Mona Simion: Blame As Performance

Mona Simion: Blame as Performance

This paper develops a novel account of the nature of blame, drawing its resources from the theory of performative speech acts. It first argues that the central difficulty underlying both cognitive and emotional theories of blame on the market consists in only capturing one direction of fit of the speech act of blaming. Second, it puts forth a view of blame as performance: roughly, according to this view, blaming is adding a black mark in one’s normative ledger for some perceived wrong.​

R.A. Duff: Responding Responsibly to Wrongdoing: Accountability in Law and Morality

We should distinguish responsibility as answerability or accountability, from responsibility as liability (my focus will be mainly on responsibility as answerability):

• If I am answerable for Φ, I can be called to account for it—called to explain, to justify, or to excuse my conduct.
• If I cannot account for Φ in an exculpatory way, I am liable to criticism, blame, or (in the context of criminal law) conviction and punishment for Φ.

Responsibility is doubly relational: I am responsible for Φ, to those who have the standing to call me to account for it, in virtue of our shared membership of a normative community. Thus in the paradigm case of criminal responsibility, I am answerable for my (alleged) commission of a criminal offence, to my fellow citizens (through the criminal court) in virtue of our shared membership of the polity.

Discussions of criminal responsibility typically focus on what we may or should do to/demand of the alleged offender whom we hold responsible—

• We demand that he answer to the charge, and for his criminal conduct if it is proved.
• We convict him, which is to censure him and condemn his conduct, if his guilt is proved.
• We then think that we are justified in imposing punishment on him, or in requiring him to undertake a punishment (punishment as an offender’s duty?).

These are ways in which we enact the offender’s responsibility to us. But responsibility must be a two-way, reciprocal relationship: if I can demand that you answer to me, I must be ready to answer to you; if you have responsibilities towards me, I must have responsibilities towards you. (Is this a conceptual or a moral point?)

These aspects of responsibility have some important implications for the question of whether we can do penal justice in an unjust society.

• If the criminal trial calls defendants to account as responsible citizens, it must give them an active role in the process: they must be enabled to answer.
• But they must also be able, as responsible agents, to refuse to answer, e.g. to express their denial of the court’s authority or of the legitimacy of their trial.
• Suppose they want to answer the charge, but by offering a justification (e.g. in political terms) that the law does not recognise? Must the court that calls them to answer then hear whatever answer they want to give?
• Suppose they deny that the court has the standing to call them to answer, because they (or the group to which they belong) have suffered kinds of systematic political-social injustice that amount to a radical failure to treat them as citizens?

The last argument above is analogous to that of one who denies that I have the standing to call her to account for the wrong she has done to me, because of the wrongs that I did to her.

What undermines my standing to call another to account is not the mere fact that I wronged her, but that fact plus my refusal to answer to her for those wrongs—my refusal to recognise that responsibility is a two-way relationship. So I can regain my standing by being willing to answer to her. Can this solution be applied to the criminal law: can the court, or the polity in whose name it speaks, regain the standing to call the unjustly treated defendants to account by finding a way to answer to them for the injustice they have suffered? How could this be done?

Ioannis Tassopoulos: Forgiveness Transformed: The Right to Free Speech, Tolerance and Civility
Forgiveness has some problematic aspects. From the point of view of the victim, forgiveness may be seen as an additional moral burden aggravating his or her situation. Regarding the perpetrator, it is followed by the suspicion of further indulgence, especially when not combined with a sincere change of mind (metanoia). From the point of view of third parties, being prone to offering forgiveness may implicate an excessive reverse tendency to blame others. The existence of a legal right tends to diminish the room, if not the importance, of forgiveness. Having the rightful authority to do or to say something, even if it affects negatively the interests of others, the issue of forgiveness is out of context. In an age of rights, forgiveness tends to become outmoded.
The right to free speech is characteristic of the institutional transformation of forgiveness in the form of tolerance. Tolerance sets the baseline for a liberal relation between victims, perpetrators and the public on matters of ideas, ideals, sexualities, etc. The various grounds for the justification of free speech are also grounds for this public form of forgiveness of what can be morally blameworthy, offensive or blasphemous and aggressive.
However, the right to do wrong, according to Waldron's felicitous expression, should have the meaning of release from the legal, not the moral blame. The separation between law and morals should not extend the legal recognition over the field of morality. The existence of moral responsibility and of moral blame should be distinguished from their legal counterparts. Unfortunately, the pressure of political correctness shows that this is not the case. People tend to merge the legal with the moral, and derive the latter from the former. It seems to me that this strategy backfires in the long run. Instead of leading to a greater civility -one based on a culture of rights- it leads to the debased public morality of relativism and to uncivil politicians in positions of power.
Adam Smith's notion of civility, being founded on a sensitive understanding of the situations and what is at stake and appropriate in every case, replaces the proper scope of moral responsibility towards our fellow humans, without the "moral pacifier" of legal rights. Confronted with the simple question "but didn't you know?" our moral responsibility is fully in question and under scrutiny. Adam Smith's conception of civility rehabilitates forgiveness for a conscience whose passion for justice in an unjust world, and the resentment over injustice against us or others, can become self-consuming.
This last circumstance of forgiveness, however, is secular and totally devoid of the usual religious and metaphysical aura of forgiveness, typical of Christianity; although it concerns the soul and its capacity to be functional and effective in its social environment. But, it is a case of forgiveness for the salvage of the soul, not for its salvation.

Andreas Brekke-Carlsson

Following Gary Watson, it is increasingly common to distinguish between to kinds of responsibility:responsibility as accountabilityandresponsibility as attributability. Accountability is normally taken to have stricter control conditions than attributability. A common way to argue for this claim is to point to differences in the harmfulness of blame: accountability blame can be seen as sanctions, attributability blame as evaluations. In this talk I’ll argue that this distinction is less straightforward when we consider self-blame. To blame one self in the accountability sense is to feel guilt and feeling guilty is to suffer. To blame one self in the attributability sense, I will argue, is to feel shame. However, shame also entails suffering. If accountability and attributability have different control condition, the explanation cannot merely be difference in the harm of blame. Instead, I will suggest that accountability blame and attributability blame are governed by different notions of appropriateness: an agent S is accountability blameworthy for X only if Sdeservesto feel guilty; an agent S is attributabilityblameworthy for S only if it isfittingthat S feels shame for X.

Maria Seim: Standing to Blame and Personal Relations

Within our practice of holding responsible some argue that one is justified in holding someone morally responsible if the person meets the requirements for being blameworthy. However, there is a distinction betweenthe criteria that establish blameworthiness, and the criteria that warrant holding responsible. There are several considerations that might defeat one’s standing to blame: the blame can be too much for the victim to handle; the blamer can themselves be guilty of similar wrongdoing, or be complicit in the wrongdoing; the blamer can belong to a different moral community; the wrongdoer might have repaired the wrongdoing and thus not be liable to blame; or, finally, the wrongdoing might not be the business of the would-be blamer. It is this last consideration I am interested in. I want to examine how the relations we have to each other are constitutive of norms that determine how we ought to treat each other. Special relations and social roles seem to be constitutive of special norms that apply only to those party to the particular relation, and these norms might influence who can blame whom for what.

Carla Bagnoli: Moral Responses to Wrongoing Under Duress

On a standard view, committing a wrongful action under duress does not amount to wrongdoing, i.e.doingwrong. This is because in such circumstances, agents are not morally responsible for what they do, hence not to be blamed. This paper explores some problematic cases in which agents maintainsomekind of moral responsibility in acting under duress, considers which moral responses are morally appropriate and how they count toward moral repair.