1.1.1 Reactive Essentialism

What all reactive accounts of blame have in common is that the negative reactive attitudes play some central role in making sense of what blame is. But the way that we understand the degree of centrality can make a significant difference when it comes to the plausibility of a particular reactive account of blame. Here I will characterize three main options for understanding this role that have coalesced in the literature thus far: (1) reactive essentialism, (2) functional reactivity, and (3) canonical reactivity.

The first option, which I will call reactive essentialism, is perhaps the most natural way of understanding reactive blame. It is also the one that opponents of reactive blame have called the most attention to. Reactive essentialism is the view that some experience or expression of the negative reactive attitudes is a necessary feature of blame. Thus, an instance of apparent blame will count as genuine only if it is accompanied or characterized by the actual experience or expression of a negative reactive attitude.

I take this way of understanding reactive blame to be something of a straw man. While much ink has been spilled arguing that reactive blame so understood is descriptively implausible – it is subject to a wide array of counterexamplesFootnote ³ – it is not at all clear that any proponents of reactive blame actually endorse reactive essentialism.Footnote ⁴ In fact, many of those who have defended accounts of explicitly reactive blame most vigorously have themselves acknowledged such counterexamples and weakened their views accordingly. R. Jay Wallace, for example, argues only that blame involves a susceptibility to the reactive emotions,Footnote ⁵ stating explicitly that “it is not required that we actually feel the relevant emotion in all the cases in which it would be appropriate to do so” (Wallace, Reference Wallace1994: 77). Wallace instead characterizes the connection between the reactive attitudes and blame as indirect and disjunctive. Blame is about holding one another to expectations we accept, and the reactive attitudes are constitutively linked to these expectations:

I will discuss Wallace’s view in much greater depth in Chapter 3, but here I wish to emphasize that even for Wallace – whose view is often taken to be a paradigm reactive account – the role played by the reactive attitudes is not an essential one. While susceptibility to the reactive attitudes is a sufficient condition for blame on Wallace‘s view, it is not a necessary one. Rather, one might also hold someone to an expectation and blame them by meeting the second disjunct above, and simply believing that it would be appropriate for one to feel the reactive attitudes in a given circumstance.Footnote ⁶

Wallace is not the only proponent of reactive blame to avoid commitment to reactive essentialism.Footnote ⁷ In fact, this kind of reactive essentialism is quite difficult to find clear examples of.Footnote ⁸ Nor do I see any clear reason for a proponent of reactive blame to accept reactive essentialism. There are alternative ways of understanding the central role that these attitudes play which are far more plausible. In what follows, I will set reactive essentialism aside, and focus instead on characterizing reactive blame in terms of one or both of these two alternatives.

1.1.2 Functional Reactivity

Angela Smith (Reference Smith, Coates and Tognazzini2013) has recently offered an alternative to reactive essentialism, which I will here call functional reactivity. Smith is primarily interested in the role that moral protest plays in blame, arguing that registering one’s moral protest is an essential feature of blame left out by many nonreactive accounts. She attempts to carve out a middle ground between “moral assessment” accounts of blame, and “moral sanction” accounts, taking blame to involve more than a mere negative judgment about its target’s quality of will while still falling short of full blown punishing or sanctioning (Smith, Reference Smith, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 27).

Smith states the view as follows:

While registering such protest “need not take the form of a Strawsonian reactive attitude,” Smith acknowledges that explicitly Strawsonian accounts do come closest to capturing the element of moral protest that she does take to be essential. Understood as a form of moral protest, Smith then takes the function of blame to be twofold. First, blame registers the fact that the victim did not deserve a certain kind of treatment by “challenging the moral claim implicit in the wrongdoer’s action” (Smith, Reference Smith, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 43). Second, blame “prompts moral recognition and acknowledgement of this fact on the part of the wrongdoer and/or others in the moral community” (Smith, Reference Smith, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 43). And resentment and indignation are very common ways of protesting the conduct of others and meeting these two aims. However, these negative reactive attitudes are not the only means of doing so. It is possible, for example, to challenge and prompt recognition of such conduct “dispassionately,” sometimes by merely modifying our attitudes, intentions, and expectations of one another (Smith, Reference Smith, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 45).

The fact that the negative reactive attitudes are not a necessary feature of moral protest rules out reactive essentialism for Smith. However, Smith’s account of blame still has a significantly reactive feel, and she ultimately concludes:

Here an alternative to reactive essentialism begins to emerge. Rather than taking the negative reactive attitudes as an essential feature of reactive blame, we might more charitably understand the centrality of the negative reactive attitudes to blame in something like Smith’s terms. While these attitudes are not strictly necessary, they are often the best, or at least the most common means we have of meeting and sustaining the aims of blame. Call this understanding of the way in which the negative reactive attitudes are central to reactive blame functional reactivity.

On Smith’s view, the aims of blame directly involve moral protest, but one need not be committed to this detail in order to embrace functional reactivity. Here I simply take Smith’s view to be instructive in elucidating a plausible alternative to reactive essentialism.

1.1.3 Canonical Reactivity

Functional reactivity is not the only alternative to reactive essentialism. Victoria McGeer has also recently applied Jackson and Pettit’s (Reference Jackson and Pettit1995) appeal to canonical features of a kind to blame, and in doing so, sketched an additional alternative. Canonical features are those features that have criterial significance, in that they “account for our interests in identifying a kind as such, even though things belonging to the kind do not invariably manifest the feature in question” (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 168). Canonical features are more than mere characteristic or typical features of a kind, but also fall short from counting as essential or necessary. McGeer suggests that the negative reactive attitudes are precisely this kind of feature of blame. I will call McGeer’s method of characterizing the centrality of the negative reactive attitudes to blame canonical reactivity.

This proposal for understanding the centrality of the negative reactive attitudes arises in the context of McGeer’s attempt to resolve a tension similar to the one at issue for what I have been calling the hard problem of blame – blame seems to be an important and valuable way of responding to wrongdoing, yet often has an angry, punitive edge that seems difficult to justify. McGeer argues that the project of resolving this tension and thus “civilizing blame” is subject to two constraints. First, she finds attempts to simply abandon reactive, angry blame problematic, arguing that a psychologically realistic account of blame must be an account of the reactive variety, “taking blame to be a phenomenon that displays the negative profile (warts and all) that is typically associated with [it]” (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 163).Footnote ⁹ Further, any attempt to civilize blame can only meet a second normative constraint by explaining precisely how this “unsavory” kind of blame “can still do valuable normative work so long as it is constrained by social and institutional practices that support its more constructive features” (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 163). For McGeer, it is precisely the negative reactive attitudes, understood as a canonical feature of blame, which do this valuable normative work.

I will discuss McGeer’s view in further detail in Chapter 4, and here I wish to focus only on her characterization of the negative reactive attitudes as canonical features of blame. This characterization presents yet another plausible way of understanding the central role that the negative reactive attitudes might play for reactive blame while avoiding full blown reactive essentialism. McGeer’s account is similar to the one sketched by Smith in that it takes the functional role of blame to be an important starting point. However, her own view of the functional role of blame differs in that McGeer is primarily concerned with blame as a psychological kind, taking a naturalistic, evolutionary approach to understanding its aims.

According to McGeer, blame involves both backward and forward-looking elements of appraisal. In regard to the former, blame is triggered by various events only insofar as they are coded or perceived as situations of a certain emotion-inducing type, namely as norm transgressions (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 171). In regard to the forward-looking element, blame disposes us to behave in ways that at one point had an overall tendency to enhance individual fitness in ancestral populations by promoting large-scale human cooperation (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 171). On McGeer’s account, the psychological feature that plays both these forward- and backward-looking roles is moral anger. Moral anger is the psychological state that typically plays the causal role of blame in creatures like us, and the unpleasant emotional character of this state is not incidental (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 169). While it is possible to blame dispassionately without moral anger (and thus reactive essentialism is false), such instances of blame are in some sense defective on McGeer’s account. They lack a canonical feature of blame, namely the negative reactive attitudes that constitute the varieties of moral anger.

But how ought we to understand the distinction between canonical features, and other kinds of features? Here McGeer is also instructive. She distinguishes between features of a kind that are essential or constitutive, those that are merely “kind-associated,” and those that are canonical. Essential features are, again, those necessary to a genuine instance of the kind, whereas mere kind-associated features are “features whose contingent association with the phenomenon in question is of no criterial significance” (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 168). The ability to fly, for example, is a kind-associated feature of birds. While many members of the kind have this feature, it does not figure in how we demarcate the bounds of the kind itself. The ability to fly is a contingent feature of birds, and not the sort of thing we appeal to in order to distinguish birds from non-birds, or to understand the kind of thing birds are.Footnote ¹⁰

Canonical features, in contrast, are those that do have criterial significance. They are the very features that

Canonical features therefore represent a middle ground between mere kind-associated features and features that are essential. Genuine members of the kind can lack a canonical feature, but we could not make sense of the kind itself without such features. Here McGeer’s use of the kind “heart” as an example is instructive:

Just as hearts are canonically the kinds of things that pump blood, blame is canonically the kind of thing that involves moral anger. Yet, just as a heart that has stopped beating is still heart, so too might a dispassionate instance of blame still count as genuine blame. However, like the stopped heart, such an instance of blame would be defective in some sense. Blame is the kind of thing that usually involves moral anger, and this negative reactive attitude serves as a canonical feature.

I take both functional reactivity and canonical reactivity to represent plausible ways of understanding the way in which the negative reactive attitudes are central to reactive blame. Here I will not take a stand on which of these alternatives to reactive essentialism I am inclined to endorse. Nor is it clear that these two characterizations should necessarily be treated as distinct options. It is worth emphasizing that the appeal to the functional role of blame is an important feature of each way of understanding the centrality of the negative reactive attitudes for reactive blame, and that one might easily combine a normative approach to understanding this role like Smith’s with a naturalistic, evolutionary approach to understanding it like McGeer’s.Footnote ¹¹

In what follows, I assume only that reactive essentialism is an uncharitable way of characterizing reactive accounts of blame. Critics are correct to point out that counterexamples involving apparently genuine yet dispassionate instances of blame abound, but incorrect to dismiss reactive blame because of them. There are other plausible ways of construing the central role of the negative reactive attitudes for reactive blame that need not characterize these emotions as necessary or essential. In what follows, I invite the reader to think of the role of these attitudes, especially moral anger, in terms of either functional reactivity, or canonical reactivity.

I will use these two ways of thinking about centrality to distinguish reactive accounts of blame from their nonreactive counterparts. As we will see in Section 1.3, it is not always clear whether an account of blame is nonreactive or reactive to a degree relevant to the problem of blame. And this is especially true once we have abandoned reactive essentialism as a way of characterizing the latter. In what follows, I will use the disjunction of functional and canonical reactivity as a test for the degree of reactivity needed to give rise to the problem of blame. If an account takes the negative reactive attitudes to be necessary to explaining or sustaining the functional role of blame, or to distinguishing blame as a genuine kind in the first place, then it is an account of reactive blame in need of defense from the problem of blame.

I turn now to a brief tour through two explicitly nonreactive alternatives to reactive blame, accounts that seem to easily avoid the problem of blame and worries about permissibility.

1.2.1 Cognitive Accounts of Blame

If reactive blame occupies one extreme on the spectrum of the potential harms of blame, cognitive accounts lie at the other. Cognitive accounts are those that take blame to be some kind of evaluative judgment, where the content of this judgment varies. For example, some cognitive accounts take the content of the evaluative judgment involved in blame to be a kind of negative mark on one’s “moral ledger” (Zimmerman, Reference Zimmerman1988: 38).Footnote ¹² This kind of view was proposed by J. J. C. Smart (Reference Smart1961), who characterized blame as similar to dispraise in that it involves a grading judgment of its target as a thing of a certain kind.Footnote ¹³ However, for Smart blame goes beyond mere dispraise in that this evaluative judgment has some additional significance. It implies that its object is responsible for their action or character.

Other cognitive accounts take blame to involve an aretaic judgment, or as Gary Watson puts it, to see the conduct at issue “as a poor exercise of human evaluative capacities, as characteristic of someone who cares little about standards of excellence in human affairs” (Watson, Reference Watson2004: 265). While Watson does not take this kind of cognitive blame – the kind associated with what he calls the attributability face of responsibility – to be the only kind of blame, it is itself a robust cognitive alternative to reactive blame.

What the variety of cognitive accounts have in common is that some evaluative judgment is not only necessary, but also sufficient for blame. Further, these accounts make no mention of the reactive attitudes. The varieties of moral anger play no role in blame on a straightforwardly cognitive account, though they may turn out to be merely contingently associated with the relevant evaluative judgment. Thus, cognitive accounts constitute perhaps the clearest example of straightforwardly nonreactive blame.

However, not all evaluative judgments are normatively equal. This is especially clear when we consider evaluative judgments about one’s quality of will. Judgments about quality of will seem to have a special normative force, and are importantly distinct from other kinds of negative evaluative judgments, say about one’s awful cooking or bad driving. Quality of will matters more to us, and judgments about it flag ways in which someone has “dropped below some standard that we accept (or perhaps that we think they should accept), whether of excellence, morality, or respectful relationships” (Coates and Tognazzini, Reference Coates, Tognazzini, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 9). We care about such judgments in ways that we simply do not care about what others think about our cooking or our driving, even (and perhaps especially!) if they are never communicated to us.

Views that take blame to be constituted by an evaluative judgment of ill will are often categorized as cognitive accounts. However, for my current purposes things are not so clear cut. Because judgments of ill will have special significance and force for us, they are precisely the kind of judgments that tend to trigger the negative reactive attitudes. Whether or not such views end up counting as reactive or nonreactive will depend on the details (namely whether or not the negative reactive attitudes turn out to be an essential, functionally necessary, or canonical feature of blame), and as such I will treat them separately in Section 1.3. Before dealing with these thornier issues, it will be first helpful to get a clear picture of the other paradigmatic variety of nonreactive blame, conative blame.

1.2.2 Conative Accounts of Blame

In addition to cognitive accounts, conative accounts represent perhaps the most fully developed and plausible alternative to reactive blame. Among the most prominent defenders of conative accounts of blame are George Sher (Reference Sher2006) and T. M. Scanlon (Reference Scanlon2008). Conative accounts follow cognitive accounts in taking some kind of evaluative belief or judgment to be central to blame, but depart from these more minimal accounts in that the relevant belief is not sufficient. Conative accounts take some corresponding change to the blamer’s motivation – their desires, attitudes, or other dispositions to behave in certain ways – to also be necessary. Here I will focus on Sher and Scanlon’s accounts as the two most fully developed conative accounts currently on offer.

According to Sher’s conative account, blame is a belief–desire pair. The belief in question is that the target of blame has acted badly or has a bad character, while the corresponding desire is the desire that the target had not acted badly, or had not had a bad character (Sher, Reference Sher2006: 112). In regard to the belief component, Sher clarifies that “bad acts” refer to “morally defective acts that render agents blameworthy” (Sher, Reference Sher2006: 9). So, the belief component looks to be simply a judgment that the target of blame has a character or has committed some wrong conduct for which they are blameworthy. It is then the desire component of the core pair that allows this account to avoid vicious circularity by further elucidating what the blameworthy are worthy of – namely, whatever reactions are made appropriate by the overall pair.

This core belief–desire pair composes the first “tier” of Sher’s account of blame, with some class of blame-related behavioral and attitudinal dispositions forming the second tier (Sher, Reference Sher2006: 138). According to Sher, it is the desire component of the core belief–desire pair that explains the relevant behavioral and attitudinal dispositions:

Sher’s key insight is that there is something motivational at the heart of our blaming reactions. His view has the advantages of allowing for a significant degree of variation across our actual blaming responses and explaining why the negative reactive attitudes are not necessary to blame.Footnote ¹⁴ In regard to the latter, consider a particularly close relationship with a friend or loved one. In this case, the belief that she is blameworthy paired with a desire that she had not wronged you might dispose you to other responses than hostile negative reactive attitudes. Hoping to maintain the relationship you might instead be disposed to calmly confront her, and communicate information about the kind of amends or apology that would be needed to reconcile fully. Many have criticized Sher’s claim that the core belief–desire pair he identifies is sufficient to explain a wide enough range of apparent instances of blame, or even that it is necessary to do so.Footnote ¹⁵ Here I do not wish to assess the overall plausibility of Sher’s conative view of blame, but merely to note it as a robust conative alternative to reactive blame.

Perhaps, the most richly developed and defended alternative to reactive blame is another conative account, the account developed over the past several decades by T. M. Scanlon (Reference Scanlon1988, Reference Scanlon1998, Reference Scanlon2008). Scanlon (Reference Scanlon2008) explicitly proposes an account of blame that he takes to satisfy four main desiderata, namely to explain: (1) the difference between blame and mere objective stigma or moral outcome luck; (2) the relation between blame and wrongness; (3) the significance of blame and why blame matters to us; and (4) the ethics of blame (who can be the target of blame, who has standing to blame, and why we should blame).Footnote ¹⁶

According to Scanlon, to be blameworthy entails that something about your attitudes toward others impairs the relationship that they can have with you. This notion of impairment is central to Scanlon’s account of blame, and it arises out of his account of the standards constitutive of our interpersonal relationships (Scanlon, Reference Scanlon2008: 131–138). These relationships are constituted by the reasons one takes themselves to have for treating others in certain ways, and corresponding dispositions to feel and act in certain ways. Nondefective interpersonal relationships should be mutual or reciprocal and governed by certain normative standards and ideals. The relevant kind of normative ideal is simply whatever must be true in order for an individual to have a relationship of the relevant kind; how they should behave ideally; and what attitudes they should have ideally relevant to that kind.

On Scanlon’s view, different kinds of relationships can, and in fact sometimes do, have radically different normative ideals. The conditions that must be met in order for me to be a term in an interpersonal romantic relationship will be drastically different from the kinds of ideal attitudes, dispositions, and expectations needed to engage in a relationship between colleagues. These normative ideals set the standards for a kind of relationship, and also restrict what might count as a genuine interpersonal relationship of the relevant kind. While on Scanlon’s view there will be a wide array of kinds here, not just any relation will count. One-off or grue-likeFootnote ¹⁷ relations (say between people who see each other in the hallway in passing on Tuesdays) will not count, because there is no apparent normative ideal relevant to them. Finally, on Scanlon’s view most of our interpersonal relationships are contingent and conditional.Footnote ¹⁸ Maintaining them often depends on several factors that can lie outside of one party’s control, and they can be ended. Often relationships come to end due to an impairment. But they can also be ended blamelessly and without impairment, such as when two friends simply drift apart.

Like blameworthiness, actively blaming someone is closely related to the normative ideals of our interpersonal relationships and what it means to impair them. On Scanlon’s view, an interpersonal relationship is impaired when one party, while standing in the relevant relation to another person, holds attitudes toward that person that are ruled out by the standards (normative ideals) of that relationship, thus making it appropriate for the other party to have attitudes other than those that the relationship normally involves. This notion of impairment is not all or nothing – most of our interpersonal relationships can continue in an impaired form. A bad friend, for example, might still be considered a genuine friend (Scanlon, Reference Scanlon2008: 131–138). When a relationship has been impaired in the relevant sense, it is appropriate to blame the party who has caused the impairment. Scanlon explicitly defines what it means to blame someone as having two features: (1) a judgment that the target of blame is blameworthy (as stated earlier, the belief that they have impaired the relevant relationship); and (2) to take the relationship with the target of blame to be modified in a way that this judgment renders appropriate.

Here the notion of modification still needs to be elucidated, and it is this feature that renders Scanlon’s account of blame a conative one. Scanlon uses the example of Joe, a disappointing friend, to articulate some of our options for modification:

While Scanlon takes it to be a merit of his account that it allows for a wide array of relationship-modifying responses to count as blaming responses, this example highlights a few noteworthy possibilities. First, and perhaps most minimally, modification might involve simply altering your judgments and attitudes about the nature of your relationship with the target of blame. A betrayal like Joe’s might lead you to view him as more of an acquaintance than a friend. In doing so, you might change your intentions toward Joe, and adjust your expectations of him in the future. For example, you may no longer intend to spend substantial amounts of time with him, or to confide in him. Or, you may abandon the expectation that he will keep any future confidences, or defend you against slander from others.

Whatever the attitudinal revision, this first kind of modification need not entail any overt behavior or speech that communicates the modification of your relationship. If the target of blame is not particularly observant, then it is compatible with Scanlon’s view that this kind of blaming modification might occur without any uptake from that target. In practice, it does seem that blame is sometimes “silent” in this way, and so one virtue of Scanlon’s account is that it has the resources to make sense of this kind of private blame.

But blame is often public, and does in fact aim at some form of uptake from its target. On Scanlon’s account revising not only our attitudes but also our dispositions can mark a modification to a relationship to both the blamer and target of blame. Returning to Joe, my previous disposition to feel happiness when good things happen to Joe may weaken. Likewise, I might adjust or completely abandon my disposition to defend him when others speak poorly of him, to prioritize spending time with him, or to help him when he is in need. It is not clear how fine grained we ought to be in characterizing these kinds of dispositions, but in Scanlonian terms we might think of many of them under the umbrella of a certain kind of withdrawal. Perhaps, one of the most widespread ways in which we blame others we judge to be blameworthy is to mark the impairment they have caused by taking a step back from them. We withdraw, and adjust many of the ways that we were previously disposed to engage with them.

This second kind of modification is far more likely to receive uptake and be noticed by blame’s target. It is difficult for someone engaged in a genuine friendship not to notice when a friend withdraws or distances themselves. But it is still not the most overt way of marking the fact that an impairment has caused a particular relationship to be modified. Scanlon also acknowledges that we sometimes express our judgment that a relationship has been impaired with an explicit complaint, demand for explanation, apology, or justification, or by pairing any of the above with an expression of resentment or indignation. However, this final possible means of modification has an entirely contingent relation to blame. While we can mark modifications to our relationships in response to a judgment of impairment in ways involving the reactive attitudes, we need not do so:

On Scanlon’s view, then, the negative reactive attitudes are neither an essential, functionally necessary, nor canonical feature of blame. As such Scanlon’s account is explicitly nonreactive, and constitutes perhaps one of the most fully developed alternatives to reactive blame.

1.3.1 Quality of Will Accounts of Blame

As discussed earlier, quality of will accounts of blame are sometimes categorized loosely as cognitive accounts. Like cognitive accounts, quality of will accounts take blame to involve a particular kind of evaluative judgment. However, unlike evaluative judgments about one’s moral “ledger,” or aretaic character, judgments about quality of will seem to matter to us in ways that feel distinctly forceful. And that is due in large part to the apparent connection between our beliefs about the quality of one’s will and the negative reactive attitudes. The question, then, of characterizing such views as reactive or nonreactive will hang on what the view takes this connection to amount to. If the negative reactive attitudes are an essential feature of our evaluative judgments about one’s quality of will, if they are necessary for such judgments to fulfill the functional role of blame, or if they are canonical features of such judgments, then the view in question will count as a reactive account of blame and one for which the problem of blame is in fact a problem. If not, then while the view might acknowledge that the negative reactive attitudes can (or even that they often contingently do) accompany our judgments about quality of will, then these views would be better characterized as nonreactive.

While there are a wide array of views that take an evaluative judgment about one’s quality of will to feature significantly in blame,Footnote ¹⁹ here I will focus on Pamela Hieronymi’s (Reference Hieronymi2004) influential account in particular. According to Hieronymi, blame is an evaluative judgment of ill will or disregard. Hieronymi’s account is especially instructive for examining the centrality of the negative reactive attitudes for quality of will views, as she is explicitly interested in the force of blame, and whether or not such force could be subject to what she calls the target charge of unfairness (Hieronymi, Reference Hieronymi2004: 115).

The target charge of unfairness is the claim that the characteristic force of blame is unfair in certain conditions, namely when either: (1) the target of blame could not have done otherwise and gotten themselves off the moral hook; (2) they did not have the ability to control their behavior in light of moral reasons; or (3) they did not play a sufficient role in becoming the kind of person that they are (Hieronymi, Reference Hieronymi2004: 116–118). Whether or not the target charge is true will depend on what the force of blame actually is, and on Hieronymi’s view, the primary force of blame lies in the judgment of ill will that constitutes blame itself. Even though this judgment is descriptive “many truths are important to us,” and it matters to us whether such judgments of ill will are true, or whether others think that they are true about us, because of the importance of our mutual regard for one another (Hieronymi, Reference Hieronymi2004: 122).

As noted in Section 1.2, judgments of ill will are important to us in ways that evaluative judgments about other features – for example, one’s bad driving or cooking – are not. They are judgments about a kind of moral failure – their object has disregarded the worth or standing of a fellow person. According to Hieronymi, this is precisely what lends the evaluative judgment of ill will constitutive of blame its special force and significance. However, she argues that the target charge of unfairness does not apply to this particular kind of force, because the only thing that could render it unfair would be an absence of object-focused reasons for thinking that the judgment that gives rise to it is true.Footnote ²⁰ According to Hieronymi, whether the target of blame could have done otherwise in a way that would get them off the moral hook or played a sufficient role in becoming the kind of person that they are is not relevant to whether an evaluative judgment that they have failed to regard others’ moral worth or standing appropriately is fair. What matters is simply whether they have so failed. Barring any object-focused reasons to think that a judgment of ill will is false, we lack grounds for thinking that a corresponding instance of blame is unfair.

However, the special significance of evaluative judgments of ill will is not the only feature of blame that lends it its force that Hieronymi considers. She also notes that the disagreeable, adverse effects of the negative reactive attitudes that tend to correlate with such judgments sometimes lend blame some further force. However, according to Hieronymi the force of these attitudes is not located primarily in their affect, as the emotional aspect of these attitudes is largely involuntary. Instead, Hieronymi argues that the negative reactive attitudes lend blame an additional “multifaceted” force (Hieronymi, Reference Hieronymi2004: 133). While the affective component of these attitudes often serves to mark the significance of the evaluative judgment of ill regard at the heart of blame, their own force is itself derived largely from the significance of this judgment (Hieronymi, Reference Hieronymi2004: 133).

Whether or not Hieronymi’s account is best characterized as reactive or nonreactive will depend on the nature of this significance-marking role.Footnote ²¹ Are the negative reactive attitudes essential to this role? Here the answer seems clearly no. Are the negative reactive attitudes functionally necessary to marking the significance of our judgments of ill will? This possibility seems far more plausible. Perhaps for creatures like us with the psychological makeup that we find ourselves with these unpleasant emotions are the only way to adequately mark this kind of significance.Footnote ²² Finally, do the negative reactive attitudes seem to be a canonical feature of blame on this view? Here I am unsure, but a case could certainly be made for thinking that we might have difficulty understanding blame as the kind of thing that involves judgments of ill will that have the special force that they do without their relation to the negative reactive attitudes.

So, while Hieronymi’s account of blame is often characterized as a cognitive (and thus nonreactive) one, I think we have good reason to treat it as sufficiently reactive to give rise to worries about permissibility and the problem of blame. Hieronymi’s account of blame is likely to find itself in the curmudgeon’s crosshairs along with other more explicitly reactive accounts.

1.3.2 Functional Accounts of Blame

Another subset of views about blame that do not clearly lend themselves to the reactive or nonreactive distinction are functional accounts. Often such views have a hybrid feel to them, combining elements from cognitive, conative, and straightforwardly reactive accounts. What functional accounts have in common is the idea that we should identify blame with its tasks. Coates and Tognazzini characterize this kind of view in terms of the following methodology:

Both Smith and McGeer’s accounts might be characterized as functional accounts of blame, in that they both begin with an account of the aims of blame. Recall that for Smith, blame is a form of moral protest; and for McGeer, blame is the kind of thing triggered by perceived wrongdoing that in turns disposes creatures like us to behave in certain ways (McGeer, Reference McGeer, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 171). As discussed in Section 1.1, I take Smith and McGeer’s accounts of blame to each be instructive examples of plausible accounts of reactive blame that avoid commitment to reactive essentialism. In taking the role of the negative reactive attitudes to be the most paradigmatic means of achieving the aims of blame (in Smith’s case), or to have criterial significance crucial to identifying the kind of thing that blame is (in McGeer’s case), each view gives the negative reactive attitudes sufficient pride of place to give rise to the problem of blame curmudgeons are worried about. Will this be the case for other explicitly functionalist accounts of blame?

Whether a specific functionalist account of blame will best be characterized as reactive or not will ultimately depend on the details, in particular on how the aims of blame are characterized and the degree to which we need the negative reactive attitudes to sufficiently pursue or understand those aims. It may be helpful to note that I suspect most functionalist views will tend in the direction of reactivity, but here I will examine Christopher Franklin’s (2013) value account of blame as a functionalist test case.

On Franklin’s view, the aim of blame is to properly value the objects of moral value, and blame is “a mode of valuation required by the standards of value” (Franklin, Reference Franklin, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 209). According to his preferred account of what it means to value something (as opposed to merely judging it valuable), valuing requires certain emotional and deliberative dispositions. Perhaps foremost among them is the disposition to protect and defend the objects one values. While Franklin avoids controversial commitments to an account of what the proper objects of moral value actually are, he takes it as a given that they will include human beings (Franklin, Reference Franklin, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 213–216). When such objects suffer an instance of moral wrongdoing, Franklin takes this to have a specific kind of symbolic meaning – wrong actions express the wrongdoer’s claim that the object wronged is not to be valued after all (Franklin, Reference Franklin, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 218–223).

The role of blame in valuing the proper objects of moral value is to protect and defend these objects against such claims. And doing so requires more than mere expression of a judgment that the symbolic claim expressed by wrongdoing is false. Disagreeing is not defending, especially when it comes to claims as serious as the denial of one’s value as a person.Footnote ²³ Instead, Franklin argues that properly valuing persons and truly defending and protecting them from such claims requires a disposition to blame wrongdoers in just the sort of way colored by the negative reactive attitudes. Mere judgments, or the kinds of dispassionate modifications to other dispositions sufficient to blame on conative views like Scanlon‘s, will not be enough here. Franklin argues instead that what is required to fulfill the aims of blame and successfully protect and defend the proper objects of moral value when they are wronged is a disposition to experience and express the negative reactive attitudes (Franklin, Reference Franklin, Coates and Tognazzini2013: 218–223).

In offering an account that takes dispositions to experience and express the negative reactive attitudes as crucial to achieving the aims of blame, it seems that Franklin’s account is best characterized as a reactive one. While the negative reactive attitudes are not a necessary or essential feature of blame on this view, Franklin seems clearly to embrace at least some form of functional reactivity. Because the aims of blame cannot be met without the negative reactive attitudes on this account of blame, this view is also likely to end up in blame curmudgeons’ crosshairs.

Before turning to the problem of blame itself, a few brief remarks on whether or not this examination of Hieronymi and Franklin’s accounts as test cases for reactivity suggests any broader conclusions about quality of will and functionalist accounts in general might be helpful. For my part, I expect that most functionalist accounts of blame are likely to be reactive accounts. That is because such accounts often appeal in some way to the kinds of dispositions needed to act as strong motivating forces for achieving the aims of blame. While conceptually it may be possible for other dispositions to serve this kind of role, I take it to be instructive that Smith, McGeer, and Franklin all coalesce around dispositions involving the negative reactive attitudes as the paradigm for this kind of motivating force. As Joshua Greene notes, “when Nature needs to get a behavioral job done, it does it with intuition and emotion wherever it can” (Greene, Reference Greene, Naddelhoffer, Nahmias and Nichols2010: 367).

When it comes to quality of will accounts, my expectations are similar. Hieronymi’s account is not unique in taking the negative reactive attitudes to be not only closely correlated with evaluative judgments of ill will, but to perhaps have some tighter connection to them when it comes to our ability to mark their significance. And so it would not be surprising if the majority of quality of will accounts turn out to be reactive and subject to the problem of blame as well.

But what precisely is this problem? While I have characterized it broadly in terms of a kind of tension that arises between the value blame seems to have and the harm that it causes, I have not yet fully explicated the problem that blame curmudgeons and others inclined toward skepticism about blame are concerned with. Now that we have a clearer picture of the kind of blame that gives rise to worries about permissibility in the first place, we can now move on to the task of more clearly explicating the problem of blame itself.

1.4.1 Blame versus Punishment

The first step to explicating the desiderata for a normatively adequate account of reactive blame is by noting an analogy with a similar and more familiar problem: the problem of punishment. Like reactive blame, punishment causes harm. The problem of punishment arises when we try to understand how and why it could be permissible to intentionally inflict the harms of punishment on wrongdoers, despite our standing pro tanto reasons not to cause harm to others.Footnote ²⁶ Two possible solutions to the problem of punishment – deterrence and retributivism – can each serve to elucidate something about the desiderata for a normatively adequate account of reactive blame.

On one hand, deterrence theorists sometimes argue that it is permissible to intentionally cause harm via punishment because the reasons we have not to harm can be outweighed by some overwhelming good. In particular, the harms of punishment might reduce harm on a larger scale. On the other hand, retributivists sometimes argue that it is permissible to intentionally cause harm via punishment because the reasons we have not to harm are defeated in some cases, namely when the relevant harm entailed by punishment is deserved. When it comes to the permissibility of punishment, we might therefore characterize a possible desideratum for a normatively adequate view of punishment in the following way:

Might we say the same thing about the desiderata for a normatively adequate view of reactive blame? Here the corresponding standard would be that we are justified in blaming if either (a) our reasons not to blame are outweighed because reactive blame entails some overwhelming good; or (b) our reasons not to reactively blame are defeated because in at least some cases blame is deserved in the basic sense.

While this first pass is instructive, I do not think that it is ultimately correct. This is due to an important difference in the relation between (a) and (b) for punishment versus blame. In the case of punishment, deterrent and retributive strategies for establishing the permissibility of punishment are usually pursued independent of one another.Footnote ²⁷ The desideratum for a normatively adequate account of punishment sketched earlier is in turn a disjunctive one. Punishment is permissible if either the deterrence theorist or retributivist gets things right. But this does not seem to be the case for reactive blame. Rather, when it comes to blame there is an underlying assumption that the value of blame could outweigh our reasons not to harm only if blame is also deserved in the basic sense, and that basic desert of blame could defeat our reasons not to harm only if the value of blame also outweighs our reasons not to harm.

To see this more clearly, consider first the way that whether or not the value of reactive blame outweighs our reasons not to harm is dependent on basic desert. Recall that, for example, on Franklin’s functional account reactive blame is a necessary condition for valuing what we ought to value. If this is correct, then there is at least a prima facie case for thinking that the value of even reactive blame might outweigh the disvalue of its unpleasant and harmful features. When it comes to ranking the value of our various moral practices, properly valuing the objects of moral value themselves looks like the kind of thing that plausibly appears at the top of the list. But, even if this is correct then the following challenge is also plausible: the value of this practice (properly valuing the objects of moral value) will only be relevant to the all things considered normative adequacy of reactive blame insofar as reactive blame is also deserved.

If we want to know whether or not it is ever permissible to reactively blame, it is not enough to say that reactively blaming is good for us.Footnote ²⁸ This is perhaps most obvious when considering the perspective of the unfortunate targets of reactive blame. Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of misplaced resentment will agree that attempts to justify blame via appeal to the overall value of blame alone will be of little comfort. The harms of reactive blame raise the stakes. Reasons for thinking that the harms of reactive blame are outweighed by its value are not enough if we lack any further reason to think that those harms are also deserved. We must also have good reason for thinking that our standing reasons not to harm one another are defeated when it comes to reactive blame. What the intuitive impermissibility of misplaced reactive blame highlights is that appeals to value alone are insufficient to meet the relevant standard of normative adequacy without an accompanying defeater.Footnote ²⁹

On the other hand, might appeals to basic desert alone be enough to do the relevant justificatory work? Mere appeal to desert also appears insufficient to do the relevant justificatory work. Assume for the sake of argument that we do have a defeater to the harms of blame – some people are in fact deserving of blame for some of their actions in the basic sense. Those skeptical of the permissibility of blame might still reasonably push back against the claim that reactive blame is normatively adequate. Surely there are things we might do that, while deserved, would not be all-things-considered permissible. Hitler, for example, might have reasonably deserved to live out the remainder of this natural life in a torture chamber. Had he survived WWII, this fact about desert in itself would not be sufficient to justify the claim that it would be permissible for anyone to actually lock him up in one and throw away the key.Footnote ³⁰

The same can be said of reactive blame. Perhaps it turns out that the negative reactive attitudes are far more harmful to creatures like us psychologically speaking than we currently recognize. If we came to discover this fact, or that attributions of blame violate some other weightier moral considerations, then skepticism about the normative adequacy of this kind of blame would be reasonable despite the further fact that it is deserved in the basic sense. While the impermissibility of misplaced reactive blame suggests that basic desert is necessary for a normatively adequate account, further considerations like these suggest that it is not sufficient.

1.4.2 Two Desiderata for Normatively Adequate Reactive Blame

Defending the permissibility of reactive blame therefore requires meeting two desiderata for normative adequacy. One must defend both the claim that reactive blame is sometimes deserved in the basic sense, and the claim that the value of this kind of blame outweighs its corresponding harms. In order to meet blame skeptics on their own terms, a maximally persuasive argument for the permissibility of reactive blame should meet the following two desiderata for normative adequacy:

I take each of these desiderata to be independent necessary conditions for establishing the permissibility of blame. Taken together, they are also jointly sufficient. Despite being unpleasant and even harmful, if reactive blame entails some overwhelming good for creatures like us and it is also deserved in the basic sense, then it is unclear what more skeptics about its permissibility might reasonably require.

Do we have any reason to think agents can be (and sometimes are) deserving of reactive blame in the basic sense, and that this kind of harmful blame is valuable? My goal in the next several chapters will be to systematically argue for affirmative answers to both of these questions.