Abstract:

This piece explores three related questions: The question of what blame is, the question of the content of what principles implicitly govern our practice of blaming, and the question of what blame is for. I do not engage the classical philosophical anxieties about whether blame can be justified or rational in a deterministic universe. My concern is rather to take some steps towards describing our blaming practices, which form a very familiar, yet quite distinctive, aspect of our everyday social experience.

My first suggestion is that blaming might be understood as a matter of doing something mentally distinctive with the thought that a person has done a particular act ('holding the act against him'), where this is different from merely having the thought that he has done it; but is also different, on one hand, from behaving towards him in a particular way, and, on the other, from making a moral judgment about him. I argue that consideration of blame's abstract, formal features offers some support for this analysis.

Next, I suggest that consideration of the circumstances under which factual ignorance provides an excuse for wrongdoing supports the thought that, among the principles that implicitly govern our blaming practices is some version of the principle that a person ought not to be blamed for a failure in circumstances in which his success would have been a matter of luck.

Finally, I suggest that both of these thoughts about blame are happily accommodated by the speculation that blame is a system for keeping a mental record of others' behavior in a way that will usefully inform our future interactions with them.