In this chapter, I begin with the observation that there is an asymmetry in our normative expectations of degrees of self-blame and degrees of other-blame. There are many situations in which it seems intuitively plausible that a person should blame herself to a certain degree, while at the same time it is also appropriate for others to blame her to a lesser degree. This calls out for explanation. In this chapter, I canvass the prospects for rejecting the idea that there is any systematic explanation to be found, as well as those of a variety of possible explanations that purport to justify a genuine asymmetry between the norms of self-blame and other-blame. These latter include explanations according to which it is virtue to over-blame in one’s own case, and in which it is a virtue to be disposed to under-blame in the case of others. In the end, I argue instead that a central and systematic explanation relies in part on a general moral principle that asymmetric risk imposition between self and others is justified. I conclude by exploring the implications of this view for whether we should privilege intuitions about self-blame, other-blame, or neither when engaged in philosophical theorizing.

This chapter sets out a non-retributive conception of blame and of self-blame, that is, one that does not invoke the notion of basically deserved pain or harm. To blame is instead to take on a non-retributive stance of moral protest. The reasons for moral protest are forward-looking: moral formation or reconciliation in a relationship that has been impaired due to wrongdoing, protection from wrongdoing, and restoration of the integrity of its victims. Regret, a painful response to one’s own wrongdoing, which by contrast with guilt (by stipulation) does not involve the supposition that the pain it involves is basically deserved, may appropriately accompany self-blame. The pain of guilt, an attitude distinct from regret, conceptually involves basic desert since it involves the supposition that it would be prima facie permissible for those who are appropriately situated to impose it on a wrongdoer for a non-instrumental reason. The pain of regret, by contrast, does not involve this supposition.

Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over which we lacked such control (e.g., our desires, beliefs, and intentions). I argue that, despite this manifest diversity in our blaming practices, it’s possible to provide a comprehensive account of blame. Indeed, I propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that aims to specify blame’s extension in terms of its constitution as opposed to its function. And I argue that this proposal has a number of advantages beyond accounting for blame in all its disparate forms.

Central cases of moral blame suggest that blame presupposes that its target deserves to feel guilty, and that if one is blameworthy to some degree, one deserves to feel guilt to a corresponding degree. This, some think, is what explains why being blameworthy for something presupposes having had a strong kind of control over it: only given such control is the suffering involved in feeling guilt deserved. This chapter argues that all this is wrong. As evidenced by a wider range of cases, blame doesn’t presuppose that the target deserves to feel guilt and doesn’t necessarily aim at the target’s suffering in recognition of what they have done. On the constructive side, the chapter offers an explanation of why, in many cases of moral blameworthiness, the agent nevertheless does deserve to feel guilt. The explanation leans on a general account of moral and non-moral blame and blameworthiness and a version of the popular idea that moral blame targets agents’ objectionable quality of will. Given the latter idea, the morally blameworthy have harmed the standing of some person or value, giving rise to obligations to give correspondingly less relative weight to their own standing, and so, sometimes, to their own suffering.

In Chapter 1, I attempt to explicate the problem of blame by making use of an analogy with another more familiar problem relevant to permissibility and harm – the problem of punishment. I argue that this comparison serves to highlight two clear desiderata for a normatively adequate account of blame, one concerning the value of blame and another concerning desert. In this chapter, I also argue that the problem of blame concerns the reactive varieties of blame in particular, offer some principled strategies for distinguishing between reactive and nonreactive varieties of blame, and discuss the role that the negative reactive attitudes play in characterizing the former.

In Chapter 3, I focus on the nature of reactive blame itself. In order to see fully how the fittingness account of basic desert might help to resolve the problem of blame, we are in need of a clearer picture of the reactive attitudes whose conditions of appropriateness this solution will ultimately depend on. I canvass three prominent views of reactive blame (P. F. Strawson’s, R. J. Wallace’s, and David Shoemaker’s) that I take to be most helpful in further explicating what meeting the desert-based desideratum for normative adequacy might look like. Here I argue for a cognitivist view of the reactive attitudes, and that we ought to restrict the scope of the relevant class of reactive attitudes at issue quite narrowly. With a sharper view of the reactive attitudes in hand, I then return to the fittingness account of basic desert and offer a first pass at an account of the right kind of reasons to reactively blame.

In Chapter 2, I turn my focus to the desert-based desideratum for a normatively adequate account of reactive blame. I begin with an issue that often plays a central role in obscuring whether the problem of blame can be resolved, namely how we ought to understand the concept of basic desert. Adjacent to the problem of blame, debates about free will and moral responsibility often seem to bottom out in appeals to whether or not the account on offer can deliver basic desert of blame. However, little progress has been made in explicating precisely what basic desert of blame amounts to. I argue that once we have restricted our focus to reactive blame in particular, a clearer picture of basic desert emerges. I go on to offer an analysis of basic desert of reactive blame which I call the fittingness account, and argue that it can provide the first step in resolving the problem of blame.

A well-known tradition in private law theory says that one is responsible for the outcomes of one’s negligence when those outcomes are connected with one’s agency in the right way. Though they differ on the detail, theorists within that tradition (exemplified in the work of Tony Honoré, Stephen Perry, Joseph Raz, and John Gardner) tend to agree that a story about what we are responsible for must be grounded on a story about who we are, and what we are like as agents. In their view, you are responsible to make repair for the consequences of your careless driving insofar as not ascribing such responsibility to you would fail to treat you appropriately as an agent who has certain general capacities and commands the normal range of rational powers, including the power to take up driving and to make driving decisions. This chapter identifies three problems with such ‘agency’ accounts. First, those accounts have difficulty explaining why the connection with agency seems to matter more in some contexts, e.g., in blaming, and less in others, e.g. in the allocation of substantive burdens among persons. Second, they lack the resources to help us decide whose responsibility it is to deal with some outcome when more than one agents are connected to that outcome in the ‘right’ way, e.g., when a malicious attacker and the speaker he targets could both have avoided the speaker’s injury by choosing appropriately. Third, their implicit claim that our ideas about agency are more basic or fundamental than our ideas about responsibility is not obviously correct.

Legal scholars often prescind to moral philosophy to try to solve legal puzzles or paradoxes and to shape the positive law by reference to the seemingly pure and uncluttered lessons derived from within first-order moral theory. This chapter aims to do something quite close to the opposite. By looking at the structure of negligence law and certain concepts within it and by exhibiting their principled bases, it generates possible solutions to some of the problems about negligence that have troubled moral philosophers. These include: whether conduct that would ordinarily be called “negligent” can qualify as a breach of moral duty even if it was solely the product of inadvertence; whether it matters to the blameworthiness of a negligent actor that her conduct caused no harm; and whether a person whose negligent conduct is purely a product of inadvertence can properly be blamed or held responsible for injuring another. In the domain of negligence law, which contains “negligence,” “duty,” and “legal responsibility” in the form of legal liability, the answer to all three analogous questions is emphatically “yes,” and tort law explains why. Moving back to moral questions, we see our way to defensible answers to those questions and we also see why the questions present themselves as so difficult.

Harms brought about through negligence are typically morally blameworthy despite being unintended and often unforeseen. How is this best understood? A natural approach parallels a common approach to blameworthiness for unwitting wrongdoing, i.e., acts performed in ignorance of their wrongness: blameworthiness for the act or harm in question is taken to be derivative from more straightforward blameworthiness for relevant earlier failures. I have argued elsewhere for a derivative blameworthiness approach to unwitting wrongdoing that appeals to reasonable expectations about available steps the agent could have taken to avoid or remedy the ignorance in question; and contra Gideon Rosen and Neil Levy, such claims about reasonable expectations do not depend on there being episodes of clear-eyed akrasia in the agent’s past management of her beliefs, so that the account allows for blame in a much wider range of cases. My aim here is to extend this approach to a variety of forms of negligence, defending a similarly broad reasonable expectations version of a derivative blameworthiness view. In particular, I will distinguish and explore cases involving (i) self-conscious negligence, (ii) negligence involving false beliefs about relevant norms of due care, (iii) thoughtless negligence, and (iv) harms due to pure forgetting – though I will argue that the latter often turn out not to be cases of negligence at all, at least for purposes of moral blame.

Chapter 11 aims to summarize the key messages in the book by applying them to our thinking during the coronavirus crisis. I show how many of the concepts – from psychology and formal modelling – recur in expert and lay reasoning during the pandemic. I argue that the danger of jumping to premature causal claims, without careful evidence evaluation, is particularly rife in situations of radical uncertainty. But causal thinking is also an essential tool for dealing with such crises.

The aim of the chapter is to develop an understanding of what moral responsibility is, so that this can, in later chapters, be applied to the case of the psychopath. I begin by distinguishing moral responsibility from other senses of responsibility, including causal, virtue, and obligation responsibility, and elucidate the various connections between these senses. I then consider the relationship between moral responsibility, praiseworthiness and blameworthiness, and the range of phenomena for which it is possible to be morally responsible. Next, I proceed to consider two major theories of moral responsibility: the Strawsonian ‘reactive attitudes’ account and the ‘reasons-responsiveness’ account. I consider the advantages and disadvantages of these, and their ability to account for a range of cases. Finally, I argue for an account adapted from R. Jay Wallace’s version of reasons-responsiveness.