2017/08/01 by Patrick Todd · 217 citations
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Action (physics) #Blame #Epistemology #Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics #Free Will and Agency #Hypocrisy #Law #Law and economics #Philosophy #Political science #Psychology #Social psychology #Sociology #War, Ethics, and Justification #Wrongdoing
paper · open access · doi:10.1111/nous.12215
published in Noûs 53(2), 347-374 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2017/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract Recently, philosophers have turned their attention to the question, not when a given agent is blameworthy for what she does, but when a further agent has the moral standing to blame her for what she does. Philosophers have proposed at least four conditions on having “moral standing”: 1. One's blame would not be “hypocritical”. 2. One is not oneself “involved in” the target agent's wrongdoing. 3. One is warranted in believing that the target is indeed blameworthy for the wrongdoing. 4. The target's wrongdoing is some of “one's business”. These conditions are often proposed as both conditions on one and the same thing, and as marking fundamentally different ways of “losing standing”. Here I call these claims into question. First, I claim that conditions (3) and (4) are simply conditions on different things than are conditions (1) and (2). Second, I argue that condition (2) reduces to condition (1): when “involvement” removes someone's standing to blame, it does so only by indicating something further about that agent, viz., that he or she lacks commitment to the values that condemn the wrongdoer's action. The result: after we clarify the nature of the non‐hypocrisy condition, we will have a unified account of moral standing to blame. Issues also discussed: whether standing can ever be regained, the relationship between standing and our “moral fragility”, the difference between mere inconsistency and hypocrisy, and whether a condition of standing might be derived from deeper facts about the “equality of persons”.