[Draft of April 28, 2008]
Dispassionate Opprobrium: On Blame and the Reactive Sentiments
R. Jay Wallace, University of California, Berkeley
Blame is one of those phenomena that are both familiar and philosophically puzzling.
We all have some experience with blame. We are naturally prone to blame ourselves
when we are aware of having treated others unfairly, and when we have been the
victims of wrongdoing it is hard not to blame the person who has treated us with lack of
consideration or regard. But what exactly is it to react in these familiar ways? A
satisfactory account is elusive.
On the one hand, it seems clear that to blame someone is not merely to register
the fact that they have done something wrong, or displayed a morally objectionable
attitude. One can acknowledge that a person has violated moral standards in these
ways without blaming them for it. Nor is it sufficient for blame that we announce
publicly that wrongdoing has occurred; blame is not merely a report or avowal about
the deficiencies in a person’s behavior and attitudes. At the same time, however, the
essence of blame equally cannot be understood in terms of the actions that we might
perform in response to an episode of wrongdoing or disregard. In particular, we can
blame someone without undertaking to punish them or to impose unpleasant sanctions
of some kind. Indeed, most of us would feel some discomfort about acting with the aim
of punishing or imposing sanctions on individuals for their moral transgressions. This is
not, one wants to say, an appropriate way for autonomous adults to interact with each
other.
The difficulty, in these terms, is to find space between two extremes for a
defensible form of blame to occupy: between, on the one hand, factual avowal, and on
the other sanctioning behavior. At the first, cognitivist extreme, blame is treated as a
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matter of reporting factually on what is independently the case, an account that deprives
blame of its characteristic (if elusive) quality of opprobrium. At the second, retributivist
extreme, blame is equated with punishment, an account that deprives blame of its
legitimacy as a form of interpersonal behavior.
In earlier work I have proposed a theory of moral blame, one that places the
reactive sentiments of resentment, indignation, and guilt at the center of this
phenomenon.1 My larger aim in the present paper is to develop and defend this
proposal. I begin, however, by considering a different account of moral blame, due to T.
M. Scanlon, which can be considered a response to the theoretical predicament sketched
above.2 Scanlon’s account, in a nutshell, is that blame is distinctively “relationshipdependent”. The special features of blame, on his approach, can be traced to the special
features of the moral infractions to which blame paradigmatically responds. In the
central cases, blame is a reaction to the attitudes that a person displays toward us,
insofar as those attitudes impair the person’s relationship with us. When we blame a
person, we affirm that they stand in a relationship to us that has been altered by the
attitudes they have adopted. This is a kind of factual reporting, but it is not mere factual
reporting, because of the normative significance that the altered relationship has for us.
Because the person has treated us in a way that impairs their relationship to us, we have
reason to adjust our own attitudes and actions regarding them, going forward. Blame is
a way of registering that this is the case; this gives it a quality that is missing in other
kinds of factual reporting, without assimilating blame to objectionable forms of punitive
treatment or retribution.
Scanlon’s account is suggestive and original. I shall argue, however, that it does
not succeed in the end. The problem, in a phrase, is that the account leaves the blame
out of blame. Blame has a quality of opprobrium that is not captured by the
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considerations about the normative significance of impaired relationships that are at the
center of Scanlon’s approach. I believe that this important dimension of blame can be
made sense of only in terms of the reactive sentiments. My critical engagement with
Scanlon’s theory will serve to develop this suggestion, showing in detail the difference
that the reactive sentiments make to the character of our reactions to wrongdoing. To
blame someone is not just to acknowledge that one stands in an impaired relationship to
them, where that in turn gives one reason to adjust one’s attitudes and responses. The
additional, crucial element is a feeling of resentment, guilt, or indignation, which unifies
our other reactions to wrongdoing in precisely the ways that are characteristic of moral
blame.
1. Blame and Relationships.
Scanlon summarizes his account in the following terms:
[T]o claim that a person is blameworthy for an action is to claim that that
action shows something about the agent’s attitudes toward others that
impairs the relations that others can have with him or her. To blame a
person is to judge him or her to be blameworthy and to take your
relationship with him or her to be modified in a way that this judgment of
impaired relations holds to be appropriate (p. 131).
This concise statement needs unpacking; let us begin with the notion of
blameworthiness. Scanlon speaks of blameworthiness for actions that a person has
performed. But he does not hold the view that blameworthiness is to be equated with
acting in a way that is morally wrong. What is crucial, on his account, is whether the
agent’s relationships with other people have somehow been impaired, and this is matter
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of what Scanlon calls the meaning of the person’s actions; it depends, in other words,
not merely on what the agent did, but on the reasons why the agent did what they did.
Consider the case of friendship, which Scanlon takes to an exemplary special
context for the more general phenomena of impairment and response to impairment that
are central to his account of blame. Friendship, we may suppose, makes distinctive
demands on the people who stand in this relationship to each other. You ought to
respond when a friend who is in a bad way reaches out to you for assistance, and a
failure to live up to this requirement will be a kind of wrong, relative to the standards
that constitute relationships of friendship in the first place. Not all actions that are
objectively wrong in this way, however, reflect the kinds of attitudes that undermine or
impair a relationship between friends. If your inability to help your friend is due to the
fact that you are dealing with a stressful personal crisis of your own—a sick child who
needs attention, say—then your failure to respond does not necessarily reveal an
absence of the kinds of commitment and concern that are partly constitutive of
friendship in the first place. What matters, both in friendship and in the more general
moral case, are the attitudes of the person whose actions violate the relevant standards.
Let us suppose, then, that attitudes are present in a person that “impair the
relations that others can have with him or her”. To blame the person, Scanlon suggests,
is in part to judge that this is the case (which is tantamount to judging that the person is
blameworthy). But this is not all that blame involves. In addition, when you blame the
person, you “take your relationship with him or her to be modified in a way that this
judgment of impaired relations holds to be appropriate.” What exactly does this further
element add to the account? There is, to begin with, the affirmation of a personal
connection to the person whose attitudes impair them for relationships of the specified
kind. To blame the person, it seems, is not merely to judge that they have displayed
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attitudes that incapacitate them for relationships of that kind, but to judge that one’s
own relations with the person have been impaired as a result.
This is not all, however. Scanlon draws attention to the interesting fact that
when your own relationships with a person have been impaired by what they have
done, this fact gives you reasons to modify your attitudes and behavior regarding the
person. You should not go on as before when someone has displayed attitudes that
degrade the relationships they stand in to you; adjustments are called for, at both the
attitudinal and the behavioral level. If you find out that a putative friend has betrayed
you at a party—joining in gleefully when others started making cruel jokes at your
expense—you have reason to treat them differently in the future. You should, at a
minimum, be less willing to rely on them and to confide in them about matters of
personal concern. You should presumably also modify your standing intention to help
them out with their own projects and crises. Facts about the impairment of relationships
thus have normative significance for the parties to those relationships, and this gives
those facts a quality that is missing with many other kinds of facts about people and the
things they do. Scanlon’s suggestion seems to be that this quality of normative
significance helps to account for the special character of moral blame.
This is the general thrust of Scanlon’s proposal; but the details remain indistinct.
In particular, it is not yet clear what exactly the connection is between blame and the
reasons that the impairment of relationships might give us to adjust our attitudes
toward someone. Here are three possibilities, each of which is suggested by some of the
things that Scanlon says:
[a] To blame someone is to judge that they have displayed attitudes that impair your
relationship with them.
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[b] To blame someone is to judge that they have displayed attitudes that impair your
relationship with them, and to acknowledge that this gives you reason to adjust your
own attitudes toward the person who is blamed.
[c] To blame someone is to judge that they have displayed attitudes that impair your
relationship with them; to acknowledge that this gives you reason to adjust your own
attitudes toward the person who is blamed; and to make the corresponding adjustments
in attitude, because you acknowledge them to be appropriate to the changed quality of
your relationship.
On all three of the proposed accounts, blame goes beyond judgments of
blameworthiness, insofar as it involves acknowledgement of attitudes that impair your
own relationship with the person who is the target of blame. On all three accounts, too,
the facts that are acknowledged to obtain have normative significance for you—the
person who is doing the blaming—of a kind that the facts involved in generic judgments
of blameworthiness do not. The accounts differ, however, on whether blame requires
acknowledgment of the normative significance of the impairment (compare [a] with [b]),
and on whether it requires that you actually adjust your attitudes and reactions in
accordance with the reasons that the impairment supplies (compare [b] with [c]).
Scanlon himself is not entirely clear as to which of these possible views he would
favor. Some of his formulations, such as the summary statement quoted above, appear
to equate blame with the judgments of impaired relationship that figure in account [a].3
But I take these suggestions to be inadvertent. Scanlon’s considered position seems to be
that blame always involves some element of modification in your attitudes toward the
person who is blamed, along the lines of account [c]. Thus he writes: “To blame [a]
person is to hold the attitudes toward him or her that this impairment [i.e. the
impairment caused by the person’s deficient attitudes toward you] makes appropriate”
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(p. 133). Formulations that suggest a less stringent view may reflect the assumption
that, in practice, the difference between the three accounts of blame I have distinguished
is vanishingly small. Given the obvious normative significance that facts about
impaired relationships possess, it is difficult to acknowledge that your relationship with
another person has been impaired without also taking yourself to have reason to adjust
your attitudes toward that person. This closes the gap between accounts [a] and [b].
Furthermore, to judge that you now have reason to respond differently to the person in
virtue of this impairment is itself already to modify your own relationship to them in
turn, insofar as relationships are constituted in part by the reasons that the parties to
them acknowledge (p. 132). This closes the gap between accounts [b] and [c].
We may assume, then, that some element of modified response is essential to the
account of blame that Scanlon is proposing, even if his formulations do not always
mention it explicitly. But which responses to impairment are at issue? Scanlon
emphasizes primarily adjustments in our attitudes that are called for in cases of this
kind, including above all adjustments in our intentions, dispositions, and expectations.
When a friend has betrayed you, for instance, you have good reason to modify some of
the standing intentions that are normally appropriate to a relationship between friends,
including your intention to confide in the person and to keep confidences in turn, and
your intention to do things together with the friend and to participate in their activities.
You should also make corresponding adjustments in your dispositions to act in these
ways, as well as in your expectations regarding the putative friend’s behavior and
attitudes toward you. Finally, it would also be appropriate for you to become less
emotionally invested in the life and activities of the person who has betrayed you, where
this involves a tendency to take pleasure in their company and to harbor special hopes
for the success of their projects and aspirations.
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Blame, on this account of it, might be thought of as a kind of “reactive attitude”,
insofar as it involves modification of attitudes in response to the attitudes of another
party toward yourself. But Scanlon is at pains to emphasize the distance between his
account and familiar Strawsonian approaches to blame, such as the one I have proposed.
“The account of blame that I will offer is like Strawson’s in seeing human relationships
as the foundations of blame. But it differs from his view in placing emphasis on the
expectations, intentions and other attitudes that constitute these relationships rather
than on moral emotions such as resentment and indignation” (p. 131). And again: “To
revise my intentions and expectations with regard to Joe … is to blame him. I might also
resent his behavior, or feel some other moral emotion. But this is not required for blame
on my view—I might just feel sad” (p. 137). Later Scanlon admits that emotions such as
resentment, indignation, and guilt “can be” appropriate responses to the impairment of
one’s relationships, and that they constitute “one element of blame” (p. 144). But he
treats these attitudes as peripheral. What is central to blame, on his account, are the
modifications in one’s intentions, dispositions, and expectations that are rendered
appropriate by the ways in which the attitudes of others have impaired your
relationships with them.
2. Affectless Adjustment of Attitudes.
I want to question the aspect of Scanlon’s approach that has just been emphasized,
namely the relegation of the reactive sentiments to a merely peripheral role in
accounting for blame. The essence of blame, on Scanlon’s account, is the justified
adjustment of one’s intentions and expectations. But you can adjust attitudes of this
kind, in response to the recognition that you have good reason to do so, in a way that is
perfectly dispassionate, and that therefore lacks the emotional tone that seems essential
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to blame. Consider again the example of the disloyal former friend. Among the reasons
you have to modify your intentions in regard to such a person are what might broadly
be considered prudential considerations. It will probably not be a wise policy to
continue to rely on and to confide in a person who has been willing to ridicule you for
the amusement of others, and you are likely to be able to find more rewarding things to
do with your limited time and energy than to continue to invest them in the sharing of
activities with such a person. But it appears that you could register these normative
considerations, and respond to them by making the corresponding adjustments in your
expectations and intentions, in a perfectly cool and calculating frame of mind. To react
in this way, however, would not be to blame the person who has treated you disloyally,
but merely to manage your relations with them, with an eye to optimizing your local
economy of benefits and burdens.
On Scanlon’s account, of course, prudential considerations are rightly accorded a
fairly minor place in the larger scheme of normative considerations to which blame is a
response. The main reason you have to adjust your intentions and expectations
regarding your former friend, as we have seen, is provided by the way in which their
attitude of disloyalty alters the quality of your relationship. Your original reason for
confiding in the person, relying on them, spending time together with them, and so on
was that the relationship constituted a genuine friendship. But someone who is willing
to ridicule you for trivial social gain is not after all a true friend, or at any rate not as
good a friend as you might have taken them to be before discovering their disloyalty.
The attitudes revealed by their act of betrayal change the meaning of the relationship, in
ways that also undermine the reasons you thought you had for forming and sustaining
the intentions and expectations typical of relations between friends. This is what
Scanlon primarily has in mind with his talk about the impairment of relationships. In
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addition, there are what we might call reflexive reasons to adjust your intentions and
expectations when the disloyalty of your putative friend comes to light. To continue on
in these circumstances as if nothing had happened would be incompatible with the
willingness to stand up for oneself that we expect of people who have a healthy level of
self-respect. In extreme cases, it would amount to a form of servility or demeaning selfabasement. These are conditions that everyone has good reason to avoid.
Scanlon is surely correct to emphasize the importance of these kinds of reasons,
at least in the case of relationships between friends. But this point about the content of
your reasons to adjust your intentions and expectations following the display of
disloyalty does not remedy the deficiency in Scanlon’s account of blame that I pointed
out above. The problem had to do with the dispassionate spirit in which you could
adjust your intentions and expectations. But the possibility of dispassionate
modification of these attitudes does not depend on the specific content of the reasons
you have for making the modifications. You can respond in a cool and calculating
manner to the prudential considerations that speak in favor of revising your intentions
in relation to the disloyal friend. But you could equally respond in a cool and
calculating manner to the more important reasons that are provided by the change in the
meaning of your relationship or by the reflexive implications of a failure to make
adjustments once the friend’s betrayal comes to light. The possibility of such deliberate
and affectless modifications in our intentions and expectations is given to us with our
basic capacities for practical reasoning. But a purely dispassionate modification of your
intentions, even for reasons of the kind that Scanlon identifies, would not amount to
blame. It would lack the affective quality that intuitively seems essential to blame,
considered as a characteristic and familiar response to moral lapses.
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To this it will rightly be objected that in the context of a genuine friendship, one
cannot respond to a display of blatant disloyalty in a completely affectless way.
Friendships are constituted, in part, by patterns of emotional interdependence and
vulnerability. To stand in a relationship of friendship with someone just is, inter alia, to
be disposed to a range of characteristic emotional responses, depending on how things
are going both with the friend and with the relationship you stand in to the friend. Just
as you will be pleased when your friend enjoys some noteworthy success, and sad when
they suffer a setback, so too will you be distressed when you learn that they have done
something to betray you. For this reason, it might not really be open to you to respond
to the act of betrayal in a purely affectless manner.
This is correct, as far as it goes, but it does not suffice to remedy the fundamental
deficiency in Scanlon’s account of blame. There are two reasons for this conclusion.
First, Scanlon intends his account to function as a general template for understanding
the phenomenon of moral blame. In the generic moral case, however, there is nothing
strictly analogous to friendship to play the role of a relationship whose impairment we
can be understood as responding to when we blame a person for something they have
done. This is a theme I shall return to at greater length below; for present purposes, the
point is that we don’t stand to ordinary strangers in relationships that are partly
constituted by emotional interdependence and vulnerability, of the kind
characteristically involved in relationships between friends. We therefore cannot appeal
to such emotional vulnerability to explain the element of affect that is apparently
involved in responses to wrongdoing that do not occur in the context of friendship.
Even in the friendship case, however, there is reason to doubt whether the
element of emotional interdependence and vulnerability suffices to account for the
distinctive affective tone that is characteristic of blame. Someone who responds to an act
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of betrayal with feelings of sadness or melancholy would thereby reveal the kind of
emotional vulnerability that we take to be natural and fitting in a context of this kind.
But sadness and melancholy are not the same as blame; they are not reactive sentiments,
in the sense introduced by Strawson. They lack the quality of opprobrium that attaches
to such reactions as resentment and guilt; they have a different focus from such reactive
sentiments; and they call for different kinds of response on the part of the person who is
their target. Insofar as Scanlon leaves open the possibility of responding to the
impairment of relationships without reactive emotions of this kind, he seems to leave the
blame out of blame.
This is so far merely an appeal to intuitions, ones that I hope my reader will
share. But the basic point should gain in plausibility if we consider the difference it
makes to the overall character of our attitudes when the reactive emotions are entered
into the picture. Scanlon concedes that it can be appropriate to experience such
emotions as resentment and indignation in response to the attitudes of others that
impair our relationships with them (p. 144). It is not that one is obligated to experience
such sentiments. But they are nevertheless “called for”, in the sense of being intelligible
and fitting reactions to things such as the betrayal of a putative friend. Emotions of this
kind are also natural, insofar as they reflect our internalization of moral norms, as
standards that govern our interactions with each other. To the extent these things are
true, we can say that moral lapses give one reason to respond with reactive sentiments.
The friend’s willingness to betray you counts in favor of adjusting your intentions and
expectations; but it also gives you reason to feel resentment at what they have done.
Now it might appear that these two responses—the adjustments in intention and
expectation, on the one hand, and the reactive emotions on the other—are parallel
syndromes that have little direct connection with each other. Indeed, if one thinks of
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them in these terms, it can start to seem as if the emotional side of the picture is of
comparatively minor importance. What ultimately matters, the thought might go, is
whether you make the called-for modifications in the intentions and expectations that
are constitutive of your relationships to other people, not the feelings you may or may
not be subject to while adjusting your attitudes in these ways. But this thought is
mistaken, reflecting a superficial understanding of the significance of the emotions to
our broader patterns of experience and response.
To see this, it may help to consider the positive example of a healthy friendship
between two people, one that has not been damaged by acts of betrayal or disregard.
Friendship, I take it, provides a normative basis for special reasons and obligations, of a
kind that are implicit in Scanlon’s discussion of this case. The fact that someone is your
friend is a reason for you to confide in them and rely on them, to spend time with them,
and to help them out when they are in a bad way. The standing intentions and
expectations that Scanlon takes to be partly constitutive of friendship are responses to
these relationship-based reasons. But friendship also provides you with reasons to
respond emotionally to your friend in distinctive ways: to care about their projects and
plans, to be concerned or troubled or anxious when things are not going well for them,
and so on. Moreover, in a well-functioning friendship, these two sets of reasons will
interact and reinforce each other in significant ways. Thus, a true friend is someone who
will support you in a time of crisis, as it seems natural to say, out of a genuine concern
for your well-being; their having the emotional identification and engagement
appropriate to friendship, in other words, alters the nature and meaning of the
intentions and actions that are characteristic of friendship.
This point requires development. There is a romantic view of friendship and
other close personal relationships, which holds that all of the special reasons that we
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have regarding our friends derive from an emotional attachment that is primitive, and
not itself to be construed as a response to reasons. You simply find yourself caring
about someone, and that brings certain reasons of friendship in its train. This picture
strikes me as naïve and misleading. There are several salient elements in friendship that
are not responses to reasons: a certain coincidence of sensibility, for instance, and the
disposition to take pleasure in the other person’s company. But the more important
emotional aspects are not like this. Your caring and concern for your friend are
responses that are appropriate to a relationship of this distinctive kind, and that would
be out of place if directed toward a person who does not stand in this relationship to
you.4 So friendship gives you reasons for these characteristic emotional responses. But
it also gives you reasons for the kinds of attitudes that figure so centrally in Scanlon’s
account, including intentions and expectations. Friendship is a reason to care about
your friend, but it is also a reason to confide in the friend, to provide them with support
and advice, etc. and to form the intention of acting in these ways.
A true friend will be responsive to reasons of both of these kinds, forming the
intentions that friendship requires, but also exhibiting the emotional attitudes of concern
and engagement that are peculiarly fitting in this context. Moreover, this combination of
attitudes will give to the friend’s activities the quality of emotional involvement that
intuitively seems to be so important in relationships of this kind. A genuine friend will
visit you in the hospital when you are convalescing not merely out of a cold and
calculating recognition that friendship requires this of them, but out of a concern for
your well-being. To make room for this possibility, we do not need to deny that
friendship provides us with reasons to support and comfort our friends when things are
going badly for them. There are special obligations of friendship, and those who are
friends can acknowledge that these obligations obtain. But the presence of the emotional
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concern that friendship also makes appropriate transforms the meaning of the actions
that fulfill these special obligations. It confers on those actions an expressive
importance. Thus, the fact that the hospital visit would express the friend’s appropriate
concern for your well-being is an additional reason for supporting you in this way, and
the friend acts out of this concern when the decision to visit you in the hospital is
taken—at least in part—in response to these expressive reasons.
With this admittedly concise treatment of friendship in place, let us now return
to the case of blame. Our problem was to attain a deeper understanding of the
significance we intuitively attach to the reactive emotions, as responses to moral
wrongdoing. In particular, if we grant that such wrongdoing provides reasons for us to
adjust our intentions and expectations regarding its agent, what need do we have for
feelings of indignation, resentment, and guilt? What difference could those sentiments
make, given the independent reasons we already have for modifying our attitudes
toward the wrongdoer?
The discussion of the emotional dimension of friendship suggests an answer to
these questions. The addition of such sentiments as resentment changes quite
dramatically the meaning of the steps we might take to adjust our other attitudes in the
ways that Scanlon thinks blame primarily involves. It is one thing to modify your
standing intention to confide in a person who has betrayed you out of a sorrowful
recognition that this attitude is no longer appropriate to the nature of the relationship
between you. It is quite another to modify the attitude when you also feel warranted
resentment of the person for letting you down in this way. The emotion is not a matter
of merely private or phenomenological biography. Its presence gives you additional
reasons for adjusting your other attitudes and activities, so that making those
adjustments in the presence of the emotion takes on a distinctly expressive significance.
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A true friend, as we saw above, responds to the special reasons and obligations of
friendship out of an attitude of care and concern for the friend, where this is a matter of
the expressive quality of their responses. Similarly, when you resent someone, the
modifications you make in your intentions and behavior become modifications that are
undertaken out of resentment, where this too is a matter of the emotional meaning of
your responses. Resentment and the other reactive emotions do not leave everything
else as it otherwise would be; they transform your activities, giving them an expressive
character that would be completely missing in their absence.
My contention is that this expressive connection to the reactive sentiments is the
key to understanding the special quality of blame. To blame someone is not merely to
register dispassionately or in sorrow the fact that a relationship you stand in has been
impaired, and to act on the reasons for adjusting your attitudes that this fact may
provide. As I said above, blame has a quality of opprobrium that these other kinds of
responses, considered on their own, seem to lack. To count as blaming a person, you
have to be exercised by what they have done, and to be exercised in the relevant way
just is to be subject to one of the reactive sentiments that Scanlon himself concedes to be
appropriate responses to blameworthy conduct.
Even if I am correct about the nature of blame, however, there is a still larger set
of questions that suggest themselves. Given the central involvement of the reactive
sentiments in blame, why is it important to us that we should have this way of
responding to immorality in our repertoire? Is blame, in the familiar form that I have
tried to pin down, a valuable practice, or would we perhaps be better off without it?
Before we can answer these questions, however, it will help to consider in more detail
Scanlon’s contention that blame is a response to the impairment of our relationships
with people.
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3. Relationships and Reasons.
To this point, I have concentrated for the most part on contexts such as friendship,
which Scanlon himself takes to exemplify his claims about “the dependence of blame on
relationships” (p. 156). I agree with Scanlon that the impairment of a relationship of this
kind gives one reason to adjust one’s attitudes in regard to the person responsible for the
impairment. But the schema does not generalize to other contexts in which the concept
of blame has application.
Friendship, as we saw above, is a source of special reasons and obligations.5 This
is to say that the fact that you stand in a relation of this kind with someone justifies and
even requires attitudes and forms of interaction that are not similarly called for in the
case of people who are not your friends. Of course, there are different forms and
degrees of friendship, and what exactly a given relationship of this general kind
demands of us is subject to some amount of mutual negotiation. Still, it seems
constitutive of friendship, as we normally understand it, that it involves special reasons
and obligations. Someone who claimed to be your friend, but who denied that this fact
gave them any reason to confide in you, keep up with developments in your life,
provide help and support when needed, etc., would have a flawed understanding of the
nature and value of this kind of relationship.
What is it, exactly, that makes a given relationship an instance of friendship, of a
kind that generates these special reasons and obligations? In answering this question, it
is plausible to suppose that we make reference, as Scanlon suggests, to an implicit
normative ideal, which identifies conditions that have to be met for a particular
relationship to count as a case of friendship (pp. 135). But this normative ideal needs to
be distinguished carefully from the specific norms that define what friends owe to each
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other, insofar as they stand in a relationship of the relevant kind.6 As I just suggested, it
is constitutive of friendship that people who stand in this relationship to each other have
reasons and obligations that they would not have if they were not mutual friends. But
these norms—call them friendship-based norms—clearly cannot decide on their own the
question of whether a given relationship counts as a friendship in the first place.
Friendship-based norms will apply to a person only if it is true of them that they already
stand in a relationship of friendship to a given person; to determine whether this is the
case, we must appeal to a different set of standards, which we might refer to as
friendship-constituting norms.
This is not the place for a detailed discussion of the standards that have to be
satisfied for a given relationship to count as an instance of friendship. But two
observations about these standards are here in place. First, friendship has an undeniable
historical dimension. Whatever the exact content of the friendship-constituting norms, it
is clear that they will classify relationships as friendships only if the parties in question
have a significant history of causal interaction with each other. You simply cannot count
as somebody’s friend if you have never met or had contact with them, or engaged in
reciprocal exchanges with them of one kind or another. Second, it is characteristic of
friendship that relationships of this kind also have an important attitudinal dimension.
Whether or not you count as somebody’s friend is, as we noted above, in part a matter of
your feelings, your dispositions, and your other attitudes. Friends, for instance,
typically have overlapping sensibilities; they find similar things interesting or funny,
and they tend to enjoy each other and to take pleasure in each other’s company. They
also have some degree of mutual care, consideration, and regard, of the kind that gives
their activities the expressive significance discussed in the preceding section, as well as
the emotional interdependence and vulnerability that were likewise acknowledged in
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that section. And there is a reflexive dimension as well. To be the friend of someone is
in part share with the person an understanding of yourselves as friends, where this in
turn involves acknowledging your common history of interaction and mutual affection,
and affirming and acting on the reasons and obligations that relationships of this kind
generate for those who are party to them.
These remarks about the constitutive norms of friendship put us in position to
make sense of Scanlon’s suggestion that friendships can be impaired by the attitudes of
the parties to them, in ways that affect those parties’ reasons going forward. Consider,
again, the friend who has been disloyal to you at a party, making unkind jokes at your
expense to provide amusement to a group of mutual acquaintances. The attitude that
the putative friend thus displays alters the nature of the relationship that you have with
them; it changes the meaning of the relationship, as Scanlon puts it. This happens,
because the friendship-constituting norms, as we have seen, take friendships to be
constituted in part by the broader pattern of attitudes of the parties to them. Someone
who is willing to betray you for the amusement of fellow partygoers does not
acknowledge the bonds of loyalty that friendship involves, nor do they display the kind
of consideration and concern that are partly constitutive of relationships of this kind. Of
course, the friendship-constituting norms are complex, and a single episode of disloyalty
would generally not be sufficient to transform a relationship from a friendship into a
non-friendship. It would, however, change the nature of the friendship, impairing it—in
Scanlon’s phrase—by reference to the norms that define what it is for a relationship to
count as a case of friendship in the first place.
This in turn will have normative significance for you, going forward from the act
of disloyalty. The special reasons and obligations at issue in a case of this kind, as we
have seen, are distinctively based in the character of your relationship as a friendship.
20
They are defined by what I called above friendship-based norms. But if your reasons for
maintaining certain intentions and expectations regarding a person are based in the fact
that you stand in a relationship of friendship to them, those reasons will be affected
directly by the impairment of the relationship, relative to the friendship-constituting
norms. Insofar as your putative friend’s disloyalty changes the meaning of your
relationship, it will thereby undermine the reasons and obligations that are based on the
nature of that relationship.
Scanlon sees a close parallel between the special case of friendship and the more
general case of morality. His idea is that there is a valuable form of relationship that we
can stand in to any human being, which we might refer to as mutual recognition, and
that morality sets the standards for relating to people in this way. 7 This in turn is
supposed to pave the way for a generalization of the account of blame that was initially
developed by reference to the example of friendship. Moral blame, on this account,
involves the acknowledgment that your relationship to somebody has been impaired
through their attitudes, in ways that have normative significance for your own
intentions and expectations in the future.
The problem, however, is that the analogy between the special case of friendship
and the general case of morality breaks down at a crucial point. As we have seen, the
reasons of friendship are based in the nature of your relationships to specific individuals
as cases of friendship, where this in turn is determined by an implicit normative ideal
(the friendship-constituting norms). It is otherwise, however, in the moral case. Your
basic moral obligations to people are not based in the nature of the relationships you
already stand in to those people. There is, in fact, no particular kind of relationship you
need to stand in to somebody to owe them the kind of consideration and regard that is
central to the requirements of morality. But then there is no relationship whose
21
impairment should affect your moral obligations going forward, by altering the basis of
those obligations. Granted, attitudes of contempt, hostility, and disregard may prevent
another person from standing in a relation of mutual recognition to you. But compliance
with moral standards is not something you owe to people in virtue of already standing
in relations of this kind with them; it is not relationship-based, in the way the special
obligations of friendship seem to be. Hence the impairment of somebody’s ability to
relate to you on terms of mutual recognition is not something that gives you reason to
modify your default moral attitudes toward them, in the distinctive way the impairment
of a friendship gives you a reason to modify your intentions and expectations regarding
your friend.
4. Rationality, Mutual Regard, and Impairment.
Scanlon recognizes that the moral case differs from the case of friendship in certain
respects. But he claims that the differences do not undermine the fruitfulness of
thinking about generalized moral blame in terms of the impairment of relationships. In
the case of friendship, as we have seen, the relationship-constituting norms have an
attitudinal component, specifying that particular relationships between people will
count as friendships only if certain shared attitudes are present. In the moral case, by
contrast, the relationships that ground our obligations do not have an attitudinal
component of this kind. But Scanlon argues that this does not defeat the analogy he is
trying to draw, pointing out that reasons can be based in relationships, even if the
relationships in question are not themselves constituted (either in whole or in part) by
the attitudes of the parties to them (p. 141). Thus, the fact that a given person is your
parent or child gives you special reasons to care for them, reasons that do not depend on
the specific attitudes that the parent or child displays toward you. Similarly, the fact
22
that you stand in the relation of “fellow rational being” to somebody gives you reason to
adopt toward them attitudes of mutual regard and forbearance, where these attitudes in
turn make possible the valuable form of interpersonal relationship that morality is
concerned to establish (p. 141).
There are two problems with this line of response, however. First, relationships
between parents and children are in a crucial respect unlike the relationship that “fellow
rational beings” stand in to each other. The former, to be sure, are not constituted by the
attitudes of the parties to them. But they are like friendship in having an essentially
historical dimension. You count as someone’s child only if you were actually born to
them, or perhaps (in an extended sense) if you were adopted and raised by them in a
particular pattern of causal interactions. The relationship of fellow rational being, by
contrast, has no necessary causal or historical reality at all. To stand in this
“relationship” with someone is merely share with them a certain property, that of being
rational or being a rational agent. This is a condition that can be satisfied by people who
have never had any causal interactions with each other. It seems seriously misleading to
suggest that moral obligations might be based on a relationship of this merely logical or
notional kind, in a way that is analogous to the special reasons and obligations involved
in friendship and family relations.
Against this, Scanlon might reply that some familiar special obligations are based
in relationships that lack even the thin historical and causal dimension that is necessarily
present in the relationships between parents and their children. Many believe that there
are special obligations that we owe to those with whom we share ties of community or
nationhood. And yet it is implausible to suppose that we have direct causal or historical
interactions with each of the individuals to whom we are linked by such ties; perhaps
this would serve as a better model for the interpretation of morality that Scanlon is
23
trying to develop. The interpretation remains flawed, however. In the case of
community and national ties, there is a social and psychological salience to the forms of
relationship that are at issue. We understand ourselves as members of nations and
variously local communities, and these kinds of self-understanding shape our identities
in significant ways. They can influence, for instance, our passions and interests, our
conceptions of what it is good to eat and fun to do, our feelings of comfort and security,
and so on. Nothing like this seems to be true of our shared identity as rational agents.
We do not think of ourselves as having “ties” to other people solely in virtue of our
sharing with them the property of rationality; this is not an aspect of our self-conception,
a description with the kind of psychological and social salience that can help to shape
our sense of who we are. Fellow rationality is therefore not a form of relationship that is
so much as available to ground the moral obligations we have toward other people.8
A second and related problem with Scanlon’s suggestion that fellow rationality is
the basis of our moral obligations has to do with the notion of impairment. The general
schema he has proposed for understanding blame treats it as a response to the
impairment of relationships. In the case of friendship, as we have seen, there are two
factors that combine to give this schema application. First, friendship is a form of
relationship that gives rise to special reasons and obligations. And second, the nature of
friendship makes room for the possibility that the attitudes of a person can have a
detrimental effect on the quality and meaning of a relationship of this kind, understood
by reference to the friendship-constituting norms. With fellow rationality, by contrast,
nothing analogous to these two conditions is in place. In particular, there is no sense in
which the immoral attitudes of other people impair the relationship of fellow rational
being that you might be thought to stand in to them. Thus, if someone treats you with
contempt or derision, the two of you remain fellow rational beings, and you stand in this
24
“relationship” to a degree that is completely undiminished by the other person’s
immorality. What is arguably impaired by the immoral attitude of the other is their
capacity to enter into relationships of mutual recognition with you, whereby their
actions can be justified personally to you. But by Scanlon’s own account, the capacity to
stand in relationships of this moralized variety with people is not the basis of your
moral obligations to them. The ground of those obligations, rather, is the putative
relationship of fellow rationality, and this is not a relationship that is susceptible to
impairment through the attitudes and actions of those who participate in it.
Scanlon himself draws attention to a curious fact about the generalized moral
case. As he sees things, the impairment of your relationship to someone by their
immoral attitudes gives you reason to adjust your own intentions and expectations
toward them. The “default relationship of mutual regard and forbearance” (p. 142) that
we typically adopt toward people involves an intention to help them with their projects
when this can be done at little cost to us, as well as some degree of willingness to enter
into more specific relationships with them that involve trust and mutual reliance. When
someone has treated you with contempt or disregard, Scanlon suggests, you have reason
to modify these attitudes, revising your intention to help them with their projects and
your readiness to enter into relationships of trust with them. There are other parts of the
“default relationship”, however, that you do not have reason to revise under these
circumstances, including your intention to respect the person’s basic rights and claims
(p. 144). Thus attitudes of contempt or disregard do not give you reason to revise your
intention not to kill or hurt the bearer of those attitudes, or to provide emergency
assistance when they are in dire need, or to keep the promises you have given them.
Scanlon is surely right to note this difference between the two distinct clusters
within the larger complex of attitudes that we adopt toward other people by default.
25
But the relationship-based framework he has proposed renders this difference puzzling.
If our reasons for adopting the default attitudes of mutual regard and forbearance really
are grounded in our relationships with people, then one would expect the impairment of
the grounding relationship to affect all of those reasons, not just a select subset of them.
Scanlon might reply that a merely partial or selective adjustment of our default attitudes
is the appropriate response to the merely partial impairment of the grounding
relationship that is effected by ordinary immorality. But this is not a convincing line of
argument. If the grounding relationship is capable of impairment, then it should be
possible to imagine a case in which it is totally undermined by the immoral acts and
attitudes of one of the parties to it, in the way a friendship can be destroyed rather than
merely damaged by a sufficiently dramatic pattern of betrayal and deceit. But there is
nothing a person could do to you that would deprive you of your reason to respect their
basic moral rights and claims. This strongly suggests that moral reasons are not based in
the nature or quality of the relationships we already stand in to the bearers of basic
moral rights and claims.
To this point, I have interpreted Scanlon as holding that the proper analogy to
friendship in the generic moral case is the relation of “fellow rational beings” that we
stand in to each other. But Scanlon also talks about “the moral relationship” in this
connection, meaning by this the attitudes and dispositions that constitute the kind of
“mutual regard and forbearance” just discussed (p. 142). These attitudes include
dispositions and intentions to comply with basic moral requirements, as well as
attitudes that are not themselves morally obligatory (such as a disposition to take
pleasure in other peoples’ successes, and to enter into interactions of mutual trust and
reliance). This latter relationship is constituted by the attitudes of the parties to it, and it
26
therefore seems susceptible to being impaired or damaged through the behavior of those
parties. Scanlon might be interpreted as holding that generic moral blame is a response
to the impairment of this moral relationship, a relationship that it is open to us to stand
in to any other rational being.9
But there are two difficulties with this interpretation. First, as we have seen, the
default attitudes of “mutual regard and forbearance” are not ultimately the ground of
our moral obligations to other people. They are themselves grounded in our common
humanity or rationality, being attitudes we hold “toward one another simply in virtue of
the fact that we stand in the relation of ‘fellow rational beings’” (p. 141). The “moral
relationship” of mutual regard and forbearance is thus not normatively basic, rather it is
a response to more fundamental facts about our shared rationality. In this respect, the
“moral relationship” of which Scanlon speaks is crucially different from the relationship
between friends. Actions that impair the quality of a relationship as an instance of
friendship have immediate normative significance, insofar as they directly affect the
basis of the special obligations that friends have toward each other; but the basis of the
moral obligations we have to other people as rational beings is not itself impaired by
departures from the ideal of mutual regard and forbearance.
Second, talk of the “impairment” of a relationship presupposes that there is an
ongoing relationship of the relevant kind that has been damaged or degraded by the
actions of one of the parties to it. This presupposition is one that is often not satisfied in
the generic moral case; people can treat you immorally, violating the constitutive
requirements of mutual regard and forbearance, in their very first causal interactions
with you. Impairment has the kind of normative significance Scanlon attributes to it in
cases—such as friendship and other special ties—in which our reasons are based in the
nature of the relationships we already stand in to people, and in which those
27
relationships, in turn, are capable of being impaired through the attitudes of the parties
to them. As we have seen, however, morality cannot be understood as a context of this
kind. Moral requirements may be understood as relationship-constituting, but they are
not relationship-based.
When a person treats you with contempt and disregard, there is something that
could be said to be impaired by their attitudes, namely their capacity to relate to you in
the way characteristic of mutual recognition. Insofar as your reasons to treat them with
consideration are not based in the nature and quality of the relationship that obtains
between you, however, this form of impairment does not function to undermine those
moral reasons. You continue to have reason to treat them with consideration and
respect, regardless of the fact that they themselves have failed to treat you in the same
way.10 The attitudes they display may have normative significance for you, but they do
not acquire this significance by altering the meaning and quality of the relationships in
which your moral obligations are grounded.
To avoid some of the problems outlined above, we might come back to a
distinction that was implicit in our earlier discussion of the attitudes of mutual regard
and forbearance, between unconditional and conditional attitudes. Unconditional
elements within this larger complex include intentions and dispositions to comply with
basic moral requirements, which as we have seen are not grounded in the quality of our
relationships with people, and are hence universally called for. But in addition to these
morally basic intentions, there are also the attitudes that Scanlon describes as not strictly
obligatory, including the disposition to take pleasure in the good fortune of others, to
hope that things go well for them, to assist them in minor ways with their projects, and
to enter into relations of trust and reliance with them (pp. 145-6). Scanlon says that,
though it is not strictly required that one take up attitudes of this kind toward other
28
people, the failure to exhibit them is a kind of moral deficiency; an admirable person
will adopt these attitudes and dispositions by default in their interactions with other
people. But a default stance of this kind need not be an unconditional stance. Scanlon
might hold that this default complex of attitudes is reasonable (or admirable) only so
long as it is met with a degree of reciprocity on the part of the agents who are its targets.
A person who wrongs me does not display toward me the attitudes of mutual regard
and forbearance, and that gives me reason to suspend the non-obligatory elements
within this larger complex of attitudes that I ordinarily adopt towards people by default
(cf. p. 145).11
This is probably the best way to understand Scanlon’s suggestions about the
moral relationship of mutual regard and forbearance. It is a plausible picture, as far as it
goes; but it does not really vindicate the impairment model that is suggested by the
analogy with special relationships such as friendship. The non-obligatory elements in
the default stance of mutual regard and forbearance are not in any significant sense
grounded in the quality of the relationships that we already stand in to other people.
This follows from the fact that those attitudes are ones that we adopt toward people by
default, regardless of whether we have interacted with them in any particular way in the
past. Granted, those default attitudes need not be unconditional. But the reactions of
other people that give us reason to suspend them do not amount to impairments of an
ongoing and normatively-significant relationship, for the simple reason that there isn’t
necessarily any ongoing relationship to be impaired. What is impaired by the immoral
conduct of another person is, as I said above, not their actual relationship to me, but
their capacity to relate to me in a certain way, on the terms that describe what Scanlon
calls mutual recognition.
29
How, in light of these remarks, should we understand the adjustments that are
called for in our attitudes toward them by the immorality that other people display
toward us? Take a case in which a stranger—a predatory mortgage broker, say—has
deliberately manipulated and taken advantage of you for personal gain. The simplest
thing to say about such a case is that the fact that the person has treated you this way
gives you several different kinds of reason to adjust your attitudes and behavior toward
them. There are, for instance, both reflexive and prudential considerations in play. It
would certainly be unwise, and possibly demeaning as well, to continue to be willing to
enter into trust-based relationships with a person who has manipulated and taken
advantage of you, and similar considerations speak against your assisting such a person
with their personal projects and activities. Their behavior also gives you reason to
resent them, and this reactive sentiment, when present, will generate reinforcing
expressive reasons for altering your intentions toward them, of the kind considered in
section 2 above.
What we do not find in this case is the mechanism that we saw to be at work in
the example of friendship, whereby a modification in the meaning and quality of your
relationship to the person alters the standing reasons that are based in that relationship.
There was no particular relationship that you stood in to the mortgage broker prior to
their act of exploitation, and the attitudes expressed by that act therefore did not impair
your relationship to them. Furthermore, your basic moral reasons to treat others with
regard are not grounded in the quality of your ongoing relationships to them; they
remain unconditionally in place, despite the fact that the mortgage broker has taken
advantage of you. The question then becomes the following: do the basic moral
standards that remain in force permit you to act on the new reasons for adjusting your
responses that are provided by the other person’s manipulation and disregard of you?
30
Expressive considerations, for instance, might give you some reason not merely to refuse
to assist the mortgage broker with their projects, but also to refuse to rescue them in an
emergency situation. The latter response would presumably be incompatible with the
requirements of moral regard that continue to be in force here, whereas the former
response is morally permissible.
This is a better framework for thinking about the effect that immorality has on
different parts within the broader cluster of moral attitudes that we take toward other
people by default. It is not that some of our moral reasons—but not others—are
undermined by the impairment of relationships through such immorality. Rather, basic
moral requirements of regard and forbearance, which do not have their basis in the
nature of our relationships to people, are always and everywhere in place. Those
requirements then set limits to the things we are permitted to do in response to the
prudential, reflexive, and expressive reasons that the immoral acts and attitudes of
people supply. Some of the default moral attitudes, such as the willingness to enter into
relationships of trust, may permissibly be modified in response to those reasons,
whereas others, such as the intention to provide emergency assistance, may not be.
5. Why Emotions?
Blame, then, is not essentially a response to the impairment of relationships. Nor is it
merely a response to the other reasons immorality may give us to adjust our intentions
and expectations toward a person. To blame someone, I have suggested, is to be subject
to a reactive emotion toward them, where this emotional response lends your reactions
to wrongdoing an expressive dimension that would otherwise be missing.
I have argued that this proposal does justice to our familiar conception of the
nature of blame. But an important question remains unanswered: why does it matter
31
that we have this distinctive response to immorality in our repertoire? Is it a response
that adds significantly to the quality of our interactions, or would we perhaps be better
off without it (supposing that it were possible for us to overcome it)? I shall approach
this question indirectly. The strategy will be to situate blame in relation to other
patterns of attitude and response that have an emotional dimension, in the hope that this
will illuminate the larger human importance of this curious phenomenon.
Let us return to the case of friendship. We saw above that friendship gives us
reasons both to confide in and to support our friends on the one hand, and to care
emotionally about their well-being and the success of their endeavors on the other.
Furthermore, the emotional element here is not merely a matter of the private or
phenomenological coloring of our experienced interactions. It transforms the meaning
of the things that we do for our friends, turning them into actions that express the kind
of care and concern that friends characteristically have for each other. It matters to us
that our friends should have these attitudes, and that the things they do for us should
serve to express them.
Now in the case of friendship, the reason this matters is surely, at least to some
degree, that emotional involvement is partly constitutive of relationships of the relevant
kind, in the ways that were touched on above. A person who did not care about how
you were doing would not really be your friend. To be a friend is not merely to be
someone who acknowledges that friendships are valuable, in the sense of being sources
of distinctive reasons for action and for attitudes. It is to value those relationships,
where this involves (inter alia) actually caring about the person who is your friend, in
the characteristic manner that friendship renders appropriate. In the background here is
a more general distinction between acknowledging something to be valuable, and
actually valuing it in the way that is called for by its value. This is a distinction that is of
32
course familiar from a wide variety of contexts. Take the case of artistic or intellectual
pursuits, such as opera or philosophy. To acknowledge that these are valuable activities
is, among other things, to acknowledge that there is reason to support them, to engage
in them oneself if one has the requisite talents and interests, to learn about them and try
to understand them, and so on. But one can acknowledge all these things without
actually valuing opera or philosophy oneself. There is an additional quality of
emotional engagement that characterizes the attitudes of people who genuinely value
these pursuits; they take a real interest in them, care about whether they are in a good or
a bad way, become excited when there are opportunities to engage in activities related to
these pursuits, and are subject to distress when they are unable to do so.12
It is clearly a deep fact about human beings that they are capable of caring about
things, in the way that involves these forms of emotional engagement and vulnerability.
From an external standpoint, these capacities are doubtless anchored in biological
tendencies that are important to our survival and adaptation, and that therefore belong
to our evolutionary inheritance. The primitive dispositions to form bonds of attachment,
and to experience desires and emotions appropriate to the nature of those bonds, are
crucial to the survival of our offspring and to our own ability to achieve our various
objectives in life. Refined versions of these same tendencies are mobilized whenever we
become invested emotionally in projects, activities, and persons, in the ways
characteristic of valuing. From a more internal point of view, emotional engagement
contributes substantially to our sense of our activities as having meaning and point.
Caring about things gives them a kind of significance for our lives that they would
otherwise entirely lack; they engage our interests and attention, and it comes to matter
to us whether things go well or badly with them.13 We are, for better or worse, valuing
creatures, and it is difficult so much as to imagine what life might be like if we did not
33
develop emotional entanglements with the people and things that our major pursuits are
organized around.
Blame, I now want to suggest, should be understood in light of this familiar and
more general distinction between judging something valuable and actually valuing it.
Valuing, as we have seen, has a quality of emotional engagement that goes beyond
acknowledgement that there are reasons to respect and support and understand the
object or activity to which value is ascribed. So too with blame. On the account I have
offered, to blame someone is not merely to affirm that they have displayed objectionable
attitudes through their behavior; nor is it just a matter of attributing normative
significance to such displays for one’s own attitudes and responses. It involves, further,
an element of emotional involvement. When you blame somebody, you are exercised by
what they have done, insofar as you become resentful or indignant about it (or
experience guilt in the reflexive case). The immoral attitudes of the person who is
blamed matter to you, in the way that is characteristic for the more general phenomenon
of valuing. To blame someone is a way of caring about the fact that they have treated
others with contempt or disregard; when you experience indignation, resentment, or
guilt, you are not merely left cold by the immoral attitudes that form the object of blame,
but find that those attitudes engage your interest and attention.
In “Freedom and Resentment” Strawson famously wrote that the reactive
sentiments with which he associated responsibility and blame are natural human
responses, “given to us with the fabric of human social life”.14 I think Strawson may
have exaggerated the extent to which these responses are simply continuous with the
specific emotions and feelings that partly constitute our social ties to one another.
Blame, as we have seen, is not a response to reasons that are distinctively relationshipbased, and this sets it apart from our emotional attachments to individuals with whom
34
we share thick social bonds. What is natural in blame, however, is the human tendency
to care about and to become emotionally invested in things that are acknowledged to
have value.
Now morality, on any account of it that makes sense of its apparent normative
importance, is going to involve a distinctive range of values. The basic idea that blame
reflects our internalization of the values at the heart of morality is therefore one that can
be adapted to fit into a variety of theoretical frameworks for understanding the moral
realm. Scanlon, for his part, traces the normative significance of morality to the value of
a certain way of relating to other people, whereby we strive to act in ways that can be
justified to those affected by what we do, on grounds that they would be unreasonable
to reject.15 Though I have rejected Scanlon’s suggestion that blame is a response to the
impairment of relationships, I am sympathetic to his idea that much of morality can be
understood as the condition for the realization of a valuable form of human relationship.
Even if they are not relationship-based, moral requirements may be relationshipconstituting, insofar as compliance with them makes possible a distinctive form of
mutual recognition and regard. If this is right, however, then to internalize a concern for
the values around which morality is organized is to care about relating to people on
these terms, valuing this form of relationship in a way analogous to the way we value
and care about many of the other important goods that fundamentally shape out lives.
My closing suggestion is that the disposition to blame is a way of taking to heart
the values at the basis of morality that is peculiarly appropriate to the relational
character of those values. Valuing, I have contended, involves a kind of emotional
engagement and vulnerability. But one can value something without being susceptible
to the reactive emotions in particular. For all that has been said so far, one might show
that one cares about the values at the basis of morality through a tendency to feelings of
35
sadness or distress when moral values are thwarted, and to elation or pleasure when
they are vindicated. By my own account, however, emotional engagement of this more
generic kind would not suffice for the kind of ascription of responsibility involved in
blame. Blame has a quality of opprobrium that is lacking when one feels mere sadness
or melancholy, a quality that can be made sense of, I have argued, only in terms of the
distinctively reactive sentiments of resentment, indignation, and guilt. A tendency to
experience these particular emotions thus involves a special form of care and concern for
the values around which morality is organized. This observation brings us back to the
question from which I started in this section: why is it important that we have in our
repertoire the specific form of valuing response that blame seems to involve?
My answer is that the vulnerability to this emotional response represents a way
of caring about moral values that uniquely answers to their relational character.
Compliance with moral principles makes it possible for us to relate to people on terms of
mutual recognition and regard; conversely, violation of moral requirements wrongs
some other agent (or agents) in particular, undermining our capacity to relate to them on
these terms. Moral principles thus structure our social interactions. To internalize a
concern for morality, on this conception of it, is to care about relating to people in the
distinctive way that is constituted through compliance with basic moral requirements.
But people who care about this form of relationship naturally tend to hold themselves
and others to the moral norms that are constitutive of it, where this in turn involves a
susceptibility to the distinctively reactive sentiments. When we are wronged by another,
we are not merely saddened by their failure to relate to us on a basis of mutual regard;
we resent such treatment, and this emotion has a relational aspect that fits the character
of moral norms as constituting a valuable form of human relationship. To resent
someone is to feel not merely that they have acted wrongly, but that they have wronged
36
us in particular, violating the norms that constitute relations of mutual regard.
Similarly, we are prone to guilt when we take it that we have wronged someone else in
our dealings with them. Even indignation, which is available to us when we are not
ourselves directly party to an interaction that violates the relationship-constituting
norms of morality, has an implicitly relational structure. To feel indignation is to be
exercised on behalf of another person, on account of a wrong that has been visited on
that person in particular.
These remarks do not establish the psychological necessity of the reactive
sentiments implicated in blame, nor are they meant to do so. It would be possible for
someone to care about mutual recognition and regard without the tendency to feel
resentment when they have been wronged by actions that flout the norms that constitute
such relationships. But generic emotional engagement of this kind would not reflect the
relational content that Scanlon and I agree in taking to inhere in moral requirements. I
might be especially saddened when people treat me with contempt and disregard, but
the same emotion is in principle open to anyone who values moral ends in this generic
manner. Resentment, by contrast, is available only to the person who has specifically
been wronged by the violation of moral requirements. The idea that those requirements
have a relational character goes together with the idea that the person who has been
wronged by the actions of another has a privileged basis for complaint; and resentment
(together with the reactions that give expression to it) may be understood as the form of
complaint to which the victims of wrongdoing are specially entitled. In this way, the
tendency to blame can be seen to be a peculiarly appropriate way of taking to heart the
values around which morality is structured. It matters to us whether or not people
succeed in relating to us (and to each other) on moral terms, and this shows itself in the
reactive emotions that I have contended are essential to moral blame.
37
1
See R. Jay Wallace, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1994).
2
See. T. M. Scanlon, Dimensions of Moral Assessment: Meaning, Permissibility, and
Blame, chap. 4 (manuscript, in press); all parenthetical references in the text of this paper
will be to Scanlon’s manuscript.
3
See also Dimensions of Moral Assessment, p. 156, where we are said to blame people
when we take them to be less than “solid” members of a group to which we both aspire
to belong; and p. 158, where blaming a person seems to be equated with “taking one’s
relationship with that person to be ‘impaired’ in the way I have described.” These and
other passages emphasize the judgment of impairment, rather than the acknowledgment
of its normative significance central to [b] or the justified reactions and responses to
impairment that are central to [c].
4
See Niko Kolodny, “Love as Valuing a Relationship”, Philosophical Review 112 (2003),
pp. 135–89
5
My remarks about friendship and other special relationships in this section and the one
to follow owe much to conversations over the years with Niko Kolodny and Sam
Scheffler, and to the important work they have done on this topic.
6
Scanlon seems to understand the normative ideal of friendship to include standards of
both of the two kinds that I distinguish; see Dimensions of Moral Assessment, p. 135: the
normative ideal of a relationship such as friendship “specifies what must be true in
order for individuals to have a relationship of this kind, and specifies how individuals
who stand in this relation should, ideally, behave toward one another, and the attitudes
38
they should have.” My point is that the normative ideal of friendship, as Scanlon
conceives it, includes standards that play two very different roles, although there is no
doubt some overlap between these two kinds of norms. (Some attitudes, such as care
and concern, can be considered both as partly constitutive of friendship, and also as
attitudes that friends have reason to adopt toward each other.)
7
On mutual recognition as the value that morality facilitates, and that explains
morality’s normative significance, see Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, chap. 4.
8
People might, of course, understand themselves to have duties that are owed to others
simply in virtue of their standing as rational agents; indeed, I believe this to be an
important part of our consciousness of ourselves in the modern world (a legacy of the
Enlightenment, as it were). What I am claiming is that it is misleading to conceptualize
this element in our thinking in terms of the notion of a normatively-significant
relationship. We see people as having claims on each other just insofar as they are
rational agents; but sharing the property of rationality is not in any interesting way a
form of relationship with others, analogous e.g. to national ties and attachments.
9
Thanks to Niko Kolodny for suggesting this interpretation to me.
10
For this reason, it is perhaps misleading to talk about the valuable relationship that is
constituted through compliance with moral principles as mutual recognition. This
suggests that the force of moral obligations might be undermined in cases in which
others have already treated us with contempt or disregard (since there is no possibility
of genuinely mutual recognition in those cases). One of Joseph Raz’s main criticizes of
contractualism seems to depend on this literal reading of the ideal of mutual
recognition; see Raz, Ratio. But the literal reading should be resisted. What is valuable
39
here is not, strictly speaking, mutual recognition, but a way of relating to others that is
possible even when they fail to reciprocate. I shall continue to follow Scanlon in talking
about mutual recognition and regard, since a relation of this kind would be realized
through reciprocal compliance with moral requirements. But it should be kept in mind
that what is ultimately valuable is a way of relating to others that can be achieved even
in the absence of reciprocity, and that remains valuable under these more one-sided
conditions.
11
If the lack of the default attitudes on the part of another person gives me reason to
suspend toward them the non-obligatory elements in the larger complex of attitudes of
this kind, then those attitudes must be subject in some degree to deliberative regulation,
capable, that is, of adjustment in response to what we recognize to be reasons. In light of
this, it is an interesting question why these attitudes are not after all strictly obligatory,
even though it would be a moral deficiency to fail to adopt them toward people by
default.
12
I am deeply indebted to discussions with Samuel Scheffler about this topic, and to his
significant work on it; see, for instance, his paper “Valuing” in this volume.
13
Frankfurt on caring.
14
P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment”, as reprinted in Gary Watson, ed., Free
Will, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp.
15
See Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other, especially chap. 4.