Drawing on insights from conversation analysis, discursive psychology and social psychology, this article describes some interactional features of two celebrity TV confessionals and the resources used by the TV interviewers and celebrity guests to attribute, accept or deny responsibility for their transgressions. The analytic interest lies in how confessions are locally and interactionally managed, that is, how ‘doing confessing’ is achieved in the television interview context. We show how the host’s opening turn constrains the celebrity guest’s contribution and secures overt (...) admission of guilt, while simultaneously inviting the celebrity guest to tell their side of the story. We also show how celebrity guests produce descriptions which minimize the extent and severity of their transgressions, reduce agency and transform the character of their transgression. In doing so, we argue that celebrity interviewees can convey mitigations and extenuations which diminish the extent of their responsibility – calling into question the very nature of their confession. We propose that our findings demonstrate the hybrid nature of interviewing in the celebrity TV confessional and contribute to our understanding of how ‘doing confessing’ in the public eye is discursively and interactionally negotiated. (shrink)

Populist attributions of blame have important effects on citizens’ attitudes, cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. Extending previous studies that have mostly looked at populist messages blaming political elites, we use an online survey experiment (N = 805) to investigate the effects of blaming different elitist actors in populist and non-populist ways: (1) political elites, (2) corporate elites, (3) scientific elites, and (4) a combination of these elites. We compare mere causal responsibility attribution to populist blame attributions that highlight (...) a central opposition between “pure ordinary people” and “corrupt elites” to tease out the specific effect of populist rhetoric. Results suggest that populist messages blaming all elites have stronger effects than isolated cues. Furthermore, populist blame attribution leads to more negative perceptions of the elites than non-populist blame attribution. The finding that populist frames can – under some conditions – activate negative perceptions toward different elites is alarming in times of declining trust in societal institutions, and calls for a more encompassing understanding of populists’ scapegoats. (shrink)

This paper is an analysis of a video clip of an interview between a reporter and ice hockey player following a game in which the player was involved in a hard collision with a member of the opposing team. The paper explores blame attribution and how participants claim and disclaim expertise in a way that supports or undermines assertions to have correctly seen and assessed the actions shown on tape. Our analysis focuses on the video of the interview, (...) and it also examines relevant video clips of the collision and various commentaries about the identities of the characters and their actions shown on the videos. In brief, the study is a third-order investigation of recorded-actions-under-analysis. It uses the videos and commentaries as “perspicuous phenomena” that illuminate and complicate how the members’ own action category analysis is bound up with issues of expertise, evidence, and blame. (shrink)

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about (...) others’ mental control, people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (shrink)

We extend attribution and stakeholder theory in the context of crisis reputation management by examining differences in stakeholder perceptions in the form of organization-related blame. We presented eight stakeholder groups with factual information surrounding the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and asked them to indicate the extent to which they blamed the leaders and organizations associated with the event. Stakeholders also completed a survey assessing their attribution styles. Results indicated that perceptions of blame were affected by the (...) interaction of stakeholder role (i.e., active vs. passive) with attribution style (i.e., optimistic vs. pessimistic). Our results suggest that organizational leaders’ understanding of their stakeholders may be an important aspect in managing stakeholders’ sensemaking during crises. (shrink)

A central topic in experimental epistemology has been the ways that non-epistemic evaluations of an agent’s actions can affect whether the agent is taken to have certain kinds of knowledge. Several scholars have found that the positive or negative valence of an action can influence attributions of knowledge to the agent. These evaluative effects on knowledge attributions are commonly seen as performance errors, failing to reflect individuals’ genuine conceptual competence with knows. In the present article, I report the results of (...) a series of studies designed to test the leading version of this view, which appeals to the allegedly distorting influence of individuals’ motivation to blame. I argue that the data pose significant challenges to such a view. (shrink)

Several studies have examined victim blaming in rape scenarios. However, there is limited research on the analysis of the perception of blame when two or more perpetrators are involved. The present article explores the perception of blame in cases involving rape based on the level of resistance shown by the victim and the presence of one or more perpetrators. A study was carried out involving 351 university students who responded to a survey after reading a hypothetical assault scenario. (...) Six situations were established where the victim showed either low or high resistance, depending on whether the resistance was verbal or physical and verbal, and in the presence of one or two male perpetrators. It is expected that perpetrators are more culpable when acting in groups and that less resistance from the victim leads to greater attribution of blame. The results confirm that more blame is attributed to the perpetrators when they act in groups than when they act alone. Likewise, women consider the victim generally exerts greater resistance and this variable influences the attribution of greater blame. (shrink)

In this paper, we set out to test empirically an idea that many philosophers find intuitive, namely that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. Many philosophers find it intuitive that moral agents are responsible only if they know the particular facts surrounding their action. Our results show that whether moral agents are aware of the facts surrounding their action does have an effect on people’s attributions of blame, regardless of the consequences or side effects of the agent’s actions. In general, it (...) was more likely that a situationally aware agent will be blamed for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. We also tested attributions of forgiveness in addition to attributions of blame. In general, it was less likely that a situationally aware agent will be forgiven for failing to perform the obligatory action than a situationally unaware agent. When the agent is situationally unaware, it is more likely that the agent will be forgiven than blamed. We argue that these results provide some empirical support for the hypothesis that there is something intuitive about the idea that non-moral ignorance can exculpate. (shrink)

Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, (...) to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine. (shrink)

In recent years, there have been several high-profile recalls of hybrid products. If consumers perceive a global firm to be responsible for the recall, then it will reduce their brand equity. Therefore, global firms may respond in ethically questionable ways to justify themselves to important stakeholders and avoid blame. Understanding how stakeholders attribute blame for crises involving hybrid products is important to shed light on the unethical manner in which global firms might avoid blame in such situations. (...) The research reported here shows that in a hybrid product crisis, consumers show a bias in favor of the brand company and against the manufacturing company. This bias is more pronounced when the country of manufacture has an unfavorable image or when consumers lack familiarity with the recalled brand. Ambiguous recall announcements by companies that fail to provide a specific and clear reason for the product defect prompt consumers to assume that a manufacturing flaw caused the product defect. As a result, consumers reduce their attribution of blame for the brand company, and thus its brand equity is maintained. (shrink)

IntroductionGlobally, 15% of adolescents give birth before turning 18, leading to considerable personal, social, and medical impacts on adolescents and to the general society.ObjectiveThis study aimed at exploring and comparing three psychological attributes between parents and teachers for the phenomena.Method672 teachers and 690 parents participated in the study.ResultsThe results indicated a significant mean difference between parents and teachers on empathy, attribution of blame, and feelings of responsibility. Except for attribution of blame, parents’ mean scores of other (...) variables were higher than that of teachers.DiscussionTeachers’ higher attribution of blame to pregnant adolescents and lower empathetic concern raises a prominent concern over students’ healthy environment at school.ConclusionUnderstanding social feelings about responsibilities over adolescents’ general health is very essential, especially for fighting against the problem of early pregnancy. (shrink)

On the moral model of addiction, addicts are morally responsible and blameworthy for their addictive behaviours. The model is sometimes resisted on the grounds that blaming addicts is incompatible with treating addiction in a compassionate and non-punitive way. I argue the moral model is consistent with addressing addiction compassionately and non-punitively and better accounts for both the role of addicts’ agency in the recovery process. If an addict is responsible for their addictive behaviours, and that behaviour is in some way (...) bad or wrong, then that addict is blameworthy. If not, then they are not. But, if their addictive behaviour or behaviour which contributes to and perpetuates their condition of addiction, is not bad or wrong, then addiction is not an issue of moral concern. Addicts are blameworthy, but attributions of blame need not be followed by harsh treatment or punishment. Because blame and harsh treatment or punishment can be separated, there is no good reason to reject the moral model of addiction. (shrink)

The wide variety of blame presents two difficult puzzles. Why are instances of blame categorized under so many different mental kinds, such as judgment, belief, emotion, action, intention, desire, and combinations of these? Why is “blame” used to describe both interpersonal reactions and mere causal attributions, such as blaming faulty brakes for a car crash? I introduce a new conception of blame, on which blame is attention to something as a source of badness. I argue (...) that this view resolves both puzzles and offers an independently appealing conception of blame. (shrink)

In this commentary on Anneli Jefferson’s Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders? I endorse her capacitarian approach to responsibility but suggest that the effects of at least some mental/brain disorders on the agent’s psychology show that we cannot neatly separate the epistemic condition from the control condition when assessing agential capacity. I then discuss the labeling issue in the context of rival attributionist accounts of responsibility which hold that agents are responsible if their actions are attributable to them. The incorporation of (...) mental disorders into identity through social processes may open agents with mental or brain disorders open to unfair blame. However, we cannot fully understand the effects of the disorders on agential capacity without closely attending to the social environment that shapes the way the disorder is conceived, enacted, perceived, and responded to over time. (shrink)

In this paper I want to argue that acts of blame are performed by collectives, and not by any collective but only by collectives that satisfy certain conditions { broadly those that, by collectivizing reason, can be held to be autonomous subjects to which it makes sense to attribute attitudes, including participant reactive attitudes such as resentment. The actors involved must also be related to the collective in particular ways in order to hold and be held responsible, but they (...) need not have the same attitudes as the collective. This implies both that our attributions of moral responsibility to an agent does not depend only on facts about the agent but also on facts about us, and that the reasons for which we hold responsible and by which we justify our moral practices, and which the agent can likewise appeal to in an attempt to avoid being held responsible, depend on the collective involved and its substantive ethical precepts. The answer to whether an agent is responsible, or is an appropriate object of a reactive attitude, is not to be settled purely by philosophical analysis, and even the kind of naturalistic description of the pattern of our reactive attitudes that [22] suggests in \Freedom and Resentment" will only go part of the way { the excuses and exemptions are things we might say in a dialogue where reasons are exchanged, but each collective has some leeway over what substantive reasons count as grounds of an excuse or exemption. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists often assume that responsibility and blame only apply to certain agents. But do our ordinary concepts of responsibility and blame reflect these assumptions? I investigate one recent debate where these assumptions have been applied—the back-and-forth over how to explain the impact of norms on ordinary causal attributions. I investigate one prominent case where it has been found that norms matter for causal attributions, but where it is claimed that responsibility and blame do not apply (...) because the case involves artifacts. Across six studies more carefully investigating Hitchcock and Knobe’s Machine Case, I find that the same norm effect found for causal attributions is found for responsibility and blame attributions, with participants tending to ascribe both to a norm-violating artifact. Further, the evidence suggests that participants do so because they are using these terms in a broadly normative, but not distinctively moral, way. (shrink)

Feminists critique acts and practices as victim-blaming. Victim-blaming is a moral phenomenon: to call a communicative act victim blaming is to criticise it. It is also a political phenomenon. As feminists point out, it plays a important role in perpetuating oppression. But what makes a communicative act an act of victim-blaming? I propose that victim-blaming communicative acts attribute responsibility to the victim for the wrong in contexts in which such attributions are morally improper. Attributions of responsibility can be morally imporoper (...) in virtue of what they make salient in a conversation. Making salient the victim's conduct and backgrounding the conduct of the perpetrator can run afoul of the duties we have to the victim: including the duty to listen to the victim, to support her, and to hold the perpetrator responsible. (shrink)

In a celebrated experiment, Joshua Knobe showed that people are much more prone to attribute intentionality to an agent for a side effect of a given act when that side effect is harmful than when it is beneficial. This asymmetry has become known as ‘the Knobe Effect’. According to Knobe's Moral Valence Explanation, bad effects trigger the attributions of intentionality, whereas good effects do not. Many others believe that the Knobe Effect is best explained in terms of the high amount (...) of blame attributed in the harm condition, and the low amount of praise attributed in the help condition. This Blame Hypothesis explains the high number of intentionality attributions in the harm condition in terms of the high degree of blame people ascribe, and the low number of intentionality attributions in the help conditions in terms of the low degree of praise people attribute. We replicated Knobe's original experiment and conducted a logistic regression on the results to probe more deeply into the relationship between attributions of intentionality and responsibility. The statistical analysis revealed a hitherto unknown interaction effect: intentionality correlates with blame, but not with praise. This interaction effect is consistent with the Moral Valence Hypothesis, but inconsistent with the Blame Hypothesis, as well as with two of the three other hypotheses discussed here. (shrink)

Quality of will accounts of moral responsibility hold that ill will is necessary for blameworthiness. But all such accounts are false to ordinary moral practice, which licenses blame for agents who act wrongly from epistemically unreasonable ignorance even if the act is not ill willed. This should be especially concerning to Strawsonians about moral responsibility, who think the genuine conditions of blameworthiness are derived from the standards internal to our practice. In response, I provide a theory of moral blameworthiness (...) on which ill will is not necessary for blameworthiness. On the view I defend, “Rational Capacitarianism,” agents are blameworthy whenever they act wrongly from an unreasonable attitude which is attributable to them, where an attitude is attributable to an agent just in case she has the capacity to assess reasons for and against the attitude and modulate the attitude in light of these assessments. Acting from unreasonable ignorance is just a special case of acting from an unreasonable attitude. My theory contrasts both with both quality of will accounts of blameworthiness and the Capacitarian view, which specifies that agents who act wrongly from ignorance are culpable if they could and should have known better. On Capacitarianism, a variety of awareness-relevant capacities are pertinent, including memory; on my view it is only failures of rational capacities that render the agent culpable, because only failures of rational capacities are attributable to the agent. (shrink)

Recent research shows – somewhat astonishingly – that people are willing to ascribe moral blame to AI-driven systems when they cause harm [1]–[4]. In this paper, we explore the moral- psychological underpinnings of these findings. Our hypothesis was that the reason why people ascribe moral blame to AI systems is that they consider them capable of entertaining inculpating mental states (what is called mens rea in the law). To explore this hypothesis, we created a scenario in which an (...) AI system runs a risk of poisoning people by using a novel type of fertilizer. Manipulating the computational (or quasi-cognitive) abilities of the AI system in a between-subjects design, we tested whether people’s willingness to ascribe knowledge of a substantial risk of harm (i.e., recklessness) and blame to the AI system. Furthermore, we investigated whether the ascription of recklessness and blame to the AI system would influence the perceived blameworthiness of the system’s user (or owner). In an experiment with 347 participants, we found (i) that people are willing to ascribe blame to AI systems in contexts of recklessness, (ii) that blame ascriptions depend strongly on the willingness to attribute recklessness and (iii) that the latter, in turn, depends on the perceived “cognitive” capacities of the system. Furthermore, our results suggest (iv) that the higher the computational sophistication of the AI system, the more blame is shifted from the human user to the AI system. (shrink)

We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal that the (...) blameworthy artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. We can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, from lip-synching to long division, from murders to meringues, but the relation involved, what author Matt King calls the basic responsibility relation, is the same in every case. We are responsible for the things we do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they're good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Why is this a radical proposal? Firstly, because so much of the contemporary literature on moral responsibility has moralized its nature. According to most accounts, moral responsibility is either a special species of responsibility or else depends on moralized capacities. In contrast, King argues that we get a more complete and unifying picture of responsible agency from a more general theory of responsibility. Secondly, the proposal is radical due to its drastic simplicity. King foregoes many of the complications that feature in other accounts of responsibility, arguing that we can make do with less demanding theoretical elements. (shrink)

Greenwashing is a phenomenon that is linked to scandals that often occur at the supply-chain level. Nevertheless, research on this subject remains in its infancy; much more is needed to advance our understanding of stakeholders’ reactions to greenwashing. We propose here a new typology of greenwashing, based on the locus of discrepancy, i.e. the point along the supply-chain where the discrepancy between ‘responsible words’ and ‘irresponsible walks’ occurs. With three experiments, we tested how the different forms of greenwashing affect stakeholders’ (...) reactions, from both ethical and business perspectives. We developed our hypotheses by building on attribution theory, which seeks to account for how observers construct perceptions about events. We had anticipated that the more internal, controllable and intentional the discrepancy is, the greater the blame attributed to a company is, and the lower the intention to invest will be. When greenwashing occurs at a company level, this results in a higher level of blame attribution, while the intention to invest falls. Indirect greenwashing refers to a misbehaviour perpetrated by a supplier who claims to be sustainable, and which results in a less negative impact on a supplied company. We also propose the vicarious greenwashing, which occurs when the behaviour of a supplier is in breach of a company’s claims of sustainability. This type of greenwashing is nevertheless detrimental to investment. The findings here advance our understanding of how greenwashing shapes stakeholders’ reactions, and highlight the need for the careful management of the supply-chain. (shrink)

Why do we find agents less blameworthy when they face mitigating circumstances, and what does this show about philosophical theories of moral responsibility? We present novel evidence that the tendency to mitigate the blameworthiness of agents is driven both by the perception that they are less normatively competent—in particular, less able to know that what they are doing is wrong—and by the perception that their behavior is less attributable to their deep selves. Consequently, we argue that philosophers cannot rely on (...) the case strategy to support the Normative Competence theory of moral responsibility over the Deep Self theory. However, we also outline ways in which further empirical and philosophical work would shift the debate, by showing that there is a significant departure between ordinary concepts and corresponding philosophical concepts, or by focusing on a different type of coherence with ordinary judgments. (shrink)

Attribution theory is used as a conceptual framework for examining how causal beliefs about peer harassment influence how victims think and feel about themselves. Evidence is presented that victims who make characterological self-blaming attributions are particularly at risk of negative self-views. Also examined is the influence of social context, particularly the ethnic composition of schools and classrooms. It was found that students who were both victims of harassment and members of the majority ethnic group were more vulnerable to self-blaming (...) attributions. In contrast, greater ethnic diversity, that is, classrooms where no one group was in the majority, tended to ward off self-blaming tendencies. Studies of peer harassment are a good context for examining one of the main themes of the special issue, which is how the social context influences the way individuals think and feel about themselves. (shrink)

Research has documented that individuals consider outcomes, intentions, and transgressor negligence when making morally relevant judgments (Nobes, Panagiotaki, & Engelhardt, 2017). However, less is known about whether individuals attend to both victim and transgressor negligence in their evaluations. The current study measured 3‐ to 6‐year‐olds (N = 70), 7‐ to 12‐year‐olds (N = 54), and adults' (N = 97, ages 18–25 years) moral judgments about scenarios in which an accidental transgression occurred involving property damage or physical harm. Participants were either (...) assigned to conditions where the victim or the transgressor was negligent. Results revealed attention to negligence among all participants across a range of different moral judgment measures (including acceptability judgments, punishment judgments, and attributions of blame), with age‐related increases in attention to negligence evident. Results provide novel evidence that children and adults consider not just outcomes and intentions, but also the role of negligence in both victims and transgressors, when making social decisions. (shrink)

Exploration of the fundamental motivations for attributing moral responsibility to various kinds of collectives serves as the basis for understanding the meaning of such attributions. Such attributions have a mid-range, limited justification. The analysis has broad implications for a wide variety of writings on aspects of collective moral responsibility, revealing serious deficiencies of any theory of corporate moral personhood.

The new coronavirus pandemic, COVID-19, has resurrected a number of historical and sociological problems associated with naming and blaming collectives for the origin or transmission of infectious disease. The default example of the false accusation in 2020 has been the case of the charge of well poisoning against the Jews of Western Europe causing the pandemic of the Black Death during the fourteenth century. Equally apparent is the wide-spread accusation that Asians are collectively responsible for the spread of the present (...) pandemic. Yet querying group actions in times of pandemics is not solely one of rebutting false attributions. What happens when a collective is at fault, and how does the collective respond to the simultaneous burden of both false, stereotypical accusations and appropriate charges of culpability? The case studies here are of Ultra-Orthodox Jewish (Haredi) communities and the PRC during the 2020 outbreak of COVID-19. (shrink)

Much has been written about the fittingness, epistemic, and standing norms that govern blame. In this paper, we argue that there exists a norm of blame that has yet to receive philosophical discussion and without which an account of the ethics of blame will be incomplete: a norm proscribing comparatively arbitrary blame. By reflecting on the objectionableness of comparatively arbitrary blame, we stand to elucidate a substantive, and thus far overlooked, norm governing our attributions of (...) responsibility. Accordingly, our aim in this paper is to develop a comparative non-arbitrariness condition on blame that can enrich our understanding of the ethics of blame. (shrink)

In Moral philosophy meets social psychology, Gilbert Harman argues that social psychology can educate folk morality to prevent us from committing the ‘fundamental attribution error,’ i.e. ‘the error of ignoring situational factors and overconfidently assuming that distinctive behaviour or patterns of behaviour are due to an agent’s distinctive character traits’ (Harman, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 99, 315–331, 1999). An overview of the literature shows that while situationists unanimously agree with Harman on this point, they disagree on whether we (...) also tend to commit a kind of fundamental attribution error with respect to moral responsibility and blame. Do we also tend to ignore situational factors and overconfidently assume that people are morally responsible and blameworthy for their distinctive patterns of wrongful behaviour? Very few scholars have addressed this issue, and none has ever given a comprehensive account of moral responsibility and blame from a situationist perspective. In this paper, I argue that situationist social psychology impugns subjective theories of responsibility and blame which focus on the agent’s inner states and supports an objective theory—namely, the standard of the reasonable person. I defend this standard as a tool for moral appraisal, and then I refute the common misperception that this approach lets most perpetrators off the hook and poses a threat to society. (shrink)

This paper looks at judgments of guilt in the face of alleged wrong-doing, be it in public or in private discourse. Its concern is not the truth of such judgments, although the complexity and contestability of such claims will be stressed. The topic, instead, is what sort of activities we are engaged in, when we make our judgments on others' conduct. To examine judging as an activity it focuses on a series of problems that can occur when we blame (...) others. On analysis, we see that these problems take the form of performative contradictions, so that the ostensible purposes of assigning guilt to others are undermined.There is clear evidence from social psychology that blame is especially frequently and inappropriately attributed to individuals in modern Western societies. On the other hand, it has often been observed how suspicious we are about the activity of judging – thus a widespread perception that a refusal to judge is somehow virtuous. My suggestion is that the sheer difficulty of attributions of responsibility, in the face of a complex and often arbitrary moral reality, frequently defeats us. This leads to a characteristic set of distortions when we blame, so that it is no surprise that we have become suspicious of all blaming activities. (shrink)

This chapter distinguishes between two concepts of moral responsibility. We are responsible for our actions in the first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents, i.e. when they are attributable to us. We are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain expectations and demands on those actions, i.e. to hold us accountable for them. This distinction allows for an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias, defended here, on which (...) people may lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias but are still accountable for them. What this amounts to is leaving aside appraisal-based forms of moral criticism such as blame and punishment in favor of non-appraising forms of accountability. This account not only does more justice to our moral experience and agency, but will also lead to more effective practices for combating the harms of implicit bias. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:HUME ON BLAME AND EXCUSE17. Hume's account of blame and excuse differs in fundamental respects from many contemporary ones. Many contemporary views, ultimately derived from the Kantian dictum that 'ought' implies 'can', base excuses on the nonvoluntary character of an action. For example, H. L. A. Hart argues that the basic requirements for responsibility are that a person have the capacity and a fair opportunity to do (...) what is required. A person is to be excused for an action if he lacked either the capacity or opportunity to do what was required. As these are conditions for an action being voluntary in a suitably narrow sense, Hart primarily bases excuses on the nonvoluntary character of actions. Likewise, Richard Brandt's view, which in many respects is similar to Hume's, requires that the manifestation of a character trait be subject to a high degree of voluntary control before blame.2 is appropriate. Hume, however, explicitly denies that either a character trait or its manifestation in conduct need be subject to voluntary control for blame to be appropriate. The nonvoluntary character of an action does not necessarily excuse one from blame. Hume makes four key claims about blame and excuse. (1) The ultimate objects of praise and blame are mental qualities, not actions. (2) Actions are considered only as signs of mental qualities. (3) The possession and expression of these mental qualities may be appropriate objects of praise or blame even if they are nonvoluntary. (4) Persons have excuses if their actions do not indicate enduring mental qualities. These points need to be substantiated and explained. The first two claims may be considered together. That Hume holds mental qualities are the ultimate objects of praise and blame and that actions are considered only as signs of mental qualities is indisputable. 18. 'Tis evident, that when we praise any actions, we regard only the motives that produced them, and consider the actions as signs or indications of certain principles in the mind and temper. The external performance has no merit. We must look within to find the moral quality. This we cannot do directly; and therefore fix our attention on actions, as on external signs. But these actions are still considered as signs; and the ultimate object of our praise and approbation is the motive, that produced them. For present purposes, only two points need be noted about this passage. First, it clearly states that the ultimate objects of praise and, as he indicates in his following 4 paragraph, blame are always mental qualities. The expression mental qualities is vague, perhaps deliberately so. Sometimes Hume uses the term motive instead. By 'motive' he does not intend any passing desire or further intention which one may have in acting, e.g., embarrassing others. For Hume, some motives are not even dispositions to act. Second, actions or external performances have no merit. They are only signs of mental qualities. Even if the concept of an action includes more than the external behavior, such as the intention, it does not include motives or desires. A difference in intention may entail a difference in action, but a difference in motive does not. The same action may be performed from different motives. Hence, actions are not logically connected with the objects of praise and blame. Hume's claim that actions themselves have no merit, it might be objected, is incorrect. People do constantly evaluate actions. If they did not, then actions would not be considered untoward and a basis for attributing blame. However, Hume does not deny that actions may be evaluated in some way or other, only that they alone have merit or are appropriate objects of praise and blame. Actions may be evaluated without reference to mental qualities, for example, as right or wrong, useful or unuseful. Hume is 19. chiefly concerned with evaluating actions as virtuous or vicious. The terms virtuous and vicious as applied to actions involve an element of praise and blame, whereas the terms right and wrong, at least in most of their uses, do not. Thus, Hume is not denying that actions alone may have merit in the sense of value or utility. Rather, he is denying that actions... (shrink)

Idealizing conditions are scapegoats for scientific hypotheses, too often blamed for falsehood better attributed to less obvious sources. But while the tendency to blame idealizations is common among both philosophers of science and scientists themselves, the blame is misplaced. Attention to the nature of idealizing conditions, the content of idealized hypotheses, and scientists’ attitudes toward those hypotheses shows that idealizing conditions are blameless when hypotheses misrepresent. These conditions help to determine the content of idealized hypotheses, and they do (...) so in a way that prevents those hypotheses from being false by virtue of their constituent idealizations. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relevance of social roles and hierarchies for the attribution of blame and causation in five culturally different countries, namely China, Germany, Poland, the United Arabic Emirates, and the United States of America. We demonstrate that in all these countries, hierarchical differences between the social roles occupied by two agents and associated differences in duties to care for others affect how these two agents are morally and causally judged when they make a decision together. Agents (...) higher in a hierarchy are attributed more blame and considered more causally responsible for an action’s consequences. We also demonstrate that the degree of this effect depends on culture-specific differences in how hierarchies are conceived. (shrink)

Are current theories of moral responsibility missing a factor in the attribution of blame and praise? Four studies demonstrated that even when cause, intention, and outcome (factors generally assumed to be sufficient for the ascription of moral responsibility) are all present, blame and praise are discounted when the factors are not linked together in the usual manner (i.e., cases of ‘‘causal deviance’’). Experiment 4 further demonstrates that this effect of causal deviance is driven by intuitive gut feelings (...) of right and wrong, not logical deliberation. Ó 2003 Published by Elsevier Science (USA). (shrink)

Responsibility as accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than responsibility as attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame involved in these different kinds of responsibility. This paper argues that this explanation does not work once we shift our focus from other-directed blame to self-blame. To blame oneself in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To (...) blame oneself in the attributability sense, it will be argued, is to feel shame and feeling shame is also to suffer. The different control conditions cannot be explained by a difference in the harm of blame. Instead, this paper argues that accountability and attributability are governed by different kinds of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if S deserves to feel guilty; an agent S is attributability blameworthy for X only if it is fitting that S feels shame for X. (shrink)

Drawing upon work in evolutionary game theory and experimental philosophy, I argue that one of the roles the concept of knowledge plays in our social cognitive ecology is that of enabling us to make adaptively important distinctions between different kinds of blameworthy and blameless behaviors. In particular, I argue that knowledge enables us to distinguish which agents are most worthy of blame for inflicting harms, violating social norms, or cheating in situations of social exchange.

Recent findings in experimental philosophy have revealed that people attribute intentionality, belief, desire, knowledge, and blame asymmetrically to side- effects depending on whether the agent who produces the side-effect violates or adheres to a norm. Although the original (and still common) test for this effect involved a chairman helping or harming the environment, hardly any of these findings have been applied to business ethics. We review what little exploration of the implications for business ethics has been done. Then, we (...) present new experimental results that expand the attribution asymmetry to virtue and vice. We also examine whether it matters to people that an effect was produced as a primary or side- effect, as well as how consumer habits might be affected by this phenomenon. These results lead to the conclusion that it appears to be in a businessperson’s self-interest to be virtuous. (shrink)

In the current research, we examined whether ostracism and sexual objectification affect the tendency to blame the victim of sexual harassment. Previous research concerning victim blame examined the attribution of blame considering the characteristics of the victim, the perpetrator, and the relation between them. However, no research to date examined whether situational factors of the perceiver can affect their perception and judgment of blame. We propose that sexual objectification and ostracism may elicit empathy toward the (...) victim, and in turn, reduce victim blame. In two experimental studies, women were instructed to imagine interacting with a videotaped man who either gazed at their body, away from them, or at their face. Then, they were asked to read a newspaper article or watch a video portraying encounters in which the man's sexual advances continued after the woman expressed discomfort and lack of interest. In study 1, we found that sexually objectified women attributed less blame to the woman compared with the women who were treated well, with ostracized women falling in between and marginally different from both. In study 2, using mediation analysis we found an indirect effect such that sexually objectified women experienced greater empathy toward the victim, which was associated with reduced attribution of blame. It appears that greater similarity between the situation of the perceiver and the situation of the victim elicits greater empathy. This adds to the previous knowledge that personality similarities result in higher empathy. (shrink)

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 has long been attributed to errors by Joseph Stalin, yet a revisionist position known as the Icebreaker hypothesis has also emerged alleging that Stalin is not to blame. This essay examines why the Icebreaker theory is erroneous based on its lack of concrete facts. The reasons why Operation Barbarossa was so effective are also examined, leading to the conclusion that Stalin should still shoulder most of the blame (...) for Soviet disorganization prior to the invasion. (shrink)

Free will has been the object of debate in the context of addiction given that addiction could compromise an individual’s ability to choose freely between alternative courses of action. Proponents of the brain-disease model of addiction have argued that a neuroscience perspective on addiction reduces the attribution of free will because it relocates the cause of the disorder to the brain rather than to the person, thereby diminishing the blame attributed to the person with an addiction. Others have (...) worried that such displacement of free will attribution would make the person with a drug addiction less responsible. Using the paradigmatic literature on the seductive allure of neuroscience explanations, we tested whether neuroscience information diminishes attributions of free will in the context of addiction and whether respondent characteristics influence these attributions and modulate the effect of neuroscience information. We performed a large-scale, web-based experiment with 2,378 German participants to explore how attributions of free will in the context of addiction to either alcohol or cocaine are affected by: (1) a text with a neurobiological explanation of addiction, (2) a neuroimage showing effects of addiction on the brain, and (3) a combination of a text and a neuroimage, in comparison to a control group that received no information. Belief in free will was measured using the FAD-Plus scale and was, subsequent to factor analysis, separated into two factors: responsibility and volition. The investigated respondent characteristics included gender, age, education, self-reported knowledge of neuroscience, substance-use disorder (SUD), and having a friend with SUD. We found that attributions of volition (in the cocaine-subsample) were reduced in the text and neuroimage-treatment compared to the control group. However, respondent characteristics such as education and self-reported knowledge of neuroscience were associated with lower attributions of responsibility for both substances, and education was associated with lower attribution of volition for the alcohol sub-sample. Interaction analyses showed that knowledge of neuroscience was found to generally decrease attribution of responsibility. Further research on attribution of free will should consider the effects of context and respondent characteristics, which appeared surprisingly larger than those induced by experimental treatments. (shrink)

Antisemitism is on the rise. Recently, discussions have considered so-called “no-go zones for Jews” (city areas Jews should avoid to reduce the likelihood of being attacked). In this context and drawing from attribution theory, we examined if news consumers perceive a Jewish hate crime victim as partly responsible for being attacked when news coverage explicitly emphasizes that the victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) in a certain inner-city location. We conducted a quota-based survey experiment (N = 392) in Germany (4 (...) groups, between-subjects design) and randomly exposed participants to news coverage about an anti-Semitic attack. The article either emphasized that the Jewish victim displayed religious symbols (kippah) or not, and highlighted the specific location of the attack (Berlin synagogue vs. deprived inner-city district of Berlin). Moderated mediation analysis suggested that participants perceived the victim’s behavior to be more provocative when the news article highlighted that the victim displayed religious symbols and when the attack occurred in a deprived Berlin district. Yet, effects were only detected for individuals with low (vs. high) levels of education. Perceived provocativeness in turn increased victim blaming indicating that some individuals indirectly regarded the Jewish victim to be partly responsible for being attacked. (shrink)

Several studies have shown that people are more likely to attribute intentionality and blame to agents who perform actions that have harmful consequences. This kind of bias has problematic implications for jury decisions because it predicts that judgment in juries will malfunction if an action has a blameworthy effect. Most of these studies include in their design a vignette in which it is clear that agents have foreknowledge of the effects of their actions. This kind of design fails to (...) replicate trial situations where, in most cases, it is impossible to know with certainty whether agents have foreknowledge of the effects of their actions. In the present study, we adopt an alternative design that includes vignettes in which there is no direct evidence of foreknowledge to investigate the relationship between intentionality and blame in actions that have harmful and helpful effects. We find that people are still more likely to attribute intentionality to actions that produce harmful effects than actions that produce good effects. However, we find that people tend to attribute more blame when they have direct evidence of foreknowledge than when presented with an alternative design that does not include foreknowledge. Results indicate the relevant role that evidence of foreknowledge plays in experimental designs that study blame attribution. (shrink)

Jurors’ emotions, both integral and incidental, can affect their attributions of legal responsibility and blame in several, sometimes complexly interrelated ways. The article reviews the experimental research, outlining the multiple paths of emotional influence, and explains why identifying them is worthwhile. It then discusses why the modest to moderate effect sizes found in the research may understate emotions’ actual influence in some cases yet overstate it in others, and discounts moral intuitionism as a reason for believing that emotional influences (...) in real cases are stronger than the experimental data indicates. The article concludes with recommendations for further research. (shrink)

A series of studies in experimental philosophy have revealed that people blame others for foreseen negative side effects but do not praise them for foreseen positive ones. In order to challenge this idea, also called the Knobe effect, we develop a laboratory experiment using monetary incentives. In a game-theoretic framework we formalize the two vignettes in a neutral way, which means that we abstain from the use of any specific language terms and can easily control and vary the economic (...) parameters of the situation. We confirm the Knobe effect in one situation and present situations in which the effect vanishes or even reverses. Our results are in line with a theoretical approach where the assessment of intention is not based on the action itself but on the underlying motive – as modelled in Levine. (shrink)

The idea of individual responsibility for action is central to our conception of what it is to be a person. Behavioural genetic research may seem to call into question the idea of individual responsibility with possible implications for the criminal justice system. These implications will depend on the understandings of the various agencies and professional groups involved in responding to violent and anti-social behaviour, and, the result of negotiations between them over resulting practice. The paper considers two kinds of approaches (...) to the question of responsibility and ‘criminal genes’ arising from a sociological and philosophical perspective respectively. One is to consider the social context and possible practical implications of research into ‘criminal genes’ which will later be examined through interviews and discussions with a range of experts including lawyers and social workers. A second and different kind of approach is to ask whether the findings of behavioural genetics ought to have implications for attributions of responsibility. Issues of genetic influence are central to both approaches. (shrink)

This paper examines ordinary people’s responses to Jennifer Lackey’s Chicago Visitor case. In particular it examines responses regarding the case from participants with Taiwanese backgrounds and US backgrounds. The Chicago Visitor case is one of the most influential cases in epistemology in recent years and plays a significant role in a number of debates in epistemology. First, the case is used to suggest that the Credit View is mistaken. Second, the case seems to pose a problem for a virtue epistemological (...) account of the nature of knowledge. Our paper explores these points in relation to our survey results, which show that participants believe that the protagonist in the case does have knowledge and that the protagonist deserves some credit for his true belief. Our aim in this paper, however, isn’t only to discover evidence bearing on the discussion of the Chicago Visitor case and cross cultural differences related to that case, we are also interested in what else the case might tell us about epistemic agency. For this reason we also asked participants to tell us to what extent they thought that the protagonist would be at fault in a case in which their belief turned out to be false. Here most of the participants found that the protagonist would indeed bear some fault in such circumstances. Our survey results also show, however, that participants of US background tend to be likely to attribute less fault to the testimonial recipient in bad testimonial cases, than their Taiwanese counterparts. More generally, we explore what the result regarding fault can tell us about epistemic agency. (shrink)

When faced with adverse circumstances, there may be a tendency for individuals, agencies, and governments to search for a target to assign blame. Our focus will be on the novel coronavirus outbreak, where racial groups, political parties, countries, and minorities have been blamed for spreading, producing or creating the virus. Blame—here defined as attributing causality, responsibility, intent, or foresight to someone/something for a fault or wrong—has already begun to damage modern society and medical practice in the context of (...) the COVID-19 outbreak. Evidence from past and current pandemics suggest that this tendency to seek blame affects international relations, promotes unwarranted devaluation of health professionals, and prompts a spike of racism and discrimination. By drawing on social and cognitive psychology theories, we provide a framework that helps to understand the effect of blame in pandemics, when people blame, whom they blame, and how blame detrimentally affects the COVID-19 response. Ultimately, we provide a path to inform health messaging to reduce blaming tendencies, based on social psychological principles for health communication. (shrink)

While philosophers hold that it is patently absurd to blame robots or hold them morally responsible [1], a series of recent empirical studies suggest that people do ascribe blame to AI systems and robots in certain contexts [2]. This is disconcerting: Blame might be shifted from the owners, users or designers of AI systems to the systems themselves, leading to the diminished accountability of the responsible human agents [3]. In this paper, we explore one of the potential (...) underlying reasons for robot blame, namely the folk's willingness to ascribe inculpating mental states or "mens rea" to robots. In a vignette-based experiment (N=513), we presented participants with a situation in which an agent knowingly runs the risk of bringing about substantial harm. We manipulated agent type (human v. group agent v. AI-driven robot) and outcome (neutral v. bad), and measured both moral judgment (wrongness of the action and blameworthiness of the agent) and mental states attributed to the agent (recklessness and the desire to inflict harm). We found that (i) judgments of wrongness and blame were relatively similar across agent types, possibly because (ii) attributions of mental states were, as suspected, similar across agent types. This raised the question - also explored in the experiment - whether people attribute knowledge and desire to robots in a merely metaphorical way (e.g., the robot "knew" rather than really knew). However, (iii), according to our data people were unwilling to downgrade to mens rea in a merely metaphorical sense when given the chance. Finally, (iv), we report a surprising and novel finding, which we call the inverse outcome effect on robot blame: People were less willing to blame artificial agents for bad outcomes than for neutral outcomes. This suggests that they are implicitly aware of the dangers of overattributing blame to robots when harm comes to pass, such as inappropriately letting the responsible human agent off the moral hook. (shrink)

There is a large literature exploring the effect of norms on the attribution of causation. Empirical research on this so-called “norm effect” has predominantly focused on two data points: A situation in which an agent violates a salient norm, and one in which there is no violation of a salient norm. Since the phenomenon is understood in bivalent terms (norm infraction vs. no norm infraction), most explanations thereof have the same structure. In this paper, we report several studies (total (...) N=479) according to which perceived causation depends on the strength of the norm violated – whether strength is conceived in terms of the norm’s strictness, explicitness or associated punishment. Consequently, the norm effect, properly conceived, is not bivalent but graded in nature, the standard data points (norm violation vs. no norm violation) are but a special case of a broader phenomenon. This, we argue, puts pressure on many, if not most, of the current explanations of the norm effect on causation. (shrink)