 245).
> 
> 
> 



The obstacle to blame that Watson is describing here is not the
thought that Harris might not be blameworthy (though he might not be),
but rather the thought expressed well by the phrase "There but
for the grace of God go I". It's a humbling perspective to take
on one's agency, one that may "taint one's own view of one's
moral self as an achievement" (2004: 246), and make one feel
that "indignation on one's part would be self-righteous and
indulgent" (2004: 254). For want of a better term, we might say
that this is a worry about *subjunctive hypocrisy*, since it
certainly has a similar flavor to the hypocrisy worry discussed above.
The thought is something like this: "If I were as bad as him,
I'd have no standing to blame him. But the difference between us is
simply a matter of luck, and surely my good moral luck can't serve as
the basis for my moral standing to blame. So I lack the standing to
blame even though I've never done the terrible things in
question."



It's worth mentioning one final fact about the blamer that can
complicate a blaming interaction, though this one fits less well into
the framework we've been exploring because it's not something that
makes blame *inappropriate* so much as it is something that
makes blame *unheard*. We have in mind an idea introduced by
Vanessa Carbonell (forthcoming), which she dubs "*claimant
injustice*". According to Carbonell, claimant injustice
"...occurs when social prejudices or structural inequalities
undermine a moral agent's ability to engage in felicitous moral
address--to make moral claims, to call out wrongdoing, to judge
or condemn others for their action, to hold responsible, to seek
redress, to blame or punish, to participate in any of the social
practices associated with the participant and vicarious reactive
attitudes" (forthcoming: 16). The idea here is that the very
power to engage in moral address is something that requires a social
context where the blamer is recognized as (and believes themselves to
be) a valid source of moral claims, but this context can be absent for
members of marginalized groups, thus rendering them unable to hold
members of dominant groups responsible. Thus it may be that yet
another fact about the blamer--the fact that they are
marginalized--can render blame infelicitous. (See Hornsby 1995 for related discussion.) Again, it's not that
their blame is *dismissed* so much as simply not heard *as
moral address* in the first place.


### 2.4 Varieties of Blame



Because the nature of blame is controversial, we have tended in this
section simply to use the word "blame", but it's important
to remember that one's views about the ethics of blame will very much
depend on what one takes blame to be. For instance, although
hypocritical moral address (to use Wallace's term) seems clearly to
underwrite the legitimacy of a "who are you" charge, it is less clear
whether merely harboring a hypocritical blaming judgment is likewise
inappropriate, or inappropriate in quite the same way. In general, the
difference between *expressed* and *unexpressed* blame
is an important distinction to keep in mind when theorizing about the
ways in which blame can go wrong (see Fritz and Miller 2018; Todd
forthcoming). 



Moreover, blame seems to be just one among many ways that we respond
to wrongdoing, and it's still an open question just how blame relates
to activities like holding responsible, demanding answers, punishing,
and so on. (For some attempted taxonomies, see Macnamara 2011;
Shoemaker 2011; Smith 2012; Tognazzini 2015.) So, answers to the above
questions about the ethics of blame will not automatically double as
answers to analogous questions about the ethics of these other ways of
interacting.