Blame's Topography: Standing on Uneven Ground

1. Introduction

Once upon a time, philosophers sought to discover whether or not human beings possessed free will. But members of the search party could not come to a shared understanding of what free will was. To make things more concrete, many agreed that the kind of free will worth caring about was whatever kind would support judgments of “moral responsibility.” But what was that? Energized by P.F. Strawson’s (1962) “Freedom and Resentment,” which encouraged philosophers to appreciate the importance of the “reactive attitudes” to interpersonal relationships, the searchers narrowed their focus yet again. They concluded that to be morally responsible is to be properly subject to these attitudes, especially blame. But what is blame? The urge to answer this question has generated a profusion of articles and books attempting to analyze this once under-theorized concept.

In this paper I show how this drive to understand blame’s nature has led us astray in at least one context. Specifically, I focus on the contemporary debate about the “standing” to blame and argue, first, that theorizing about blame-in-general has assumed an impoverished moral psychology that fails to reflect the range of blaming emotions and that conflates these emotions’ distinctive logics;¹ and, second, that such theorizing has encouraged the propagation of misleading theories of blame’s “norms.”

In doing so, I aim to show how participants in this debate have failed to attend adequately to the psychology and ethics of the specific blaming attitudes that generate worries about standing in the first place. I concentrate especially on the differences between reactions we might colloquially label “righteous indignation” and “resentment,” showing how an agent’s own bad behavior alters the appropriateness of these attitudes in distinctive ways. Marking these distinctions allows us to reject and move beyond a near-universal assumption in the current literature on the standing to blame, namely, that the wrongness of standingless blame is fundamentally a matter of hypocrisy.

Throughout the paper, I employ a distinctive methodological approach that I hope my discussion (at least partially) vindicates. That is, in order to determine whether or not one has the “standing to blame,” I believe that we must first investigate the psychology of the specific emotion (or the details of the specific judgment) being felt or expressed rather than theorizing about the “nature and norms”² of blame-in-general. Assuming the blaming reaction is emotional, this will require an understanding of that emotion’s logic or mode of functioning: what it responds to, what it aims at, how it can be resolved. With this logic in hand, we may then determine whether or not the specific reaction in question is fitting—whether it accurately represents its object. This judgment of accuracy or inaccuracy will, in turn, inform further ethical deliberation about the emotions we ought to feel and express “all-things-considered.” If the emotion’s representation is inaccurate, then its expression will involve false and potentially self-serving claims that others would be right to discount or dismiss.

2. Background

Does having done the same thing that one is blaming another for render that blame inappropriate or wrong? If such blame is inappropriate or wrong, how and why is it inappropriate or wrong?³

The standard answers to these questions are that blaming under such circumstances would be wrong, and that this wrongness is a matter of hypocrisy. R. Jay Wallace (2010) holds that the hypocrisy consists in a failure to meet an obligation of self-scrutiny that blaming generates (326). He explains that such failure of self-scrutiny “offends against a presumption in favor of the equal standing of persons […] fundamental to moral thought” (328).⁴

Kyle Fritz and Daniel Miller (2015) offer a similar theory, arguing that blame is objectionable when it reflects a “differential blaming disposition,” which is incompatible with a commitment to the equality of persons. According to this view, a commitment to the equality of persons is the very basis of blame, and so differential blaming is self-undermining.

Patrick Todd (2019) offers a more straightforward explanation of the non-hypocrisy condition. He argues that we have the standing to blame if and only if we are genuinely committed to the values that the blamed agent transgressed. Ultimately though, he defers explanation of why lack of commitment to the values under attack undermines one’s basic standing to blame, writing “This is, I submit, a question to which we presently do not have an adequate answer” (371).

The prevailing approach, then, assumes that hypocrisy is the vice “standingless” blaming reflects, and then attempts to show that hypocrisy violates a general “norm” or “commitment” of “blame.” In what follows, I will suggest an entirely different understanding of the impropriety of blame for acts the blamer has committed. To characterize blame of this kind, I will use the term “impure” rather than “hypocritical,” for, as I will explain, I do not believe that such blame need be hypocritical at all.⁵ By focusing on the appropriateness of specific blaming attitudes, I will aim to resolve Todd’s unanswered question: Why does the performance of bad actions render blame for similar actions inappropriate?

My central claim is that the impropriety of impure blame cannot be understood apart from its unfittingness.⁶ That is, certain kinds of impure blame do not accurately represent their objects; they implicate blamers in misperception.

While the argument will not depend on any especially complicated or controversial assumptions about fittingness, two brief caveats are necessary. First, I am committed to the idea that there is an important sense of emotional fittingness best explained in terms of emotional accuracy. As D’Arms and Jacobson (2000) and others have argued, this evaluation of accuracy is distinct from ethical assessment of what one should feel and express, “all-things-considered.”⁷ Second, I deny that charges of representational inaccuracy are “merely” epistemic criticisms with no further ethical implications.⁸ As incorrect construals or “appraisals,”⁹ they imply falsehoods that others are justified in discounting or dismissing. Moreover, emotional misconstruals are more than just false. As I will emphasize, emotional misperceptions can reflect and constitute moral vices. When expressed, inappropriate emotions communicate not only misleading but often self-serving and objectionable claims.

3. Blame’s High Horse

A newlywed couple have divided the task of writing thank-you notes for wedding gifts they have received. The husband procrastinates on his half of the thank-you notes for weeks and begins to feel a gnawing sense of guilt. As weeks become months, the mere sight of the wedding gifts becomes painful. Eventually, he feels so guilty and ashamed that he cannot bear another day with the shadow of the thank-you notes looming over him. As he finally sits down to the task, his wife walks in and groans, “The thank-you notes! I guess I should get started on my half, too….”

I submit that the husband lacks standing to feel and express some forms of blame toward his wife for her failure to write her half of the thank-you notes. Why only some forms of blame? “Blame,” is a term we use in a variety of ways to cover a range of reactions, many of which have distinctive conditions of correctness. Some of these responses are obviously fitting and justified in this case. The husband might reasonably believe, for example, that both he and his wife acted wrongly and wish that they had done better.¹⁰ He might even alter his relationship with his wife slightly, perhaps questioning his tendency to expect her to take the initiative in household tasks.¹¹ If one wishes to call these reactions “blame,” then the husband has the standing to blame his wife. His own failure does not render these particular responses inappropriate or wrong.

Whatever we call these reactions, there is at least one attitude that seems to drive much of our interest in the standing to blame that the husband cannot appropriately feel precisely because of his own wrongdoing. Specifically, he cannot legitimately feel a blaming emotion that I will call “righteous indignation.”

In discussing righteous indignation, I will not need to defend a particular theory of its essence. Indeed, it does not matter (for my purposes) what we call the emotional complex I will describe. There are, of course, theoretically developed treatments of righteous and indignant attitudes in the philosophical literature,¹² but because my aim here is to identify the reactions that drive our interest in the “standing to blame,” I need only to sketch the basic contours of a recognizable blaming attitude that ordinary people understand to be undermined by impurity. For this purpose, I can rely on righteous indignation’s plebian Wikipedia entry (2023), which summarizes definitions from Merriam Webster and the Standard Dictionary.

‘Righteous’ means […] in accord with divine or moral law or free from guilt or sin. It may also refer to a morally right or justifiable decision or action or to an action which arises from an outraged sense of justice or morality. ‘Indignation’ is anger aroused by something unjust, mean, or unworthy. The Standard Dictionary describes indignation as a ‘feeling involving anger mingled with contempt or disgust.’

Impure blamers may not legitimately feel either righteousness or indignation, at least as Wikipedia defines the terms. They cannot properly feel righteousness because they are not faultless: they have transgressed in the same fashion as their targets. They cannot properly feel indignation because indignation involves looking down upon one’s target, and their own bad behavior has lowered them to the blamed agent’s level. The husband in the thank-you note example could coherently judge both himself and his wife to be morally lowly, but looking upon her with righteous indignation’s downward gaze would involve a misconstrual.

How significant is the conclusion that it is unfitting to feel this form of righteous indignation—contempt underwritten by a sense of one’s own purity—when one has also performed the action one is criticizing? The answer depends on the extent to which our considered judgments about the loss of “standing” to blame emerge from our sense of the impropriety of impure righteousness and indignation. And in fact, I believe that this is exactly where many of these judgments originate. Charges of standingless blame are often reactions to the experience of being looked down upon or judged by unworthy spectators. Wrongdoers who level such charges are quick to employ idioms of elevation. One might defensively assert that the impure blamer that has no right to sit on a “high horse,” to act “high and mighty,” to “look down on” others or “stand in judgment” of them. Indeed, the phrase “standing to blame” itself implies uprightness and elevation.

The husband’s righteous indignation in the thank-you note example would be inaccurate because his own failure would invalidate his implicit claim to purity and rectitude. This particular kind of inapt blaming, however, would not make him a hypocrite, at least not in the traditional sense of someone who professes commitment to standards that he is not committed to.¹³ The hypocrite engages in pretense or posturing, feigning moral investment and hiding his true character. (Indeed, the word “hypocrite” comes from the Greek hupokrisis, meaning “acting of a theatrical part.”) This is not what the husband is doing. His experience of guilt and shame both evince and partially constitute a genuine commitment to the values in question.¹⁴

If not hypocrisy, what vice might the guilty husband’s righteous indignation reflect? The answer depends on the psychological explanation of the particular emotional response. Perhaps, for example, he has convinced himself that his actions, though also deficient, are somehow not as bad as his wife’s. The vice behind that kind of misconstrual would not be hypocritical fakery but conceit, the internal overestimation of one’s own position and attendant disdain for others. The life of the hypocrite is one of deception. He does not really care about shared values but pretends to be fully devoted. The life of the conceited person, on the other hand, is one of self-deception. Although his investment is legitimate, he sees himself as nobler than he really is.

Conceit leads us to focus on others’ faults, making their shortcomings vivid¹⁵ as we congratulate ourselves on our own loftiness. In ordinary language we sometimes do call this self-deceptive superiority “hypocrisy,” but the distinction between the two vices I am highlighting, whatever we choose to call them, is ethically significant. Being hypocritical, or knowing a hypocrite, is qualitatively different from being conceited or knowing a conceited person. We might trust and rely on a conceited person where we would not trust and rely on a hypocrite. On the other hand, we might find a conceited person’s unfounded haughtiness insufferable in a way that a hypocrite’s duplicity, though disquieting, is not. It is not immediately obvious which kind of person would be a more appealing or effective politician, for example, or which vice would be more alarming to discover in one’s own child.

In conflating our blaming attitudes, the dominant approach to standing obscures the ethically significant distinction between hypocrisy and conceit. The non-generalizing approach, on the other hand, rewards us with a richer psychology, and, as a result, a more nuanced ethics. Not only does attention to righteous indignation furnish a compelling explanation of the inappropriateness of a specific and significant form of impure blaming, but it sheds new light on the vices that impure blame can express.

4. Getting Even

I have suggested that some of our strongest intuitions about the loss of “standing to blame” arise in response to impure righteous indignation. But what about our other blaming attitudes? What about resentment, an emotion that philosophers have often treated as the paradigmatic blaming emotion since Strawson’s influential essay? I will argue that impurity can undermine resentment’s fittingness as well, but not for the same reasons it invalidates righteous indignation. Once again, only a non-generalizing approach to the psychology and ethics of blame can illuminate the distinctive way in which it does so.

As with my discussion of “righteous indignation,” I am not attempting to legislate use of the word “resentment.” Nor do I need to defend an “account” of resentment against other contenders. Rather, I need only sketch the psychological profile of a distinctive and familiar response to wrongdoing that most of us would readily call blame.¹⁶

Resentment, as I will understand it here, is an angry response to wrongful insults and injuries inflicted by others. Characteristically, it implies the thought that the wrongdoer cannot be allowed to get away with what he has done—that the wrongdoing cannot stand. It motivates victims to strike back, punish, and seek justice. More specifically, it involves the perception that wrongdoing has disturbed a social equilibrium. Transgressions unduly elevate wrongdoers: Through their bad behavior, offenders send a message that they are “above the law,” and they benefit concretely from their ill-gotten gains. Victims, on the other hand, are unduly lowered: They (and any onlookers) receive the message that they are unworthy of respect, and they suffer concrete losses. Resentment is a leveling emotion. It involves a drive to restore balance by lowering the offender and/or raising oneself. We express its logic with a mix of economic and weighing metaphors: it explains our urge to “settle scores,” “get even,” and balance the “scales of justice.” We can restore the sociomoral equilibrium resentment protects by “making wrongdoers pay” and “doling out payback”—this is why resentment notoriously can lead to violence and revenge—but we typically hope that victims seek resolution through the moralized humbling (and raising) of the apology ritual rather than through extramoral retaliation.

With this rough understanding in mind, let us return to the newlywed couple and suppose that the ashamed and guilt-stricken husband reacts to his wife’s dereliction with resentment. That is, imagine that he perceives his wife’s inattentiveness to the thank-you notes as a kind of slight that raises her above him. Longing to restore equilibrium, he wishes for her to humble herself.

Some may wonder whether this reaction would be misguided—either unfitting or just plain immoral—whether the husband had written his thank-you notes or not. But imagine that the husband had promptly taken care of his half. Would it be unreasonable for him to feel affronted by his wife’s neglect? Her actions speak for both of them as a couple, and their joint failure to express timely gratitude shames them: they have, in some sense, failed to pay their debts.

But this is not our version of the case. And whatever one thinks of the ethics of this kind of resentment, the husband’s impurity presents a distinctive problem for his blame. If he has also failed to do his part, then he misconstrues the situation when he judges that his wife’s neglect elevates her above him. In fact, they have wronged each other in exactly the same way and are thus (roughly) on the same level.¹⁷ The husband, then, lacks standing to be either righteously indignant or resentful, but for different reasons. Righteous indignation is unfitting because he is in no position to look down on his wife; resentment is unfitting because he is no position to look up at her.

Although they both fall under the heading of “blame,” righteous indignation and resentment are different emotional reactions with distinct psychological profiles and ethical implications. The vice associated with impure resentment may be hypocrisy or conceit, depending on the case. However, impure resentment of the kind I have sketched may also reflect an envious and exacting will to dominate others in a way that impure righteous indignation does not. In a rule-following person, the resentful desire to lower an offender can reflect a defensible (perhaps even commendable) sense of justice and self-respect. In a person who has also performed the same bad acts, however, it more likely reflects a jealous and insecure compulsion to guard one’s own (unduly) superior position by keeping others down.¹⁸

5. Unequal Reactions

I have been trying to show that focusing on particular blaming attitudes, especially righteous indignation and resentment, yields richer and more precise ethical explanations of impure blamers’ loss of standing than the dominant, abstract approach that focuses exclusively on hypocrisy can provide. As we have seen, Todd’s suggestion—that the impropriety of impure blame stems from the blamer’s lack of commitment to the values in question—will not explain the judgment that the guilt-ridden husband’s anger (whether righteously indignant or resentful) in the thank-you note case is unfounded. But those who hold views that tie the impropriety of impure blame to some form of inequality may be better positioned to make a rhetorical move in response to this example. Take the case of righteous indignation, for instance: a person who has committed the very act he now condemns with righteous indignation has not scrutinized himself enough to realize that he is not faultless. He also looks down upon his target, and this inflated posture, it could be argued, implies some objectionable inequality. How do these alternative proposals, which hold that impure blaming expresses an objectionable inequality that undermines standing to blame-in-general, fare in comparison to the non-generalizing explanations that I have offered?

As I have been stressing, there are many negative reactive attitudes we might call “blame,” and their conditions of appropriateness vary. I will show that attention to this range of possible blaming emotions reveals that it is possible to manifest differential dispositions and failures of self-scrutiny but nevertheless remain justified in feeling fitting negative reactive attitudes in response to others’ shortcomings. Differential dispositions and insufficient self-scrutiny, then, do not automatically undermine one’s standing to feel all of the emotions we may classify as “blame.” Only by focusing on the fittingness conditions of specific emotions, rather than on “blame,” “criticism,” or “the reactive attitudes” in general, can we explain when differential dispositions and insufficient self-scrutiny do and do not render one’s emotions inappropriate.

First, consider a case of interpersonal disappointment.¹⁹ Two siblings who once shared lofty ambitions have sunk into dreary lives. One of them, despite being resigned to his own fate, feels disappointed in his sister for not making a better effort to realize her childhood dreams. The disappointed brother is not disappointed in himself. In fact, his opinion of his own abilities is so low that he does not think anyone ought to be disappointed in him. To be clear, the brother is not angry, and he does not look down on his sister. His disappointment springs from feelings of esteem and love for her that perhaps he ought also to have for himself.

Of course, the more we build a sense of superiority into the brother’s feeling of disappointment, or picture him “standing in judgment” of his sister, the more objectionable his emotional response will seem. If, for example, the brother assumed the role of an imperious father figure (“I’m disappointed in you, young lady”), then his disappointment would reflect an inapt righteousness and would be unfitting. But the kind of disappointment I have in mind need not involve a sense of injustice, or of one’s own elevation or purity. It is natural to harbor high hopes for people we look up to and admire. When they let us down, the pain of disappointment we feel need not imply resentment or scorn; it can slide toward sadness rather than anger.

The mere fact that the disappointed brother does not engage in the kind of critical reflection on his own life that would inspire (fitting) self-regarding disappointment does not undermine his other-regarding disappointment. He manifests a differential disposition and a failure of self-scrutiny, but because his perception of his sister as having fallen short of expectations is accurate, his feelings of disappointment remain fitting. Perhaps he ought to feel disappointed in himself too, and perhaps his failure to self-scrutinize reflects some deficiency of character, but there is nothing inappropriate or self-undermining about the disappointment itself.²⁰

Interpersonal distrust also illustrates the point. Imagine a policeman who sees his partner plant evidence on a suspect. It would be fitting and reasonable for the officer to adopt an attitude of distrust toward his partner even if he had recently planted evidence himself.²¹ Again, we may frame the case so that the officer’s distrust evinces a differential disposition by supposing that he sees himself as totally trustworthy and pure. Moreover, we can imagine that in forming his distrusting attitude, the officer has entirely declined to examine his own character and past behavior. But while his badly distorted self-perception and his unwillingness to self-scrutinize are evidence of character flaws, they do not render his distrust of his partner inappropriate or wrong. Perhaps neither man should trust the other, but the officer does not lose the “standing” to distrust his partner because of his own deceitful behavior.

This example is instructive because it illuminates a difference between the reactive attitudes of distrust and righteous indignation. A righteously indignant version of the officer and a distrustful version may share mistaken ideas of their own moral purity and rectitude. But while the fittingness of righteous indignation depends on the accuracy of the subject’s perception of himself as purer or loftier than his target, the fittingness of distrust does not. Where the appropriateness of distrust and disappointment depend on features of their targets and their targets’ actions, the fittingness of righteous indignation depends on a more complex sociomoral relationship between blamer and blamed.

I believe that this observation explains the initial appeal of the self-scrutiny and differential-disposition views. Feelings of righteousness and indignation imply that some (perhaps deficient) self-evaluation has already taken place and that this evaluation has produced an image of the blamer as purer and more elevated than his target. And if I am correct that righteous, indignant anger is one of the blaming attitudes that paradigmatically gives rise to concerns about “standing,” then it makes sense that one might conceive of standingless blame as involving both deficient self-scrutiny and a (certain kind of) differential blaming disposition.

Nevertheless, the foregoing examples show that failures of self-evaluation and differential dispositions only undermine a blamer’s standing to react emotionally by rendering specific negative reactive attitudes unfitting. The reason we lack standing to feel impure righteous indignation is not because such feelings would violate a blanket prohibition on differential blaming, or a general duty to self-scrutinize. If impure reactive attitudes were illegitimate for those reasons, the brother and the police officer in the cases I discussed above would lack standing to feel their respective reactive attitudes as well. But they do not. Rather, the problem with impure righteousness and indignation is that such feelings are necessarily unfitting. They imply a view of the world that is not only false but also expressive of familiar vices.²²

6. Two Abstractions

At this point, those who hold that impurity undermines our standing to blame by rendering that blame hypocritical may wish to refine their position. They might explain that in using the term “blame,” they mean to focus specifically on hostile or angry reactive attitudes, and that disappointment and distrust do not count.²³ Even the angry emotions, however, are not monolithic; impurity, even when paired with a lack of self-scrutiny or a “differential blaming disposition,” does not always undermine our standing to feel and express them. There is simply no non-distorting general method for determining when we do and do not enjoy the standing to angrily blame. Rather, we must attend to, rather than abstract away from, specific angry emotions and contexts.

To make this point, I must begin by introducing another form of abstraction encouraged by the standard approach. Theorizing about blame-in-general has tended to yield accounts that make one’s standing to blame depend entirely on internal mental processes. (Does the blamer care about the values in question? Did the blamer self-scrutinize? Does the blamer evince a differential disposition?) But we should consider the possibility that one’s standing to angrily blame can depend on social factors including (but not limited to) the successful performance of ritual, concrete humbling and raising, and the passage of time. Real human social practices shape blame’s topography. But because these practices express and give rise to specific emotions in specific contexts, the generalizing approach to blame must ignore them and, as a result, overlook the terrain’s roughness.

Consider the following scenario that played out at the sleepaway camp I attended as a child: Every summer, the bunk would informally settle on one unlucky camper to pick on—calling him names, covering his face in shaving cream while he slept, putting toothpaste in his shoes, etc. The next summer, the same bunkmates would choose a new sacrificial lamb from among their ranks, and one of last year’s bullies would become this year’s victim. The former target, happy to avoid a second straight summer of abuse, would eagerly join in.

Does the new victim in such a scenario have standing to angrily blame his tormenters? Once again, the answer depends on the specifics of the emotional and social response at issue. If his blame is righteous and indignant—if it involves “standing in judgment” of the other campers—then the bunkmates would be right to dismissively roll their eyes at expressions of it. Such an attitude would imply a false and self-serving claim of purity, and the new victim’s sudden moralism would seem awfully convenient given his newfound social lowliness.

But suppose the camper had already been feeling guilty about his behavior the previous summer and had truly committed himself to becoming a gentler person and a better friend.²⁴ Would he have standing to feel and express righteous indignation then? Here, the attitude-by-attitude method helpfully reminds us (in a way the standard approach would not) that because we are dealing specifically with righteous indignation, the crucial concepts are purity and uprightness. Restoration of standing would require cleansing rehabilitation.

My own sense, although I cannot fully defend it here, is that such cleansing rehabilitation could not be achieved through an internal change of heart alone. The reason is that the camper’s wrongdoing the previous summer was irreducibly social. It consisted not only in his feeling and expression of substandard “quality of will,” but in the elevation of his own relative social position and the corresponding drop in his victim’s. The process of purification is also social in this way. It is achieved through a kind of collective negotiation that relies on a combination of the passage of time²⁵ and rituals that effect humbling and raising.

The standard approach, which make one’s standing to blame contingent on internal states and processes, obscures this point. The problem with the new victim’s righteous indignation would not be the violation of a free-standing “norm” of blame that required self-examination, non-differential treatment, or endorsement of certain values. Nor would it be the contravention of a general injunction against hypocrisy. Rather, the problem would be that his construal of the situation, and, as a result, his self-presentation, would be false. He would be seeing himself as pure and upright, and the legitimacy and force of his righteous blame would depend on the veracity of that appraisal. But purity and uprightness are not solely determined by one’s internal mental states; in this case, the social circumstances would falsify his implicit claims to them. His bunkmates would be right to reject these claims just as we are justified in dismissing, ignoring, and even objecting to false and self-serving explicit assertions, especially those that express the moral vices I have discussed.

Acknowledging that the fittingness of a blaming attitude can depend on external factors has implications for theorizing about the relationship between blame and “blameworthiness.” Consider the following “fit-value biconditional”²⁶: “An agent S is blameworthy for x if and only if it is fitting to blame S for x.” I have been suggesting that the fittingness of blame depends on the blaming response in question and its specific appropriateness conditions. And I have just argued that because we are social beings living in physical world, our sense of appropriate emotional response will always be informed by social context. It follows, then, that if we accept the above biconditional, “blameworthiness” cannot be determined solely by the quality of one’s will, one’s level of rational control, or other internal, psychological conditions. Rather, it will also be informed by external, social factors including the specifics of relevant relationships, rituals, and histories, as well as the concrete consequences of one’s behavior.²⁷

But one need not agree with my substantive ethical claims about the relationship between social factors and fitting emotions to see a larger point: a verdict on the propriety of righteous indignation does not imply a verdict on the propriety of other forms of impure blame—even angry and emotional ones. For the final time, let us turn to resentment.

As I noted earlier, resentment (as I have characterized it, at least) roughly implies a perception of one’s unjustified lowness in a social hierarchy and a desire for the kind of leveling that would restore equilibrium. Does the bully-turned-target have standing to resentfully blame the bunkmates? I believe that he does. As a result of the other campers’ wrongdoing, the victim finds himself looking up at them in a social hierarchy—suffering the humiliation and indignity of their pranks and taunts. To use Roberts’s term, the “defining proposition” of his resentment might be something along the lines of, “They have no right to treat me like this and it cannot stand. I need to get even.” This response strikes me as fitting and justified (perhaps even good) regardless of whether it involves self-scrutiny or “differential dispositions.” Suppose the boy reacted by resentfully filling one of his tormentor’s shoes with toothpaste. Such an escalation may not be morally ideal, but the bullies could not seriously claim that the boy’s own bad behavior the previous summer undermined his “standing” to retaliate. On the contrary, the resentful reprisal would be seen as a perfectly legitimate move in the bunk’s little honor culture.²⁸

When this year’s victim resentfully objects to his treatment, he does not want to lecture, preach, castigate, or scorn; he just wants to reclaim his rightful position relative to his fellow campers. His own previous bullying does not undermine or invalidate the feelings that would spur him to do so, except in one case….

How should he feel toward last year’s victim? The kind of resentment I have been considering is about restoring a justifiable balance among members of an ethical ecosystem. Last summer’s mischief elevated all of the bunkmates above their unlucky target; this summer, that victim has the opportunity to partially satisfy his resentment by doling out payback to one of his “creditors.”²⁹ While it may be psychologically understandable for this year’s victim to be particularly furious at being bullied by last year’s victim (he may see it as a special indignity to be picked on even by the likes of that guy), his ethical grounds for resenting last year’s target are weaker than his grounds for resenting the others. The reason is simple: Resentment (as I understand it here) is a response to a relative disequilibrium of status that arises as a result of wrongdoing. There is surely wrongdoing between the two victims, but because there is now equal wrongdoing on both sides, there is no relative disequilibrium between them. As a result, resentment would be inapt; last year’s victim is getting even. Two (equivalent) wrongs may not make a right, but they do invalidate resentment.

We are now in a position to return to Todd’s crucial question: “Why is it, exactly, that [one] lacks the standing internally to blame [a wrongdoer], when he is himself so willing to perform such actions” (371)? My answer is that one lacks such standing to blame only if one’s performance of the same bad actions renders specific blaming emotions unfitting. To feel a blaming emotion when one has transgressed in the same way as the blamed agent can (but need not) amount to a kind of perceptual failure or misconstrual, depending on the emotion and the circumstances that give rise to it. The problem with impure blame is not that it violates a general prohibition on differential dispositions, insufficient self-scrutiny, or even hypocrisy, but rather that it can be invalidated by its own internal, emotional logic. When others learn of such inapt blame, they are right to discount it as misguided, dishonest, self-serving, or otherwise vicious.

7. Conclusion

I began with a brief sketch of the rise of blame as a concept of interest to philosophers of free will and responsibility in the wake of “Freedom and Resentment.” I wish to conclude by offering some tentative suggestions for moving that story forward in future work. In particular, I am interested in what it might mean to heed Strawson’s injunction to abandon abstract theorizing about free will and focus instead on the psychology and ethics of the reactive attitudes. Of course, a complete treatment of this interpretive and methodological question would be well beyond the scope of this paper, and so I hope that readers will take these brief concluding remarks in the exploratory spirit in which I intend them.

Strawson’s essay reminds us that the practices, expectations, emotional patterns, and rituals that give our lives structure and meaning have a social and political history. They both determine and are determined by our material circumstances, our aspirations, and our needs. As such, they are not to be flippantly discarded in the name of abstract metaphysics without substantive ethical argument. They “do not merely exploit our natures, they express them” (82).

By enjoining us to focus on “what it is actually like to be involved in ordinary inter-personal relationships” (67), “Freedom and Resentment” raises the prospect of dissolving infamously intractable questions of metaphysics into questions of psychology and ethics. It invites us to get a grip on philosophical concepts (free will in this case) by attending to the real-world ethical questions they purport to help us answer, and to the emotional and sociocultural life in which those questions arise. Strawson seems to suggest, moreover, that once we remind ourselves of where we are and what we care about, we may find that straightforward ethical and psychological inquiry is all we need to address our concrete concerns. We may not require a theory of free will, for example, if we can answer the ethical questions that matter without one.³⁰

One way of putting the point of this paper is that we can make progress in our thinking about the standing to blame by internalizing and applying this methodological strategy. According to this reading of Strawson, the rejection of free-will metaphysics does not buy one a license to hunt for the essence of “moral responsibility” by searching for the nature and norms of “blame.” I have tried to show how in the context of the debate about standing, such theorizing about blame-in-general has tempted authors to levels of abstraction and systematization from which it is difficult to acknowledge and appreciate ethically relevant psychological differences among our blaming attitudes as we actually experience and express them. It is not true, as we have seen, that “differential” blaming need be self-undermining, or that there is a norm of blaming that requires self-scrutiny. Nor is it true that we retain a blanket standing to blame as long as we are genuinely committed to the values our blame defends. Indeed, it is not even true that the problem with standingless blame is that it is hypocritical, or that standingless blame need be hypocritical at all.

As an alternative, I have offered, and then attempted to demonstrate, what I see as a Strawsonian method for making progress in moral psychology and ethics: begin with real-life ethical questions and answer them by attending carefully to the psychology and ethics of particular responses and their contexts.

I do not claim to have decisively proven this method’s superiority here. One could potentially use this approach to dissolve questions about the nature of blame and blameworthiness, agents’ “degrees” of blameworthiness, the relationship between blame and luck, and even the nature of “moral responsibility” itself.³¹ I acknowledge, however, that any verdict on the method’s usefulness must depend on the results of serious and sustained attempts to apply it beyond the case of the “standing to blame” that I have explored. These concluding remarks are merely suggestions for a path forward.

What I do hope to have shown is that the non-generalizing approach can, in principle, be fruitful—that it has the potential to help us appreciate the psychological and ethical complexity of our lives. We need not worry that rejecting the pull of more abstract theorizing will leave us with nothing to do. Articulating the psychology of specific reactive responses and then making an ethical “assessment of the gains and losses to human life, its enrichment or impoverishment” (73), which accrue as a result of their roles in our social ecosystems, is no small task. Indeed, doing so in a way that illuminates rather than distorts is a philosophical achievement—a worthy extension of Strawson’s hotly-contested legacy.³²