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note that almost all philosophical discussions of blame ignore (or mention only to set aside) the form of blame sometimes characterized as causal or explanatory responsibility (Kenner 1967; Hart 1968; Beardsley 1969). It is this notion of blame that is at stake when we say that Hurricane Hugo is to blame for the destruction of Charleston’s harbor, or that the cat is to blame for knocking over the vase. Theorists contrast this sense of “blame” with the sort of interpersonal blame that, for example, one gives up when one forgives... Smart notes that though you might dispraise a young philosopher for their poor writing in a letter of recommendation, you are not thereby blaming them for it. Thus for Smart, blame is distinct from dispraise. Unlike dispraise, blame involves more than merely grading someone’s actions or character (morally), since blame carries with it the implication that the person is responsible for their action or character. Blame, then, is a negative evaluative judgment that implies responsibility...

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/blame/

So moral blame seems to amount to the claim that someone did not merely cause a wrong, nor that he or she is lacks a moral character, but that they are morally responsible. Can we e.g. link the fomer two states (explanatory blame and moral dispraise) in our blame, without evoking moral responsibility? If so, then what role would that blame have?

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  • You need not blame the apparent cause, if you did not take adequate precautions. Why place a vase where the cat can knock it over? Or allow the cat to be in a room containing things it can damage? Or not training the cat well enough. The world does not have clear binary reasons for things (although human categorisation might want it to be). It is rather more grey than that.
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Jan 5 at 19:23
  • "In assigning responsibility for an outcome or event, we may simply be telling a causal story. This might or might not involve human actions... Such usages do not imply any assignment of blame or desert, and philosophers often distinguish them by referring to “causal responsibility”", IEP. We do not assign moral blame/responsibility even to immoral characters that happened to be in a causal chain of some wrong unbeknownst to them. They could be passing a box with a murder weapon in the course of their regular work at a post office, for example.
    – Conifold
    Commented Jan 5 at 22:27
  • afaict you've both missed the point. i am not asking if someone is always to blame @WeatherVane nor whether we need to know we are bringing something about to be blameworthy
    – user70707
    Commented Jan 5 at 23:11
  • You've used the word 'blame' freely in the post, so it seems that it is your focus. Blame always requires a scapegoat.
    – Weather Vane
    Commented Jan 5 at 23:13
  • right @WeatherVane so are you just musing on the topic of "blame", and saying that nothing general can be said about it? you may be right, if so, but you could tailor it to the question more (e,g, moral responsibility is sometimes not necessary for blame; sometimes cause and dispraise is sufficient, etc,)
    – user70707
    Commented Jan 5 at 23:40

4 Answers 4

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Yes, you can take the view that someone is the cause of something, and blame them for it from a moral perspective, without attributing moral responsibility to them, if you assume that morals are personal opinions, so that there is no obligation for one person to adopt the moral opinions of another.

Imagine, for example, that I consider it morally wrong for serving politicians to perform paid consultancy work. I can blame the public at large for the fact that what I see as corrupt is tolerated, but I would not go as far as saying that members of the public are morally responsible, because they might consider paid consultancies to be perfectly acceptable perks of a politician's job.

If morals are personal, then the obligation to conform to them is also personal.

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  • is there a name for this? is it just individual relativism?
    – user71083
    Commented Jan 18 at 21:49
  • absolutism about moral blame, relativism about moral responsibility?
    – user71083
    Commented Jan 18 at 21:55
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Let's take a more objective look. An event E occurs that impacts others (positively or negatively). Event E then entails certain questions:

  1. What source S caused E?
  2. Was E foreseeable by S (if S is an agent), or by some agent A (if S lacks agency)?
  3. Was E able to be controlled or influenced by the actions of S (if S is an agent), or by A (if S lacks agency)?
  4. Was E intended by S (if S is an agent), or by A (if S lacks agency)?

Causal or explanatory blame only refers to °1: what source brought about Event E. Moral blame implies a moral agent whose actions or inactions allowed or fostered E to occur. This creates three conditions:

  • E is a phenomenon in which moral agents play no part, thus there is no moral blame
  • E is a phenomenon directly controlled or influenced by some moral agent(s), and those agents are responsible for it (thus accruing moral blame)
  • E is an unforeseen or unintended consequence of the actions of some moral agent(s), and so responsibility (moral blame) is a function of foreseeability and control

So yes, here are cases in which an agent can act in a dispraisable way to produce an event E, yet still not have moral blame for E. For example, say that a person driving a car swerves to avoid an oncoming car that had drifted into his lane, and in the process hits a pedestrian walking on the verge. The driver's actions are subject to dispraise: we can see it as selfish to careless to swerve off the road and endanger others merely to avoid an accident. But since the driver had no intention to strike the pedestrian, and may not have been able to foresee it as a consequence in the heat of the moment, it would be difficult to attach moral blame.

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  • that's a fair answer, thanks. i would allege moral blame but not moral responsibility (as per the question) in these instances
    – user71083
    Commented Jan 18 at 22:16
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Don't know that there is an ultimately correct answer, but Kant's answer, which makes sense to me, is that the concept of morality includes the concept of making a free choice and thus the concept of responsibility. Therefore the blame we assign to crashing self-driving cars is different from the blame assigned to human beings. A critique of determinism, associated with scientism, is that it treats the human being like a machine.

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Maybe I am to blame when my lack of foresight means I cause something awful, and morally to blame if that blindness is due to a lack of virtue (habitual etc.), even when - becasue of e.g. intention - it is not a failure of my moral agency/responsibility. So a virtue/moral gap.

Also, take the instance of there being no-one to blame for something except yourself (what freedom therein!). In that instance, are you morally responsible?

Intersubjectivism casts us as co-authors of morality's authority, and treats moral normativity as arising from the practical authority we grant one another to make claims within moral relationships.

If your individuation is complete perhaps no-one can judge you as morally responsible except yourself... and you don't.

Of course, this is just guesswork.

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