Recent empirical research by Joshua Knobe has uncovered two asymmetries in judgements about intentional action and moral responsibility. First, people are more inclined to say that a side effect was brought about intentionally when they regard that side effect as bad than when they regard it as good. Secondly, people are more inclined to ascribe blame to someone for bad effects than they are inclined to ascribe praise for good effects. These findings suggest that the notion of intentional (...) action has a normative component. I propose a theory of intentional action on which one acts intentionally if one fails to be motivated to avoid a bad effect. This explains the asymmetry concerning intentional action. The praise–blame asymmetry is explained in terms of the claim that praise depends on being appropriately motivated, whereas blame does not. (shrink)

Abstract: Recent experimental research on the 'Knobe effect' suggests, somewhat surprisingly, that there is a bi-directional relation between attributions of intentional action and evaluative considerations. We defend a novel account of this phenomenon that exploits two factors: (i) an intuitive asymmetry in judgments of responsibility (e.g. praise/blame) and (ii) the fact that intentionality commonly connects the evaluative status of actions to the responsibility of actors. We present the results of several new studies that provide empirical evidence in (...) support of this account while disconfirming various currently prominent alternative accounts. We end by discussing some implications of this account for folk psychology. (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)

In her 1993 book Freedom within Reason, Susan Wolf discusses what she identifies as an asymmetry between the good and the bad: to qualify as doing good in a praiseworthy way, it is not necessary that one should have the ability to do otherwise, but in order to qualify as doing something bad in a blameworthy way, it is necessary that one has the ability to do otherwise. In this chapter, I relate this asymmetry between the good and (...) the bad that Wolf discusses to a range of other asymmetries between the good and the bad that various philosophers – both historical figures and contemporary philosophers – have identified. I discuss different ways of thinking about the relations among these supposed asymmetries between the good and the bad, identify different ways in which one can relate to these ideas in one’s philosophical thinking, and lastly also argue that the long history of philosophical reflections on asymmetries between the good and the bad is interesting to contemporary discussions within applied ethics. In particular, I relate these ideas about asymmetries between the good and the bad to contemporary discussions about moral responsibility – and possible gaps in responsibility – within the ethics of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Presentation and discussion of two new experimental studies surveying intuitions about cases of moral ignorance due to childhood deprivation. Discussion of resulting asymmetry between negative and positive cases and proposal of speculative hypothesis to explain results, The Difficulty Hypothesis.

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about what a person values, whether a person is happy, whether a person has shown weakness of will, and whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain (...) these observed asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non-moral in nature. (shrink)

In this paper I reject the view that the famous ‘Knobe effect’ reveals an asymmetry within people’s judgments concerning actions with good or bad side effects. I agree with interpretations that see the ascriptions made by survey subjects as moral judgments rather than ascriptions of intentionality. On this basis, I aim at providing an explanation as to why people are right in blaming and ‘expraising’ agents that acted on unacceptable motives, but praise and excuse agents who meet intersubjective (...) expectations by acting on acceptable motives. The asymmetry only arises when blameworthiness and praiseworthiness are seen as instances of one and the same concept: moral responsibility. This analysis is backed by a study of Joshua Shepherd who extended and varied Knobe’s original vignettes. (shrink)

Based on a puzzling pattern in our judgements about intentional action, Knobe [. “Intentional Action and Side-Effects in Ordinary Language.” Analysis 63: 190–194] has claimed that these judgements are shaped by our moral judgements and evaluations. However, this claim goes directly against a key conceptual intuition about intentional action – the “frame-of-mind condition”, according to which judgements about intentional action are about the agent’s frame-of-mind and not about the moral value of his action. To preserve this intuition Hindriks [. “Intentional (...) Action and the Praise-Blame Asymmetry.” The Philosophical Quarterly 58: 630–641;. “Normativity in Action: How to Explain the Knobe Effect and its Relatives.” Mind & Language 29: 51–72] has proposed an alternate account of the Knobe Effect. According to his “Normative Reason account of Intentional Action”, a side-effect counts as intentional only when the agent thought it constituted a normative reason not to act but did not care. In... (shrink)

What is that makes an act subject to either praise or blame? The question has often been taken to depend entirely on the free will debate for an answer, since it is widely agreed that an agent’s act is subject to praise or blame only if it was freely willed, but moral theory, action theory, and moral psychology are at least equally relevant to it. In the last quarter-century, following the lead of Harry Frankfurt’s (1971) seminal (...) article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” the interdisciplinary nature of the question has been emphasized by various authors. Going beyond the boundaries of the traditional free will debate, they have attempted to describe the requirements for agent accountability by appeal to theories of personality, rational agency, and ethical choice. The approach has been a breath of fresh air in the often-stagnant free will debate, bringing new considerations to bear and provoking new lines of argument, and it is an approach that we will adopt in this paper. In the following pages, we hope to show that an under-noticed phenomenon of moral psychology, inverse akrasia, exemplified by Huckleberry Finn, has something to contribute to the understanding of agency and accountability. After presenting the phenomenon in section I, we will move in section II to a quick survey of a family of Frankfurt-inspired views and a critique of them based on the phenomenon in sections III and IV. A new theory will be offered in section V, and potential objections addressed in the final section of the paper. (shrink)

This paper is about an asymmetry in the justification of praising and blaming behaviour which free will theorists should acknowledge even if they do not follow Wolf and Nelkin in holding that praise and blame have different control conditions. That is, even if praise and blame have the same control condition, we must have stronger reasons for believing that it is satisfied to treat someone as blameworthy than we require to treat someone as praiseworthy. Blaming (...) behaviour which involves serious harm can only be justified if the claim that the target of blame acted freely cannot be reasonably doubted. But harmless praise can be justified so long as the claim that the candidate for praise did not act freely can be reasonably doubted. Anyone who thinks a debate about whether someone acted freely is truth-conducive has to acknowledge that reasonable doubt is possible in both these cases. (shrink)

Continuing prior work by the author, a simple classical system for personal obligation is integrated with a fairly rich system for aretaic (agent-evaluative) appraisal. I then explore various relationships between definable aretaic statuses such as praiseworthiness and blameworthiness and deontic statuses such as obligatoriness and impermissibility. I focus on partitions of the normative statuses generated ("normative positions" but without explicit representation of agency). In addition to being able to model and explore fundamental questions in ethical theory about the connection between (...) blame, praise, permissibility and obligation, this allows me to carefully represent schemes for supererogation and kin. These controversial concepts have provided challenges to both ethical theory and deontic logic, and are among deontic logic's test cases. (shrink)

Recently David Widerker argued that from the widely accepted ought implies can principle one can deduce the controversial and much discussed principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). Actually, he argues that this result is true only of the part of PAP which deals with moral blame. Because there are acts of supererogation, he maintains that it does not apply to the part which deals with moral praise. What Widerker says about supererogation seems true, and I develop and expand upon (...) this idea in the first half of the paper. Then I argue that Widerker's argument regarding moral blame fails. (shrink)

Consequentialism has been challenged on the grounds that it is too demanding. I will respond to the problem of demandingness differently from previous accounts. In the first part of the paper, I argue that consequentialism requires us to distinguish the justification of an act \ from the justification of an act \, where \ is an act of praise or blame. In the second part of the paper, I confront the problem of demandingness. I do not attempt to (...) rule out the objection; instead, I argue that if certain plausible empirical claims about moral motivation are true, we morally ought not to blame people for failing to meet certain very demanding obligations. With this theory, we create a space in consequentialism for intuitions questioning the plausibility of demanding obligations. I conclude the paper by showing that separate justifications for \ and \ may also give us a theoretical niche for intuitions about supererogation. (shrink)

Recent research on thick terms like “rude” and “friendly” has revealed a polarity effect, according to which the evaluative content of positive thick terms like “friendly” and “courageous” can be more easily canceled than the evaluative content of negative terms like “rude” and “selfish”. In this paper, we study the polarity effect in greater detail. We first demonstrate that the polarity effect is insensitive to manipulations of embeddings (Study 1). Second, we show that the effect occurs not only for thick (...) terms but also for thin terms such as “good” or “bad” (Study 2). We conclude that the polarity effect indicates a pervasive asymmetry between positive and negative evaluative terms. (shrink)

In Making Sense of Free Will and Moral Responsibility Dana Nelkin defends the “rational abilities view.” According to this view, agents are responsible for their behavior if and only if they act with the ability to recognize and act for good reasons. It follows that agents who act well are open to praise regardless of whether they could have acted differently, but agents who act badly are open to blame only if they could have acted on the moral (...) reasons that counted against their behavior. I summarize the main themes of Nelkin’s theory of responsibility and offer reasons for rejecting the claim that agents are blameworthy only if they could have responded to moral considerations. It is true that wrongdoers who could not have responded appropriately to moral considerations are often excused from blame, but I argue that not all the forms that such incapacity can take will furnish grounds for excuse. In other words, some circumstances that entail that a wrongdoer cannot respond to moral considerations are compatible with that agent fulfilling conditions that are sufficient for moral responsibility. (shrink)

Praise and blame can function to manage membership in informal social groups. We can be praised into groups, like if you remark on my good taste in music and invite me to have lunch with you. We can be blamed out of groups, like if I’m rude to your spouse and you stop inviting me to parties. These can move in the opposite direction, with praise removing you from a group and blame drawing you in. If (...) we attend to the way praise and blame shape our social world, we can revisit some debates about the ethics of praise and blame with new eyes. (shrink)

Asymmetry theories about free will and moral responsibility are a recent development in the long history of the free will debate. Kant commentators have not yet explored the possibility of an asymmetrical reconstruction of Kant's theory of freedom, and that is my goal here. By "free will", I mean the sort of control we would need to be morally responsible for our actions. Kant's term for it is "transcendental freedom", and he refers to the attribution of moral responsibility as (...) "imputation". By "Kant's theory of freedom", I mean not only his theory of transcendental freedom and imputation, but also the various ways in which he draws on these ideas in his moral theory. (shrink)

The standard analysis of supererogation is that of optional actions that are praiseworthy to perform, but not blameworthy to skip. Widespread assumptions are that action beyond the call is at least necessarily equivalent to supererogation ("The Equivalence") and that forgoing certain agent-favoring prerogatives entails supererogation (“The Corollary”). I argue that the classical conception of supererogation is not reconcilable with the Equivalence or the Corollary, and that the classical analysis of supererogation is seriously defective. I sketch an enriched conceptual scheme, “Doing (...) Well Enough (DWE)”, that allows for distinct analyses of action beyond the call and supererogation, among other often neglected fundamental moral notions. Parallels and asymmetries with suberogation are briefly explored. Apparently, DWE’s core act-evaluative notions are more fundamental than the agent-evaluative ones of supererogation/suberogation. (shrink)

When we focus on asymmetries of power in our society, we find that blame and praise are unfairly distributed, partly due to cultural narratives that favour and exonerate the privileged. This paper provides a partial explanation for this skewed distribution of blame and praise. I draw on three analyses of disappearance narratives that erase and exonerate privileged perpetrators and therefore skew the responsibility system in their favour. Then I defend an emancipatory theory of responsibility that treats (...) blame and praise as communicative entities that can, and should, be used to debunk and dismantle these disappearance narratives, along with other oppressive ideologies. Blame and praise, on my emancipatory proposal, serve to identify and take a stand against agents of oppression and to recognize and celebrate resisters. (shrink)

Generative AI programs can produce high-quality written and visual content that may be used for good or ill. We argue that a credit–blame asymmetry arises for assigning responsibility for these outputs and discuss urgent ethical and policy implications focused on large-scale language models.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“Listening to Reason”:The Role of Persuasion in Aristotle’s Account of Praise, Blame, and the VoluntaryAllen SpeightAristotle connects praise and blame closely to the voluntary, but the question of how his discussion of these terms should be construed more broadly in the context of a theory of responsibility has been much disputed. There are some well-known difficulties with the coherence of Aristotle's views in this regard: (...) animals and children, for example, are said to be voluntary agents, but are not held to be responsible;1 moreover, praise and blame seem to be important for what might be thought to be incompatible purposes—on the one hand, for behavioral improvement and correction (a usually prospective concern) and, on the other hand, for assessment of moral responsibility in terms of what an agent merits or deserves for what he or she has done (a retrospective concern).2One of Aristotle's first examples of the use of praise and blame in the Nicomachean Ethics captures some of the difficulty commentators have found in trying to understand his position. In drawing an analogy to illustrate the difference between parts of the soul, Aristotle comments that "in morally strong and morally weak men we praise (epainoumen) the reason that guides them and the rational element of the soul, because it exhorts them to follow the right path and to do what is best" (NE 1102b13-15). There is, he thus claims, an appetitive part of the soul thatpartakes of reason insofar as it complies with reason and accepts its leadership (hē(i) katēkoon estin autou kai peitharchikon); it possesses reason in the sense that we say it is "reasonable" to accept the advice of a father and of friends, not in the sense that we have a "rational" understanding of mathematical propositions. That the irrational element can be persuaded (peithetai) by the rational is shown by the fact that admonition (nouthetēsis) and all manner of rebuke (epitimēsis) and exhortation (paraklēsis) are possible. If it is correct to say that the appetitive part, too, has reason, it follows that the rational element of the soul has two subdivisions: the one possesses reason in the [End Page 213] strict sense, contained within itself, and the other possesses reason in the sense that it listens to reason as one would listen to a father.(NE 1102b31-1103a)I will argue that this image of listening and persuasion is more significant for Aristotle's conceptions of voluntariness and responsibility than is often thought. The image suggests not only that Aristotle is interested in both prospective moral education and retrospective assessments of responsibility, but that a crucial (and, in the literature to this point, quite neglected) term that he offers as a gloss for understanding his conception of the voluntary—the notion of peithō or persuasion—is in fact central to his employment of the categories of praise and blame in both prospective and retrospective senses. Aristotle's use of the concept of persuasion is not merely a casual gloss, but gives him instead an unusually helpful category for understanding the range of types of action within his philosophy of agency and how they fit within the larger scheme of parts of the soul in the Ethics and the distinctions among actions that stem from virtue, vice, moral weakness, and moral strength.In what follows, I will first examine how Aristotle uses peithō to explain the related notions of the voluntary (as to hekousion is usually translated) and the noncompulsory in the Nicomachean Ethics, III.5, and the Eudemian Ethics, II.8. I will then explore how Aristotle appeals to peithō and its cognates to address one of the most vexing problems his theory of voluntary agency must work out—the problem of akrasia and enkrateia (moral weakness and moral strength)—and, next, more widely how these related concepts become relevant for his account of the parts of the soul and gradations of action.I. Persuasion and the Voluntary (EE II.8 and NE III.5)Aristotle appears to link closely the notions of voluntariness (to hekousion)and persuasion (hē peithō).Bonitz's Index takes the two terms straightforwardly... (shrink)

This essay aims to take up the philosophical challenge of causal determination in divine predestination to human freedom by reconstructing Augustine’s relevant insights to argue that divine predestination still can accommodate our intuitions concerning freedom and moral responsibility today. Section 1 briefly reconstructs the development of Augustine’s reflections on predestination by focusing on his interpretation of the election of Jacob. Section 2 appeals to attacks from the Idle Argument and the Manipulation Argument to present the theoretical difficulties in Augustine’s account. (...) Section 3 argues that Augustine’s teaching of predestination contains a significant but often-neglected aspect of moral intuitions: the asymmetry of moral responsibility, namely, the conditions of being praised for a good action are substantially different from those of being blamed for an evil one. In conclusion, this essay considers some possible objections to the Augustinian asymmetry thesis to show its relevance to our moral responsibility practices today. (shrink)

In this paper, I begin by considering a traditional argument according to which it would be unfair to impose sanctions on people for performing actions when they could not do otherwise, and thus that no one who lacks the ability to do otherwise is responsible or blameworthy for his or her actions in an important sense. Interestingly, a parallel argument concluding that people are not responsible or praiseworthy if they lack the ability to do otherwise is not as compelling. Watson, (...) recently, offers in its stead an 'interpersonal' argument that appeals to a distributive notion of unfairness to conclude that praiseworthy actions, too, require the ability to do otherwise. I argue that this argument does not succeed. At this point, it seems that we have support for an asymmetrical treatment of blameworthy and praiseworthy actions. However, I conclude that while such an asymmetrical treatment may ultimately be correct, there is reason to doubt that considerations of fairness of sanction and reward support an asymmetry as well as an appeal to the 'ought-implies-can' principle. (shrink)

Blame is an unpopular and neglected notion: it goes against the grain of a therapeutically-oriented culture and has been far less discussed by philosophers than such related notions as responsibility and punishment. This book seeks to show that neither the opposition nor the neglect is justified. The book's most important conclusion is that blame is inseperable from morality itself - that any considerations that justify us in accepting a set of moral principles must also call for the condemnation (...) of those who violate the principles. Properly understood, blame and morality must stand or fall together. (shrink)

Among philosophers, there are at least two prevalent views about the core concept of intentional action. View I (Adams 1986, 1997; McCann 1986) holds that an agent S intentionally does an action A only if S intends to do A. View II (Bratman 1987; Harman 1976; and Mele 1992) holds that there are cases where S intentionally does A without intending to do A, as long as doing A is foreseen and S is willing to accept A as a consequence (...) of S’s action. Joshua Knobe (2003a) presents intriguing data that may be taken to support the second view.1 Knobe’s data show an asymmetry in folk judgements. People are more inclined to judge that S did A intentionally, even when not intended, if A was perceived as causing a harm (e.g. harming the environment). There is an asymmetry because people are not inclined to see S’s action as intentional, when not intended, if A is perceived as causing a benefit (e.g. helping the environment). In this paper we will discuss Knobe’s results in detail. We will raise the question of whether his ordinary language surveys of folk judgments have accessed core concepts of intentional action. We suspect that instead Knobe’s surveys are tapping into pragmatic aspects of intentional language and its role in moral praise and blame. We will suggest alternative surveys that we plan to conduct to get at this difference, and we will attempt to explain the pragmatic usage of intentional language. (shrink)

This encyclopedia entry contrasts three influential philosophical accounts of our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might be justified. On the one hand, a broadly Kantian approach sees responsibility for actions as relying on forms of self-control that point back to the idea of free will. On this account praise and blame are justified because a person freely chooses her actions. Praise and blame respond to the person as the (...) chooser of her deed; they recognise her dignity as a rational agent, as Kantians tend to put it. This approach sharply contrasts with two further ways of thinking about the issues. One is utilitarian, where praise and blame are justified in terms of their social benefits. Another, more complex approach is roughly Aristotelian. This approach situates practices of praise and blame in terms of our on-going relationships with one another. This approach stresses the importance of mutual accountability, moral education, and assessments of character in terms of the many vices and virtues. (shrink)

Irony is acknowledged to be usually critical: the ironic speaker tends to exhibit an apparent positive attitude in order to communicate a negative valuation. The reverse is considered to be also possible though: the ironic speaker can praise by apparent blaming, although it seldom happens. This unbalance between the two sorts of ironic examples is the so-called asymmetry issue of irony. Here I shall deny the possibility of being ironic without criticizing — hence the asymmetry issue is (...) an illusion. By claiming that irony is always critical I suggest an even stronger claim: criticism is what distinguishes irony from the similar phenomenon of metaphor. (shrink)

Introduction -- The beginnings of human judgment -- The chemistry, economics, and psychology of praise -- Blame: the necessity and devastation of guilt and shame -- Family judgments, family systems -- Just friends: praise and blame between peers -- Intimate judgments: praise and blame within couples -- Professional dues: praise and blame in the workplace -- Social media and the new challenges to our judgment meter -- Lifelong judgments.

Joshua Knobe found that people are more likely to describe an action as intentional if it has had a bad outcome than a good outcome, and to blame a bad outcome than to praise a good one. These asymmetries raised numerous questions about lay moral judgement. Frank Hindriks recently proposed that one acts intentionally if one fails to comply with a normative reason against performing the action, that moral praise requires appropriate motivation, whereas moral blame does (...) not, and that these asymmetries are normal features of a theory of intentional action, not anomalies. I present two empirical studies revealing asymmetries in lay judgements of intentionality and moral blameworthiness; these cannot be explained by Hindriks' theory of intentional action. (shrink)

This article explores several entanglements between human judgments of intentionality and morality (blame and praise). After proposing a model of people’s folk concept of intentionality I discuss three topics. First, considerations of a behavior’s intentionality a ff ect people’s praise and blame of that behavior, but one study suggests that there may be an asymmetry such that blame is more affected than praise. Second, the concept of intentionality is constitutive of many legal judgments (...) (e.g., of murder vs. manslaughter), and one study illustrates people’s subtle considerations of intentionality in making those judgments. Third, controversial recent studies suggest that moral considerations can affect judgments of intentionality, and an asymmetry may exist such that blame a ff ects those judgments more than praise. I report two new studies that may shed light on these recent findings, and I discuss several theoretical models that might account for the impact of moral considerations on intentionality judgments and for the relationship between the two more generally. (shrink)

There is widespread agreement among philosophers about the Mens Rea Asymmetry (MRA), according to which praise requires intent, whereas blame does not. However, there is evidence showing that MRA is descriptively inadequate. We hypothesize that the violations of MRA found in the experimental literature are due to what we call “moral compositionality,” by which we mean that people evaluate the component parts of a moral problem separately and then reach an overall verdict by aggregating the verdicts on (...) the component parts. We have subjected this hypothesis to the test and here report the results of our experiment. We explore several explanations of the experimental findings and conclude that they present a puzzle to moral theory. (shrink)

We praise people for morally good things: giving to charity, being generous, having compassion for the needy. We blame for morally bad things: cheating on one’s spouse, being selfish, harboring ill will towards others. What are praise and blame, though? When are they appropriate? This essay reviews influential answers to these questions.

In this paper, I demonstrate that Kant's commitment to an asymmetry between the control conditions for praise and blame is explained by his endorsement of the principle Ought Implies Can (OIC). I argue that Kant accepts only a relatively weak version of OIC and that he is hence committed only to a relatively weak requirement of alternate possibilities for moral blame. This suggests that whether we are transcendentally free is irrelevant to questions about moral permissibility and (...) moral blameworthiness. (shrink)

Recent writers in feminist ethics have been concerned to find ways to reclaim and augment women's moral agency. This essay considers Sarah Hoagland's intriguing suggestion that we renounce moral praise and blame and pursue what she calls an "ethic of intelligibility." I argue that the eschewal of moral blame would not help but rather hinder our efforts to increase our sense of moral agency. It would, I claim, further intensify our demoralization.

A summary of the major arguments of PRAISE AND BLAME, both critical and constructive, is offered. The overarching objectives of the book are set forth, making clear the radical form of moral realism defended. Additional material is presented to justify the attention paid to historical vs. contemporary alternatives to moral realism, the latter found to be at once indebted to the former but often less developed. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

This final chapter develops an account of blameworthiness that dovetails with the previous chapter’s account of blame. Because the core constituents of blame consist of a desire and a belief, the norms that determine when blame is called for are the ones that correspond to these elements. On the resulting account, blame is called for when the blamer’s belief that the blamee has acted badly is true, and the blamer’s desire that the blamee not have violated (...) a moral principle to which the blamer is committed is justified by the very considerations that justify his commitment itself. By thus making explicit the link between the justification of blame and the justification of the moral principle that the blamee has flouted, we come to see that a commitment to blame is inseparable from a commitment to morality itself. (shrink)

We frequently praise or blame people for what they believe or fail to believe as a result of their having investigated some matter thoroughly, or, in the case of blame, for having failed to investigate it, or for carelessly or insufficiently investigating. for instance, physicists who, after years of toil, uncover some unknown fact about our universe are praised for what they come to know. sometimes, in contrast, we blame and may even despise our friends for (...) being ignorant of certain ecological facts as a result of their refusing to countenance the evidence. the purpose of this paper is to explore what underlies the legitimacy of this practice—the praise or blame of people for what they know or fail to know as a result of investigation or otherwise—namely, the ability to exercise control over one’s doxastic states, and, in particular, as i will argue, one’s ability to exercise indirect generic control over one’s doxastic states. (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)

Sometimes it is not one’s place to blame or forgive. This phenomenon is captured under the philosophical notion of standing. However, there is an asymmetry to be explained here. One can successfully blame, even if one lacks the standing to do so. Yet, one cannot successfully forgive if one lacks the standing to do so. In this article we explain this asymmetry. We argue that a complete explanation depends on not only a difference in the natures (...) of the standing to blame and forgive but also a difference in the natures of blame and forgiveness themselves. (shrink)

Daniel Robinson suggests that much of the civil and criminal law "serves as the institutionalized form of praise and blame". Indeed it does. Pulling at this thread of Robinson's tapestry leads the reader straightaway to a host of truths about how law and morality not only intersect, but work together in harmony. "[L]aw", Robinson says, is a "vivid expression of deeper and impenetrably complex moral theories". This essay explores several of these harmonies, but focuses on two. One is (...) that political society must be seen as the cooperation of free persons according to law, which persons hold common moral understandings. The second has to do with retribution as the moral justifying aim of punishing criminals. The author goes beyond Robinson's limited praise of retribution, and shows that some central features of our practice of punishment are understandable only within the retributive framework. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

"This book is a significant contribution to the analytic study of ethics, to the history of ethics, and to the growing field of philosophical psychology.

Women's underrepresentation in leadership positions in scientific and business life has been explained in organizational theory from several perspectives, all of which agree that women nowadays are highly qualified for leadership posts. Women are a relatively new phenomenon in this particuler sphere of work life. But long-term figurational approaches provide an explanation for the persistence of women's underrepresentation. Being an outsider in leadership positions implies ambiguity and an ambivalent fluctuation between stigmatization and counter-stigmatization. The present study uses Norbert Elias's Established (...) and Outsiders model to understand the complex polyphony in the movement of ascending and descending groups in leading positions, which are traditionally constructed as a `Man's World'. Referring to 18th-century books on etiquette through to present-day career guides, the author traces behavioural codes in gender and business life. (shrink)

The article presented a panegyric reading of the Sermon on the Plain in the Malawian context. It observed that, unlike its Matthean counterpart, the Sermon holds an insignificant place in African hermeneutics. Based on the Sermon’s structure and content the article proposed the Greco-Roman panegyric, whose function was to inculcate commonly held values, as a framework for reading of the Sermon. It argued that when read in its original context as a Greco-Roman panegyric, the Sermon’s radical stance on poverty and (...) riches had significant implications for African and Malawian socio-economic realities. It brought into light the complicated relationships between the poor and rich both among Luke’s original audience and the contemporary Malawian context. The panegyric reading of the Sermon also had a significant bearing on the application of the ubuntu philosophy in socio-economic interrelationships in Malawi. The article posited that the socio-economic inequalities in Malawi caused by corrupt, cronyism and nepotism not only challenge the majority Christian status of the nation but also the foundations of the African values of ubuntu. As a panegyric, the Sermon therefore challenges Malawian Christians to rethink their values and the relationship between the rich and the poor.Contribution: The article provides a new perspective to the interpretation of the Sermon on the Plain in African context. Against the background of its apparent neglect in African hermeneutics, the article underscores the relevance of the Sermon on the Plain to -socio-economic discourse in Malawi in particular and Africa in general. (shrink)

In this article I try to refute the so-called "libertarian" theory of free will, and to examine how our conclusion ought to modify our common attitudes of praise and blame. In attacking the libertarian view, I shall try to show that it cannot be consistently stated. That is, my dscussion will be an "analytic-philosophic" one. I shall neglect what I think is in practice an equally powerful method of attack on the libertarian: a challenge to state his theory (...) in such a way that it will fit in the modern biology and psychology, which are becoming increasingly physicalistic. (shrink)

L. C. Holborow; V*—Blame, Praise and Credit, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 72, Issue 1, 1 June 1972, Pages 85–100, https://doi.org/10.1093/ari.

There is little work of a systematic nature in ethical theory or deontic logic on aretaic notions such as praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, despite their centrality to common-sense morality. Without more work, there is little hope of filling the even larger gap of attempting to develop frameworks integrating such aretaic concepts with deontic concepts of common-sense morality, such as what is obligatory, permissible, impermissible, or supererogatory. It is also clear in the case of aretaic concepts that agency is central to such (...) appraisal, so some agential notions must be integrated with aretaic concepts as well. The current paper takes the first step in a larger project aimed at the closure of these gaps. Here I sketch a simple framework for the aretaic appraisal of an agent's performance, layered on top of a simple framework for agency and predetermination. In Part I, I develop the framework for agency, ability, and inevitability, combining elements of work by Brown, Elgesem, Carmo, Santos, and Jones. In Part II, drawing on work by Chisholm and Sosa on intrinsic preferability, I sketch and explore a framework for defining aretaic superiority, praiseworthiness, blameworthiness, neutrality, and indifference, etc., retaining proper links to agency. (shrink)

Praise and blame are the two currents that wend their way through writings about women from antiquity to modern times. Is woman Eve or Mary, “virtue or venom”? This unresolvable question gave rise to a debate structure that governs many texts dealing with women. Indeed, as Monique Engel observed, this structure points to an ideological impasse, a fundamental contradiction within Christian doctrine on women and marriage. One late-fourteenth-century writer who inscribes himself into this structure is Jean le Fèvre (...) de Ressons, who translated the Lamentations by the misogynist Matheolus and wrote its counterpart, the Livre de Leesce which he designed as a refutation of Matheolus. The Livre de Leesce forms part of the tradition of the praise of women, represented in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by such texts as Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours and Le livre de la cité des dames, and Martin le Franc's Champion des dames. (shrink)